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Self- Care for Sanity
frustration, guilt, blame, or regret, seek to create more healthy connection in your life.
Start with your own balanced self- care, which will, in turn, energize a better relationship
with your daughter.
Your Teen’s Impact on You— and How to
Deal with It
You’ve probably noticed that your daughter isn’t the only one on the roller coaster. In
a study of more than two hundred teens and their families, researchers found that
parents experience big changes in their own lives when their children hit puberty
(Steinberg and Steinberg 1994). It turns out that midlife crisis has less to do with the
age of the adult than with the age of the oldest child in a family. Midlife distress is
often set off by the oldest child entering adolescence. Marital satisfaction reaches an
all- time low when the oldest child hits the teen years. On the upside, couples that stay
together report an increase in marital satisfaction in postteen years. Whether parents
are married or single, Steinberg and Steinberg’s research shows a parent’s happiness
influences the quality of parent- teen interaction.
Taking care of yourself strengthens your resistance to the stresses of the teen years.
It also reduces your susceptibility to those parental moments that we’d all rather not
talk about.
Bad Parent Hangover
Let’s face it, parenting a teen girl isn’t easy, and we all have moments we’re not
proud of. My personal experience as the mother of two teen girls, combined with my
private practice work, led me to discover the bad parent hangover, the painful emotional
aftermath that lingers after a parental meltdown. Some parents yell, some cry, some
throw full- blown tantrums. A defining feature is lack of emotional control. Busy parents
lacking healthy balance are at high risk to impulsively react in challenging
moments. Instead of responding skillfully, we react from weariness, hurt, impatience,
or hostility.
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