Untangled

Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—especially if they have had a particularly close relationship in the past—but dads can be targets too.

polite to people who don’t earn my respect, and I think this is as much as we should ask girls to do. If your daughter gets grumpy when you pose a

your daughter gets grumpy when you pose a reasonable question, feel free to say, “You may not like my questions, but you need to find a polite way of responding.”

I’ve given a lot of thought to what it means to encourage girls to be polite.

What if you’re playing by the rules—picking your moments, asking genuine questions, following her lead—and still getting a withering stare in response to your friendly inquiries? What if your daughter doesn’t even respond to you or gives answers that are curt at best? Go ahead and be clear with your daughter that you are not expecting her to write you daily love letters, but that she does need to conduct herself in a way that is, at minimum, polite.

girls are “exquisitely attuned” to the adults they know well. And at times, they use their insider’s knowledge to be surprisingly mean.

have the right to make the many optional good deeds you do for your daughter contingent on her decent treatment of you. She should not expect you to take her to the mall on a moment’s notice if her day-to-day interactions with you are consistently unpleasant.

Normally developing teenagers can be impulsive and oppositional and can even seem downright odd by adult standards, so these budding clinicians needed a framework for evaluating the mental health of teenagers seeking psychotherapy. When we asked, “Along which strands is the teen progressing, struggling, or stalled?” we could make order out of what looked like chaos and orient novice clinicians to the work they were learning to do.

There is a predictable pattern to teenage development, a blueprint for how girls grow. When you understand what makes your daughter tick, she suddenly makes a lot more sense. When you have a map of adolescent development, it’s a lot easier to guide your daughter toward becoming the grounded young woman you want her to be.

we step back from what feels like a highly personal rejection, we can appreciate that, when it comes to parting with childhood, our daughters have a lot of developmental ground to cover in a short time. They have to get from point A, where they happily hold our hands and act like total morons in public, to point B, where they claim the independence and self-determination that come with being young women and trade their goofiness for relatively mature behavior (at least when strangers are around). To progress along this strand, girls stop telling us their secrets, bristle when we use pet names, and make it clear that they’re doing us a favor by agreeing to join the family holiday picture. But a girl’s journey away from childhood isn’t all about her relationship with her parents. She might also experiment with makeup, suddenly insist that riding the school bus is for babies, and curse when with her friends.