The Challenges of Mothering a Teenage Daughter

Last week as Mother’s Day approached I thought about being a mother. My sister and I had an exchange of words a week or so earlier and part of her comments were that we had different opinions on how to raise our kids. She thought I was too strict and she believed I thought she was not strict enough. I thought of my mother and her parenting techniques, and while I could revert to my teenage criticisms, I thought of the many things I learned from her in hindsight; and the things she taught me about motherhood long after I left her nest.


I thought of writing a note to each of my four children to tell them how I felt, individually, about being their mother. How wonderful and amazing they each are. I also thought about essentially grading myself as a parent. What were my strengths and my weaknesses? Certainly, there were times when I have been too strict, or made poor parenting choices. Nonetheless, I didn’t do any of those things. In the end, I am a somewhat lazy parent.

On Saturday night, before Mother’s Day, my fourteen year old daughter had an identity crisis. It is not her first and I doubt it will be her last. Out of respect for her privacy, I won’t go into complete details of her crisis. It, of course, involved normal teenage girl issues and some specific to the dynamics of my relationship with her.

It began with her preparing to attend a church dance. Suddenly unhappy with her choice of clothing and how she felt about herself. She asked my opinion on something and, of course, didn’t like that my opinion was not the same as hers. I thought the skirt looked better than the jeans she was wearing. Go figure, this was the trigger to a meltdown.

It is hard as a parent sometimes to be able to decipher the difference between your child acting like a spoiled brat and having an emotional meltdown over something far more complicated than what has just unfolded in front of you. If I can’t decipher correctly I risk supporting and reinforcing ridiculous tantrums; or, on the flip side, ignoring warning signs that my child desperately needs me to set aside everything and help them sort out their crisis. It would sure be easier if they came color coded; purple for tantrum, red for crisis.

When my children talk about how they feel, I try very hard not to convince them they are wrong, especially with a teenage daughter. I believe that we all have the capacity to view the same circumstance differently. While I may think that I was kind, loving and considerate in a circumstance with my child; they may have viewed it as critical, intrusive and unfair. I can’t discredit the fact that they are entitled to feel what they are going to feel. It is not my job to control their emotions, it is my job to help them understand them, work through them, and be open to communicate their feelings. That way, if my acts or the acts of another hurt them unintentionally, we can sort it out.

A couple years ago my daughter became more conscious of her weight. I noticed that she wasn’t packing lunches and, therefore, wasn’t eating lunches. She and I talked about it. I know from experience that you can’t change a girl’s mind if she thinks she is flawed just by telling her you think she’s beautiful. It is useless. So I sat with her and told her that while I do believe she is beautiful, I understand how sometimes, regardless of what others think of us, we can’t see it and are critical of ourselves. If it was her desire to lose weight, then I would totally support her. However, we’d have to do it in a healthy way, starving herself was not the answer and would do more harm to her physique than good.

It’s hard to be a teenage girl. Really hard. I can still remember looking at myself critically in the mirror and thinking I was ugly or fat. I remember wanting to be like other girls, whether it was the curl in their hair, the color of their eyes, or their body shape. When people tried to tell me I was wrong about my self-criticism, it only angered me and made me feel more isolated and alone. No one understood me.

As I sat with my daughter, it was difficult to know what to say sometimes. To know how much to share with her and to decipher how much she was mature enough to understand if I shared it with her. Sometimes, a mother’s love is disguised by a laundry list of do’s and don’ts. Morgan’s list is even more complicated by the fact that she is 5, 7 and 14 years older than her three younger siblings. Understanding that expectations of each child are different based upon their development is frustrating and somewhat beyond her comprehension. In the end, if I tell her the floor she swept isn’t clean enough, but told her 7 year old brother he’d done a good job on a floor not swept very well, she sees an injustice. I see that he isn’t capable of sweeping as well as she is.

As I talked with my daughter, I tried to be empathetic to her plight. However, at the same time, I tried to help her understand the dynamics of a family such as ours and how some of her actions might contribute to what she was feeling. I realized that there were things that I had, in fact, done that weren’t fair. And I had to apologize. I also had to decide what she was mature enough to hear from her past and my past. About how I came to love her, why I love her and some of the things I silently did to fight for her.

Sometimes it is hard as a parent. Life can be like a half burnt cake. As a parent, you do your best to cut out the burnt pieces and serve your kids the best “un-burnt” pieces. Sometimes, you suffer through eating the burnt pieces all by yourself and other times, you just throw it out. You do your best to keep them protected from things that they don’t need to experience (like the conflict between mom and dad, financial difficulties, etc.). Yet sometimes, kids take sides in things they know little about. They develop opinions about life based on the little bits they are served and are unaware that far more is happening in their life than they know. As I sat with my daughter the other night, I shared with her some of that burnt cake. Hoping not that she would somehow view the circumstances we’d already lived differently, but that she would understand the fullness of my love for her.

Yet somehow, I feel like regardless of what I say or do, loving a child is so intricate and complicated that it is impossible to explain or express, until you experience it for yourself.