Parenting teenagers

You knew this would be hard. You did not know it would feel like this. The eye-rolls, the slammed doors, the silence at dinner that lands like a slap. The bedroom that has become a country with closed borders.

You may also be in perimenopause. So now there are two of you in the house with rewiring brains. Two of you sleep-deprived. Two of you unsure who you are this week. The chemistry is not your fault. Neither is theirs.

Your teenager does not need a parent who has it all together. They need a parent who keeps showing up. You are doing that. Even when it doesn’t feel like enough, you are doing that.

When you find out they are hurting themselves

The night they showed you their arm. Or the night they didn’t, and you saw anyway. Or the night the school called. Or the text from their friend’s mum, and you have been carrying it since.

However you found out, your first feeling is probably terror dressed up as anger. That is allowed. Try not to put it on them.

What tends to help, in roughly this order

• Keep your face. Not bright. Not horrified. Just present. They are watching to find out whether they can tell you anything else.
• Treat the wound, if there is one. Don’t lecture while you do it. Let your hands do the loving.
• Ask, gently, what was going on inside when they did it. Listen to the answer. Don’t try to talk them out of the answer.
• Don’t make them promise to stop. Promises like that set up either lying or self-hatred. Both make it worse.
• Don’t punish. Self-harm is a coping mechanism, not a behaviour problem. Taking it away without offering anything in its place is not safety, it is force.
• Don’t make it about you. “How could you do this to me” is the most common parent reaction, and one of the most damaging. They have enough without your hurt as well.

Then, in the days that follow

• Make a GP appointment, with you in the room. Use the words “self-harm” and “I am worried about her safety” out loud. Don’t soften them. Soft words get soft responses.
• Get on the CAMHS list anyway. And then, please hear this: CAMHS will probably not be enough on its own. Waiting lists run into months, criteria are narrow, and many young people are discharged before they are actually well. That is not your child failing to qualify. That is a service that is on its knees. Get on the list. Then look at everything else too.
• If you can afford it, or stretch to it, find a private therapist who specialises in young people. Look for accredited via BACP or UKCP. Ask about availability and approach before you fall in love with their bio. Continuity is often the thing that actually helps.
• Free options outside CAMHS that are worth knowing about: Kooth (free, anonymous online therapy for young people 10-25), YoungMinds (information, parent helpline, signposting), Place2Be (in some schools), and local children’s mental health charities. Ask your GP what is funded in your area.
• Talk to school. A good pastoral lead can be a lifeline. A bad one can make it worse. You get to choose what you share, and with whom. Don’t feel pressured to disclose more than is useful.
• Lower the bar at home for a while. Less perfect, less performance, less anything.
• Look after yourself, separately. This is heavy. You are allowed to be wrecked by it.

Asking once was meant to be enough. Often, it is not. Keep asking. Keep adding things. Don’t apologise for needing more than the system offers.

When they tell you they want to die

Or when they don’t, and you find the notes app. The search history. The half-written letters they didn’t send.

Believe them. Always. Not as a tactical move. Believe them the way you would want to be believed.

“I hear you. I am so glad you told me. Tell me more, when you can.” You don’t need a clever sentence. You need to stay in the room.

Believe them, the way you would want to be believed. That is the whole job in the first minute.

Get help today. Not tomorrow.

• Call your GP and ask for an emergency same-day appointment, using the words “suicidal ideation in a young person.”
• If they have a plan or means, or you are frightened right now: A&E, or 999. The staff will not be cross with you for coming.
• Quietly remove the things in the house that could be used. Medicine. Sharps. Don’t announce it. Just do it.
• Tell one other adult in your child’s life. They should not be your only safety net.
• Stay in the house tonight. Sleep on the landing if you need to. They do not have to know.

Mothering through your own collapse

This is the thing nobody says.

You may be holding everything together for a child who is unraveling, while you are unraveling yourself. Your hormones are doing somersaults. You have not slept properly in months. You are scared. You are angry sometimes. You are not sure if you are still the right person for this job.

You are. Imperfectly, exhaustedly, sometimes badly, you are still the right person.

You do not have to be steady. You have to keep showing up. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them is required.

When they’re not teenagers anymore, and it isn’t better

Some children grow up and find their feet. Some don’t. Or they do, and then they don’t, and then they do again, and you stop knowing what to predict.

