It felt like a hormonal relay race where she had to pass her emotional baton to someone, and I happened to be the chosen one.
I walked into my 10-year-old daughter Lily’s room to say goodnight and found her curled up on her pink polka dot duvet, sobbing uncontrollably. Her face was red and blotchy, and her eyelids were puffy. “Oh sweetheart, what’s wrong?” I asked, panic rising within me. She looked at me with wide eyes and said something that will forever stay with me: “I don’t know! I just can’t stop crying!” In an instant, she was hiccuping dramatically, and then, without warning, she burst into laughter, tears still streaming down her face but for an entirely different reason. I handed her a glass of water and hugged her tightly, completely bewildered by the whirlwind of emotions I had just witnessed.
This was just one example from Lily’s chaotic tween years. Sometimes her tears escalated into heart-wrenching screams; other times, she’d ask me to lie beside her on her small bed, wanting to be held or serenaded. The unpredictability of her emotions left me feeling grateful when she could express what she needed, because feeling powerless was agonizing. Yet, as I rubbed her back or stroked her hair, I found myself yearning for some personal space, dreaming of the glass of wine waiting for me or the new book on the coffee table. After a long day, I often craved time alone, so what was I supposed to do? When she looked at me, exhausted and tearful, pleading for my presence, how could I walk away?
I recognized that her mood swings were a normal part of entering puberty. I had experienced my own hormonal rollercoaster; every month, I would find myself irritated with my husband, wanting to overhaul our home, and feeling let down by my kids—until my period arrived, and everything made sense. My poor girl, barely on the brink of her teenage years, was grappling with the unpredictable surge of estrogen in her body, and I felt as if I was being swept away by her emotional tide. It was a chain reaction of hormones, and I was the unfortunate recipient of her emotional outpouring. So, what could I do? Leave her to navigate this alone? Certainly not. Stay in her room until dawn? Absolutely not. I needed to strike a balance.
Four Strategies to Support Your Tween
I discovered four small strategies to support Lily while still caring for myself:
- Normalize: I needed to help my daughter understand that experiencing profound emotions without knowing the cause is normal during the tween and teen years. It’s frightening for kids to weep without understanding why or feel an overwhelming rage without a clear trigger. These feelings may resurface later in life due to pregnancy, menstruation, or menopause, so we need to normalize rather than demonize them. Our role is to help them recognize that hormones can cause bizarre emotional responses, but remind them it’s temporary and will eventually pass—until the next time.
- Breathe: When our kids are in emotional chaos, we need to encourage them to breathe as it helps calm their minds. However, if we simply instruct them to “take deep breaths,” they might shoot us daggers with their eyes. Instead, we can practice what psychologists call co-regulation: we can model deep breathing ourselves, making it contagious for our kids. We don’t even need to explain what we’re doing; we just do it, and hopefully, they will follow suit. Even if they don’t, our own breathing will help us maintain some semblance of composure amidst the chaos.
- Don’t Solve: As parents, it’s easy to feel the urge to fix our kids’ emotional struggles. Watching them in pain is heart-wrenching, and our instinct is to make it better. However, when their tears or anger stem from hormonal fluctuations, there’s no solution—only the need to sit with them in their discomfort. I know this is an unsatisfying answer, but it’s the reality. As our tweens navigate puberty and adolescence, there will be many moments when we can’t fix things, so we must learn to adapt. We can teach them coping strategies, but we can’t provide a fix.
- Set Limits: This is crucial for self-preservation. I intentionally avoided the term self-care because this is about survival. We need to establish boundaries regarding how much time and energy we can devote to helping them through these emotional storms. If we don’t recharge ourselves, we won’t be able to face the demands of parenting each day. It’s helpful to set a specific time that we’re willing to spend with them, or a certain number of things we can do for them, to prevent turning the situation into a never-ending negotiation. Setting limits might sound like: “I’ll sit with you for 10 minutes, then I’m going to read my book. I’ll check on you in an hour.” (And then we must follow through.) “I’ll sing you two songs while I brush your hair, and then I’m going to watch my show. You can pick the two songs I sing.”
And if all else fails, just play some of your favorite music. It can either: A. lift everyone’s spirits, or B. encourage your kid to kick you out of their room.