Quotes About Adolescence

Her research had been a bit too graphic for a general readership, and her theory that adolescence didn't have to be full of the misery and rebelliousness it was in America got lost in the uproar.

You have no idea how quickly a girl grows up.

I played with dolls until I was 15. My mother encouraged it because my older sister got married when she was 15, so Mom thought that the longer I stayed with dolls, the better.

When I was growing up, particularly during puberty in my teen years, I was so miserable because I elicited so much teasing and meanness from my teenage cohorts.

Twelve-year-olds are eager to turn everything into arguments but don't have the cognitive skills to win them.

A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.

You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.

Slapping his shoulder was probably a mistake; he flinched. And for the briefest of moments I appreciated what little access we ever had to what really went on in Kevin's head, since for a second the mask fell, and his face curdled with - well, with revulsion, I'm afraid. To allow even so brief a glimpse of its workings, he must have had other things on his mind.

Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—

Teenagers often manage their feelings by dumping the uncomfortable ones on their parents,

When girls come into my office in a panic...and I can tell that they they're just a wreck, I get out my glitter jar and I do this." She picked up the jar and shook it fiercely the way one shakes a snow globe. The placid water immediately became a sparkling purple tempest. "And then I say to the girl, 'Right now, this is what it's like in your brain. So first, let's settle your glitter.

It's bad enough to be rebuffed by your daughter—it's worse that it happens right when you feel that she needs you most.

I've come to learn over my years of practice, which is that having a delicate conversation with a teenager is like trying to talk with someone on the other side of a door.

Looking back on their own teenage years, most adults feel grateful that there's no easy-to-access document of all the dumb things they did.

Party parents figure that if their daughter is going to do risky things when with her friends, she'll be safer if she and her friends do those risky things right under their noses. But party parents rob their daughter of one of the best protections she has: the ability to blame her good behavior on them.

As one of my friends put it, "My daughter has five different, extreme emotions before eight in the morning.

under the sway of social influence, teenagers don't disregard the issue of rules completely. In my experience they still think about it, but in the wrong way. Instead of reflecting on why we have rules, teens focus on trying not to get caught while breaking them.

Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—especially if they have had a particularly close relationship in the past—

Raising a young woman will be one of the most vexing, delightful, exhausting, and fulfilling things you will ever do. Sometimes all on the same day. The job is hard enough even under the best conditions, and anyone doing a hard job deserves support. When we get that support, when we understand the developmental tour de force that is adolescence, we can truly enjoy and empower our girls.

if you feel you must criticize your daughter's friends—and sometimes you must—use your words and your tone to communicate that the girls are in a tricky situation, not that they are bad people.

Your daughter works hard every day to harness powerful and unpredictable emotions so that she can get on with doing everything else she means to do.

It's important to remember that teenagers form tribes with the express purpose of creating a group that doesn't include adults, so going outside of their group to get help from an adult—even for life-threatening behavior—can feel like a huge betrayal.

girls told us that they would be open to telling an adult if a friend showed signs of an eating disorder, except for one thing: they didn't want to be seen as disloyal. They were fiercely committed to supporting one another and keeping one another's secrets, and they worried that telling an adult about a troubling change in a peer's eating would be a social transgression.

So far, here's the picture I've painted of adolescent girls: aloof, withdrawn, and, sometimes, surprisingly mean. There's truth to this picture, but for parents it's not the whole story. Being pushed away is only the half of it. Raising a teenage girl becomes that much more stressful when she interrupts days of distance with moments of intense warmth and intimacy.