You may have a child in their twenties who is technically an adult but who lives in chaos. Who has the undesirable boyfriend or the unstable flat. Whose phone goes silent for months and then rings at midnight in tears. Who told everyone she was pregnant and then wasn’t, then was, then wasn’t. Who wants to move to wherever the other parent lives. Who thinks the world owes her something you cannot give her.

You love her. You also do not know how to help her anymore, and you do not have the energy of a thirty-year-old to pretend you can.

You stopped trying to fix her because trying was hurting you both. You did not stop loving her. You stopped believing she would let you save her.

There is a particular grief here that nobody warns mothers about. The grief of an adult child you have had to release from the project of fixing. The day you decided, often somewhere around when they hit 16 or 17, that trying was hurting you both, and you quietly stopped. That decision saved your sanity. It also broke a small piece of you that has never gone back together.

The other mothers

The mothers whose children went to university, then to a graduate job, then to the first house and the engagement, do not understand. Some of them are kind. Some of them are quietly relieved that they don’t have your problem. A few of them have made you feel, without ever quite saying it, that you must have done something different to end up here.

You didn’t. The same household, the same love, the same boundaries can produce four very different adults. Whatever happened to your child, you did not cause it by being insufficient. Sometimes our children arrive with their own weather, and we are only the room.

What this can look like in practice

• Putting any money you might leave them into a trust, managed by someone else, because you do not believe they can hold it themselves yet.
• Choosing not to take a phone call, because you cannot do another crisis at 11pm and still go to work in the morning.
• Loving them at a careful distance, with the door open, but not unlocked.
• Putting up with the undesirable partner, the missed birthdays, the casual cruelty that adult children sometimes save up specifically for their mothers.
• Sitting in your kitchen at fifty-something and realising that one of your children is going to be a worry for the rest of your life, and you are going to have to learn how to carry that without it being everything.

What helps, when the worry doesn’t end at 18

• Find one person who knows the whole story and will not judge you. Not all friends can do this. The right one is gold.
• Don’t try to make sense of it to people who haven’t lived it. They cannot, and the explaining will exhaust you.
• Let yourself be both. The mother who loves her, and the mother who is tired of her. Both are real. Neither cancels the other.
• Hold one quiet line. She is welcome, she is loved, she is not allowed to destroy your nervous system. That is a generous and a firm sentence, and both are allowed.
• If she goes quiet, send a short text every now and then. “I’m here. I love you. No need to reply.” Don’t expect a reply. Send anyway.
• Talk to SAM when the grief of it gets loud at the wrong hour. You won’t wake anyone up. You don’t have to be brave there.

You did not do this. You cannot fix this. You can love her, hold the door open, look after yourself, and try not to die of it. That is the whole job.

Things that almost never help

• “I had it much harder than you.”
• “You don’t know how lucky you are.”
• Taking their phone away as a punishment. (You may need to take it for safety. That’s different. Say so.)
• Insisting they go to school the morning after a bad night.
• Pretending it didn’t happen, in the hope that it goes away. It doesn’t. It goes underground.

Things that often do help

• A walk, side by side. Hard conversations land softer when you’re moving and not facing each other.
• Food, ready, unannounced. A plate that just appears.
• Saying “I love you, I am not going anywhere” out loud, without expecting a reply.
• Saying sorry, when you snap. Modelling the apology you want them to be able to make to you.
• Asking what would help, even when they say “nothing.”
• Sitting in the same room without trying. The dog helps. The telly helps. Being there helps more than you think.

Resources, because you will need them

• YoungMinds Parents Helpline, 0808 802 5544, free, for parents of children in mental health crisis.
• Papyrus HOPELINE247, 0800 068 41 41, suicide prevention for under-35s. Parents can call.
• Mind Infoline, 0300 123 3393, broader mental health support.
• Childline, 0800 1111, for them, when they will talk to a stranger before they will talk to you. That is not a failure on your part. That is sometimes easier.
• 999 or A&E, if you are scared right now.

And, last

You did not cause this. Whatever you did, you did with the information you had at the time. Whatever helps you keep going is allowed. The aim is not to be a calm parent. The aim is to be a parent who is still here in the morning, and the morning after that.

Talk to SAM if it’s the middle of the night and there is nobody else awake. You don’t have to be brave there.