Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
When she heard her mother was attending one of my workshops for mothers of adolescent girls, a thirteen-year-old exclaimed, "Well, they sure got that one right! If daughters needed help, they would have had workshops for us."
And how did the mothers react when they heard that typical adolescent remark? They agreed-mothers of teenage girls need all the help they can get. Once the confident parents of younger girls, they are baffled by the changes they see in their daughters. I could only commiserate as one mother described her daughter.
"She is increasingly sensitive to comments made by everyone in the family. What I say to her has less impact. She often disagrees with me, sometimes with tears and anger, or she acts bored with what I say."
This woman doesn't need to be told her daughter is becoming an adolescent. She hears it in her voice and she sees it in her eyes. A daughter may still look like a little girl, but the little-girl devotion to mother has vanished.
Mothers I have interviewed lament the loss of the affectionate child who lovingly took their hands and listened to their every word. Gone is the daughter who extolled their beauty and talent. In her place is an unreasonable critic who finds fault with her mother's hair style, clothes, cooking, and taste in men-even though the man in question is the girl's own father.
Mothers can take some comfort in knowing that almost all mothers of young adolescent girls experience the same assault. It may not be blatant — a subtle look or a deep sigh may suffice-but chances are a little girl will took at her, mother differently when she becomes anadolescent.
Another two-year-old stage?
Adolescence is similar in many ways to the two-year-old stage. In her twos, a girl doesn't want interference as she struggles to put on her shoes; she wants to "do it myself" At about the same time she discovers that if she says "NO!" — especially in public — she can guarantee a reaction. Remember when she daringly wandered off, but never went so far that she lost sight of her mother?
A young adolescent girl is striving once again to "do it myself," but now what she wants to do is more unnerving and out of her mother's sight. She does not require her mother's participation or help in most of her activities, and, when given a choice, she will choose to be with friends rather than her mother. That does not mean she wants her mother to disappear completely; like the two-year-old, she checks to make sure her mother is there for reassurance.
I A two-year-old crawling into her mother's lap seeks direct reassurance, while the adolescent looks in her mother's eyes and listens to her tone of voice for more elusive signals of acceptance. Although mothers know their daughters look for their approval during childhood, they are surprised that this yearning for their support continues through adolescence.
A mother's reaction to her daughter's new independent attitudes will determine the quality of the bond between them. Will their mother-daughter bond revert to the two-year-old relationship, enmeshing a girl and impeding her full psychological and emotional development? Will the bond be so weak and unconnected that the mother becomes a nonentity? Or will it be strong enough to guide the daughter through adolescence and provide a springboard of confidence into adulthood?
A new look at girls
Until recently, adolescence was taken seriously only by parents and law officials, not by psychologists, who were more concerned about infancy and early childhood. And if teenagers were studied, the subjects were boys, not girls.
This neglect of girls in research is being corrected by such leading social scientists as Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of the Educational Testing Service and Carol Gilligan of Harvard University. They have discovered that girls' experiences in adolescence do not necessarily mirror those of boys.
Psychologists have also learned that adolescence is more than a time of "transition." It is the second most important stage of life, right behind infancy, with its own patterns of growth and change. Parents are being advised to pay attention to the adolescent stage rather than hope fervently that it passes quickly. Its "plasticity," as Dr. Richard Lemer from Penn State describes a quality of adolescence,offers mothers renewed opportunity for influence.
Psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan must have been thinking about mothers and daughters when she wrote' "Adolescent changes may have a more decisive and immediate impact on the evolution of the human mind than do the events of infancy."' We don't remember our infancy, but we have clear memories of our mothers' reactions to us during adolescence.
Dethronement
At adolescence, a daughter dethrones her mother. No matter how hard a mother tries to be perfect, a girl's budding puberty combined with her new ability to think of alternatives will topple mother's exalted status.
It is dawning on the adolescent that her family, and especially her mother, needs improvement. Mothers now do the dumbest things, or so their daughters think. A girl mentioned to me that her mother had made a big effort to watch her play soccer one afternoon — and what happened?
"My mom was rooting for the wrong team. I was like, 'Mom, what are you doing on that side?' She told me she was cheering for my team. I said, 'Mom, look at what color shirt I'm wearing!' So embarrassing-everyone was asking me what my mom was doing over there."
A younger girl would be thrilled to have her mother come to her game and it would not have mattered where she stood or when she cheered. The adolescent, on the other hand, is acutely aware of her mother's presence. just as she believes that everyone is noticing what she is wearing and doing, she thinks her friends are equally conscious of her mother. She wants her mother to blend in, just the way she herself wants to blend in....
