Cushion the Walls: Surfing the Teenage Hormone Tsunami

I have a 15 year old girl in "rebellion". Actually it is more like emancipation with the aid of "performance enhancing" hormones. However you define it, it is painful to experience.

The raving, the selective hearing, disobedience, and anger...primarily against one parent (sometimes both), is not an isolated stereotype. Mind you not all teens go through this period, but enough do to create a cultural icon of the raging teen. I have one and a pastor/friend of mine has one also.

In speaking with this friend about our travail he offered a way that is not so much a solution to the problem as a way to navigate through it. He called it "Cushioning The Walls". His point was that we may not be able to win our teens hearts and minds right away but we can and must protect them from hurting themselves.

A case in point: My daughter is excluding herself from our family by staying away with friends or locking herself in her room. This makes it difficult for my wife and I especially during advent. We have a large family and the celebration of Christmas traditions is very important to us. The rest of our children actually WANT to participate in family things and my daughter's absence is strikingly apparent. This gets a bit under my skin. That being said a recent blowout between she and I had her leaving to stay the night with a friend, to cool her jets so to speak. It is at this point that the pastor and I compared notes.

One of the things we agreed to is that it is better to lose her for a night than for the rest of my life. My first thought was to apprehend her from her friend's house. But on looking at the situation, her friend's parents are friends of ours and are trust worthy. There is no harm done in her staying with them overnight. To the pastor and I, that seemed better than bringing a wildfire back into the house right away. My pastor friend said that it is better also to know where she is than not and that I must "Cushion the Walls" so that she can exist in this home without hurting herself. That means letting her exclude herself and being OK with that. It means allowing her to lock herself away in her room, because though she may not be "with" the family, we know where she is and what she is doing. Demanding that she change that may cause her to run to unsafe havens.

It also means that one of us, precisely--me, will have to button our lip and let some things go. I know that I am not going to change her by being a disciplinarian. As the pastor's wife and his daughter have a certain "natural rift" between them, so it is with me and my daughter. I don't know why that is but it is. And I need to accept that reality rather than try and force it to be different.

So the answer for me is to ride the wave, stay cool and provide my daughter a soft landing. This may not work for everyone but it sounds reasonable to me.