Lisa Damour

“There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves.” Raising teenagers is not for the fragile, and that’s true even when everything is going just as it should. Parents of teenagers need supportive partners and friends to prop them up when they feel that they just can’t take one more push-off. Knowing that you can serve as a reliable, safe base allows your daughter to venture out into the world; having the strength to stay in place when your daughter clings to and rejects you in short order usually requires the loving support of adult allies.

Girls don’t part with childhood in one fell swoop. They don’t need you one minute and become completely independent the next. Instead, their skills—or, really, their confidence in their skills—develop at an uneven pace.

We work from the unspoken assumption that every one of their emotions makes sense, that their difficult feelings—anger, frustration, sadness, worry, and the rest—happen for a reason, even when the reasons for them are unclear. Though of course I’m there to help them feel better, the aim of our work is less about comfort and more about insight. When teenagers understand what they are feeling and why, they suddenly have choices that were not available to them before.