Damour Untangled

Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood
Main
ISBN: 978-1-78239-555-3
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

Leading clinical psychologist Lisa Damour identifies the seven key phases marking the journey from girlhood to womanhood, and offers practical advice for those raising teenage girls. We expect an enormous amount from our teenage girls in a world where they are bombarded with messages about how they should look, behave, succeed. Yet we also speak as though adolescence is a nightmare rollercoaster ride for both parent and child, to be endured rather than enjoyed. In Untangled, world authority and clinical psychologist Lisa Damour provides an accessible, detailed, comprehensive guide to parenting teenage girls. She believes there is a predictable blueprint for how girls grow; seven easily recognisable 'strands' of transition from childhood through adolescence and on to adulthood. Girls naturally develop at different rates, typically on more than one front, and the transition will be unique to every girl. Each chapter describes a phase, such as 'contending with adult authority' and 'entering the romantic world', with hints and tips for parents and daughters, and a 'when to worry' section. Damour writes sympathetically and clearly, providing a practical and helpful guide for any parent, and for teenage girls too.

After graduating with honours from Yale University, Lisa Damour received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan. She has worked for the Yale Child Study Centre and directs the Centre for Research on Girls at Laurel School, maintains a private psychotherapy practice, consults and speaks nationally, is a faculty associate of the Schubert Centre for Child Studies and is a clinical instructor at Case Western Reserve University. Damour's 2012 TED talk: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxCLE-Dr-Lisa-Damour-The-Diff;DigSign

Autoren/Hrsg.

Damour, Lisa

Leseproben

Introduction

WE NEED A NEW WAY TO TALK ABOUT TEENAGE GIRLS, BECAUSE the way people do it now isn’t fair to girls or helpful to their parents. If you’re reading this book, someone has probably already remarked about your daughter, “Oh, just wait till she’s a teenager!” (And parents who say this never mean it in a good way.) If you’ve read other books about teenage girls, you may have noticed that they tilt toward the dark side of adolescence— how girls suffer or cause suffering in their parents and peers. It’s certainly true that girls can be hard on themselves and others, and even when they are at their best, they’re often unpredictable and intense. But too often we talk about adolescence as if it’s bound to be a harrowing, turbulent time for teenagers and their parents. We make raising a teenage girl sound like a roller-coaster ride: the whole family hops on, white-knuckles their way through, and the parents hope that after all the ups and downs their daughter steps off at the end as a healthy, happy adult.

I’m here to tell you that life with your teenage daughter doesn’t have to feel like a tangled mess. 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.

To give us a new and helpful way to talk about teenage girls, I’ve taken the journey through adolescence and organized it into seven distinct developmental strands that I introduce, one per chapter, in this book. These developmental strands make plain the specific achievements that transform girls into thriving adults and help parents appreciate that much of their daughter’s behavior—however strange or challenging it may seem—is not only normal but evidence of her excellent forward progress.

The early chapters in this book describe the developmental strands that tend to be most salient in Years 7 to 9 (ages eleven to thirteen for most girls) and the later chapters address the strands that usually become prominent as girls move through Years 10 to 13. Normally developing teenagers move along each of these strands at different rates, and girls are always growing on several fronts at once, a fact that helps us appreciate why the teenage years can be so stressful for girls and the adults who love them.

I’m one of those adults who care deeply about teenage girls and I have built my professional life around them. Every week I meet with girls and their parents in my private psychotherapy practice, instruct graduate students in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Case Western Reserve University as they learn to work with teenagers, and advise students in my office at Laurel School, an independent all-girls school that runs from a toddler program to Year 13, where I work as a consulting psychologist and direct the school’s Center for Research on Girls. And, as the proud mother of two daughters, I’m lucky enough to have girls at the heart of my personal life, too.

Seeing girls through so many different lenses inspired me to appreciate that the work of becoming an adult sorted itself into meaningful categories and I realized that we could use those categories—those strands—to measure how girls were coming along in their growth. The concept of developmental strands isn’t new; it was first proposed in 1965 by Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter and an esteemed psychoanalyst in her own right, as a way to organize the normal turmoil of childhood development. She pointed out that children advance on multiple fronts—from dependency to self-reliance, from play to work, from egocentricity to companionship—and noted that we can accurately assess a child’s development in terms of maturation along these and other strands.

