Tween Daughters: Coping with Forces of Nature

I love this recent self-portrait my daughter created.  

 On our “good” days, I look at this piece and can actually feel her artistic soul, her strength and power, her inner and outer beauty, her brilliant mind teeming with infinite creativity.

On our ‘bad’ days, I am grateful I can gaze upon her face, remind myself of all her positive qualities, and thank God that I cannot hear what her rosebud lips are spewing behind a slammed bedroom door.

“Mom, just RELAX, it’s no big deal.” “Why don’t you go talk to your spoiled boy child? HE gets everything.” “I don’t CARE!” “Can I live with Grandma Sandy?” “I can’t clean my room, there’s no space in here to put things” (Jordan has a walk-in closet). “You’re ruining my life!”

Wow, I am one powerful woman. With a single sentence I can devastate a member of the future generation of America, and all I asked for was a cleaned room, a coat to be hung up, and three million nail polish bottles to be stowed away.

And Jordan is a masterful button-pusher, sharp-tongued, fierce and fiery. She baits her opponent (me) deftly, always trying to get in the last word, turning on heel and huffing out of the room. The terrible tweens period, accompanied by a full contingent of new hormones, has arrived.

I remember to breathe. I check for a full moon. I refer to one of my favorite parenting books, “How to Behave So Your Children Will, Too”, by Sal Severe. I count to ten, twenty, I lose count. I de-brief my husband on the latest encounter. I refer to Mr. Severe’s book and consider throwing it at her door (brief lapses in judgment I lovingly refer to as “Parent of the Year” moments).

As parents, especially moms, we want our daughters to be strong-willed, self-sufficient, responsible and independent. We just don’t always want them to behave that way on our watches.

I am lucky that I have a very close and loving relationship with my daughter, which seems to only serve to make our tween incidents all the more intense and hurtful.

Our home has a “no yelling” policy, period. The minute a voice is raised, you are sent to your room, regardless of your age. When we are ready to discuss the latest infringement, we talk it through. It may take three hours, with many, many bedroom breaks, but in the end issues are resolved, apologies are offered, and we don’t go to bed angry.

Don’t misunderstand – my family doesn’t walk outside at the end of a bitch session to find itself bathed in the glow of forgiveness, surrounded by flitting butterflies and singing birds. We’re damn spent, and tend to break off to separate areas of the Dralle dome to decompress.

My best advice? Don’t fight. Seriously. Develop a set of rules your family will live by as to how you will communicate, what actions will and will not be tolerated, and the consequences of not following these rules.

Try (as hard as it may be) to not get baited. Stick to the topic at hand, and NEVER go back in time to previous fights. Try to remember yourself at her age, and don’t minimize your daughter’s feelings. Take the time to listen and not judge – she may not want you to solve her problems, she just may need to sound off.

When done consistently, it does work, and works well. But it is hard, hard, hard, hard, hard work. Did I mention it is difficult?

Does it prevent the most ridiculous fights from starting? No, of course not. Will you still sometimes want to hang a sign around your daughter’s neck and place her at the end of the driveway,  “Free Child – You Haul”? Yep.

But now I try to treat each encounter with a fresh set of eyes, and question myself when my immediate response to almost every request is initially “no.”

If you can get your hands on a copy of Mr. Severe’s book, DO IT. The ideas seem so self-obvious, the tools so easy to use, I guarantee you will find yourself nodding as you read along, reading passages out loud to your husband while he’s trying to go to sleep.

As I was writing this, Jordan and Jamie were wrestling, making the dog bark while my husband was in the middle of a conference call in his office. When I told Jordan to stop instigating for the fifth time, she stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry.

My response was calm and immediate. “Tomorrow, no computer for the day. You were warned.” I walked away and did not hear a voice at the back of my head! Fifteen minutes later, I received an UNSOLICITED apology for her behavior.

Apparently her dad’s promise last week to remove her bedroom door if she ever slammed it in anger again stuck somewhere in her mind. Somewhere it stuck in my mind to use a calm voice and not scream up the stairs.

Us Dralle girls might just be learning something in spite of ourselves…