How To Raise Happy & Confident Teenage Girls

Lorraine, let’s start with a big question – why are the teenage years so challenging?

The reason I wrote the book was to reach ordinary mums raising ordinary teens, tweens and pre-teens. So, it’s not aimed at anyone dealing with extreme issues like eating disorders or anxiety; it’s for normal mums raising teenage daughters who experience this sudden, overnight change – which feels like a brutal rejection. Chaos starts to enter the house, and they may become incredibly demanding – much more so than toddlers – and they only want you. Every problem seems to need solving by mum. From my own experience, I was very shocked that no one was talking about this shift and why it happens. Via writing my parenting columns for two national newspapers, I’d been privileged enough to talk to leading experts around teenage development. What occurred to me was how solvable a lot of these problems are – it’s why I decided to put everything in one book. It’s partly based on things that have happened to me which is why I focused on girls, and partly what the experts recommend.

And what makes the mother-daughter relationship especially tricky?

My personal experience of raising two teenage girls as a female offered some seriously eye-opening moments that all women, all mothers, need to be talking about more. As a woman, the moment you hit 40 and the perimenopausal years, your hormones start to fluctuate wildly – just when your teenager’s hormones also start changing massively. There’s something like 40 different symptoms of the perimenopause, one of which is extreme rage, another is insomnia and another is sheer exhaustion – which is caused by vital hormones gradually disappearing from your body. It means that just as your children become adolescents, you also hit a difficult transition. In my opinion, not talking more about this parallel does women over 40 a massive disservice. Opening up the conversation impresses upon them the importance of taking care of themselves, too.

What else makes the female-on-female relationship so unique?

Any expert will tell you the single most important female role model for your daughter is their mother or significant adult female carer. She is acutely watching you and she has been since she was very small. Her identity, which is what ultimately develops during the teenage years, will be hugely informed by the kind of role model you are. As her brain changes (it quite literally gets taken apart and put back together again in a neurological sense) they’ll reject parts of you and accept others. Because you’re also a female, there’s also this very primal instinct where they may hand you all their bad, sad and difficult problems, because they know you most likely have the emotional intelligence or experience to deal with them. It was the rejection part I found most brutal. They need to separate from you to find out who they are, and they’ll tell you there are plenty of things they don’t like about you. Boys don’t want to be you, so it’s very different and far less complicated.

Is it ever a good idea to try to be ‘friends’ with your teen?

Out of the many experts on adolescent mental health I interviewed for the book one, American psychologist Lisa Damour, who works exclusively with teenage girls, told me it makes her shudder to hear mums say their daughter is their best friend. Ultimately, all mothers want their daughters to like them, but teenagers should be able to lead a separate life from their mothers. This helps them become resilient human beings. So it’s okay for them to have secrets – some things should be kept private. And every child should know what it is to be happy as well as to be sad, so they can learn to deal with their own feelings. As a generation, we seem to have tried to make our children happy all the time, as if that is a normal default setting – but this isn’t realistic. Teens need to experience lots of feelings – you can't possibly ensure their happiness all the time. So when a mum is trying to please their daughter all the time, it may be the teenage girl feels incredible pressure to make their parent happy. That can be quite stressful for them emotionally and make it harder for her to have her own happiness. It’s much more important to allow them to bond with their peers than their parents; they won't feel stressed about keeping their peers happy. 

Body image is a huge issue for teenage girls – what are your thoughts?

The rise of social media has certainly made this a far bigger and more challenging topic. It’s also made it an equally important problem for both teenage girls and teenage boys. That said, I think it’s still harder for girls. In an ideal world, parents would say nothing from birth about their children’s appearance. There should be no emotional value placed on that or school or academic performance either, but on who they are as a person. In western society, that’s really, really hard to do. Body image is so much bigger than all of us – if you think about it, you shouldn’t comment on anyone else’s appearance either, but how many of us can say we do that? It also crops up in films, books, magazines – this is a debate that’s been raging for years. It’s a problem that exists, so as parents it’s our job to build up teens’ confidence in other areas of their life so they don’t feel as much pressure on this one issue.

Are some teenagers more susceptible to these kinds of issues than others?

As your teen’s neurology changes during these five or so years, some children may turn out to be more sensitive than others. It’s something we can often spot ahead of time – for example, my two teenage daughters are only a year apart, they have the same parents and yet they have a completely different reaction to and relationship with social media. The experts recommend starting early on building resilience when it come to any any negative feelings provoked by using social media: give them confidence in other areas. Don’t bother saying “Don’t look at social media.” It won’t work – we can’t get rid of it or indeed remove all the bad things from our children’s lives. They may be affected by certain things but it’s about how they deal with it and how we can help them navigate it. And remember, the world has made a lot of strides in terms of women’s rights and representation – watch any film from the 80s and you’ll see how far we’ve come. 

As someone who worked in women’s magazines, how do you think teenage girls should interact with the worlds of fashion and beauty?

It’s perfectly okay to have fun with fashion and beauty – it can be helpful when it comes to building confidence, actually. It’s more about the language you use, especially when it comes to the way you talk about your own body. For example, women’s body shapes change dramatically after 40, and if you’re constantly saying how much you hate your muffin top, then it’s a very hard message for your daughter to hear. It’s very hard, but you have to be mindful of what you’re saying when you’re around your teen – it’s fine to explore it as an issue together but try not to make it a central part of every discussion.