Anna Freud was one of many thinkers to propose a framework for healthy psychological growth. In 1950, Erik Erikson articulated a developmental model spanning from infancy to old age, marked by existential challenges to be mastered at each step along the way. Modern psychologists maintain the tradition of studying development in terms of its component parts. Today, we typically consider aging in terms of its physical, emotional, cognitive, and social facets. In other words, scholarly approaches to human growth broken down into discernible phases now constitute a rich theoretical tradition and a robust body of research; I stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants in proposing a concrete and comprehensive model of what, exactly, girls must accomplish to move through their teenage years successfully.

Once I had this model in mind and found that it illuminated so much of what I observed, I introduced it to my graduate students to help them shed light on the complex adolescent cases that come their way. 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.

Thinking about girls in terms of the strands of teenage development is practical for professionals, but much more important, it allows parents to pinpoint the specific achievements that turn girls into grown-ups and makes sense of familiar, but confusing, teenage behavior. Last year your daughter may have happily participated in the children’s games at your street party, but this year, she insists on hanging out with the adults while complaining that she’s bored. What accounts for the shift? It might be that she has begun the work of parting with childhood (chapter 1). And how do you understand the girl who is equally excited to buy a copy of The Economist for her Model UN research paper and three copies of an Us Weekly magazine featuring her favorite boy band? Well, you’re likely looking at her foray into entering the romantic world (chapter 6). When you understand the important developmental work your daughter is doing, you’ll fret less about some of her puzzling behaviors.

Thinking in terms of developmental strands helps us to focus our energy where it’s needed most. For example, your daughter may enjoy a loyal group of friends and have succeeded in happily joining a new tribe (chapter 2), but she might neglect her schoolwork and need help planning for the future (chapter 5). Perhaps she’s aiming to play softball in college but ignores the advice of her coaches. She may be committed to her goal, but that doesn’t cancel out her trouble contending with adult authority (chapter 4). Attending to the many domains of your daughter’s development will keep you from letting her success in some areas distract you from her difficulty in others.

And thinking in terms of strands allows us to weigh any one moment in a girl’s life against her overall progress on the relevant developmental strand. Should you be worried about your daughter’s meltdown when she loses a student council race? That will depend on whether she’s usually pretty resilient or instead she’s having a lot of trouble harnessing emotions (chapter 3). Should you ignore her decision to go without a coat on a cold day, or is her disregard for her well-being part of an alarming pattern of difficulties with caring for herself (chapter 7)? Given that teenage girls routinely do things their parents don’t understand, it’s helpful to have a way to know when it’s okay to hang back and when you should step in.

But if teenagers typically do things that would be considered abnormal at any other time of life, how do you know when something’s really wrong? To clarify the difference between normal teenage behavior and that which is truly concerning, every chapter ends with a “When to Worry” section that will help you know if your daughter has moved to a level where a dramatic shift in approach or a professional consultation might be in order. In other words, we’ll consider both the garden-variety challenges that come with raising teenagers and gain new insight into why some teenage girls collapse in on themselves or act out in destructive ways.

There’s a universal quality to the developmental strands introduced in this book: they capture the timeless aspects of adolescence for girls and boys, and for teenagers from many backgrounds. Though you and I developed along these strands, growing up today differs from what we remember now that we’re raising children in a high-speed culture of intense competitive pressure and 24/7 digital connection. We’ll address the enduring aspects of adolescence and how our current culture shapes the realities of being a teenager—and the parent of one—today.

Fundamentally, girls and boys are more alike than they are different, so don’t be surprised to discover that some of the stories and advice that follow speak to your experience of knowing or raising a teenage boy. But girls face unique challenges as teenagers and this book takes a deep dive into the cutting-edge research that parents raising daughters need to know. The developmental strands presented here apply across racial and economic lines, and those...