“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Mom, but I don’t want you picking out my clothes anymore,” my very independent 10-year-old daughter announced recently. “We have different taste, and yours isn’t good for me.”
Her in-your-face delivery has the tone of an athlete taunting someone on a rival sports team. When did I become her opponent?
This is the same kid who often asks me for snuggle time and kisses me on the cheeks like an out-of-control woodpecker while wildly professing how much she loves me.
I have whiplash from pivoting back and forth between her emotions. Other parents and experts tell me I’m not alone.
“This is a normal developmental stage,” said Rachel Simmons, author of “The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls With Courage and Confidence.” She said it’s common for tweens and teens to toggle between loving and hating their parents.
“As your daughter begins to separate, she is pushing you away and rejecting you,” she said. Ms. Simmons noted that girls are under pressure to be liked. “The trade-off,” she said, “is they suppress difficult feelings and conflict so they can preserve friendships. Yelling at mom and dad is the release valve they pull.”
Wendy Mogel, author of “Voice Lessons for Parents: What to Say, How to Say It, and When to Listen,” agreed, “It is your child projecting her insecurities on to you,” she said. “She is focused on her identity at that age, and you are an extension of it.”
Maybe that explains some of the exaggerated eye-rolling she and other tweens display.
“As you’ve learned, parents are the guinea pigs as kids try to figure what behaviors work and what doesn’t,” said Michele Borba, an educational psychologist and author of “UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World.”
“Kids watch to see our reactions to their bad behavior, so the way parents respond has an impact because they will model your responses and use it as a response to verbal or other taunting or bullying with their peer group,” she said.
Lisa Damour, author of “Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls,” said there’s even more reason to keep calm.
“The most destructive parent-child interactions are when the child criticizes the parent, and the parent cannot tolerate it,” Dr. Damour said.
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So how should parents handle it when their kids turn on them?
Dr. Borba said the parent needs to let the child know what crosses the line and why, and if it is wrong, what to replace it with. Look at the tone, the delivery and the intent. Was it helpful or hurtful?
Following are some expert suggestions for navigating tween conflicts in a positive way.
Pick Your Battles
Decide when to let something slide — a throwaway remark, shrug or eye-roll — and when to push back, Ms. Simmons said. Push back should happen when something goes against the moral values of the home, such as insulting a parent’s appearance or refusing to do chores.
Use ‘The Hand’
If your child insults you (“your laugh is silly,” “that’s an ugly shirt”), sometimes it’s best to give them the nonverbal treatment, Dr. Borba suggested. Try holding up your hand as a stop sign. This allows you to have a moment to pause and think and calm down before you respond.
Take a Time Out
You don’t owe your children an instant response. You can respond to an insult with a brief “Cut it out” or “I’m not having this discussion now,” without getting into a back and forth exchange.
Instead of yelling, say, “I’m going to leave the room for a while, because I feel hurt about the way you are talking to me. Let’s discuss it later.” (And then make sure you do.)
When my daughter said she wanted to choose her own clothes, I could have said, “Maybe you can show me what styles you like later.”
Replace the Bad and Reinforce the Good
You can give your child explicit instructions on how to replace a bad attitude and delivery. For example, you can say, “We don’t talk like that in this family. Let’s do a retake. This is how I expect you to say it.” To turn behavior around, reinforce good behavior by saying, “I appreciate you being respectful and using the right tone.” A family mantra, such as “In our home, we respect and treat each other kindly,” can also go a long way toward instilling the proper attitude.
To reduce conflict, Dr. Borba suggests picking four or five nonnegotiable rules (such as homework before phone or you lose the phone), and posting them somewhere accessible, like on the refrigerator. If a rule is broken, “you can just point to the fridge, without even having to say a word.”
I’m still figuring out our nonnegotiable rules, but I’ve been teaching my daughter self-regulation (and practicing it myself) by doing daily meditation exercises and deep breathing together.
As the school year gets underway, my daughter is a few weeks into fifth grade with all of its tween-age pressures. She and I read this article together before publication and discussed trying to improve the way we communicate with each other. For example, now she picks out the clothes she wants online, puts them in the shopping cart, and I have final approval. Yes to the cute romper, no to the cropped, ripped T-shirt.
I’m hoping the experts’ suggestions will help us both keep our cool the next time she decides that I don’t have any.
