Staying Connected – the superpower to get you through the tweens and teens.

Staying Connected – the superpower to get you through the tweens and teens.

Few parents actively set out to disconnect from their teenagers. Patterns of disconnection can all too easily emerge over time – as our children seem more independent, and their lives, and our lives get busier. Both as a school leader, and more recently as a coach, I have been involved in supporting families where bonds have become frayed and distance between teens and one or both parents has become a source of strain and distress.

No matter how angry, defiant, or cynical the teenager, beneath the armour plating often lies a more vulnerable yearning to be understood, and held in mind, held in esteem by their caregivers. Whilst a young person has the drive to grow beyond their closest family bonds in their teenage years, and undertake the task of ‘individuation’ – the name psychologists give to the process of becoming an independent person – it is so helpful that they have access to mentorship of an elder. Even whilst they may be wanting to be immersed in the teen scene.

I do not want to bring in another stick to beat parents with. Our relationship with our children is -hopefully – a long-haul, enduring experience. And there will be periods of closeness, and periods of distance. It’s not going to be all cup-cakes and unicorns, snuggles on the sofa…Sometimes, we are going to have to say no to them – and they won’t like it. How they deal with it is not in our control…But it is our job to hold boundaries, keep them safe, and reconnect across the divide of their wrath.

The key thing to consider is the quality and quantity of the points of connection and the quality and quantity of the points of distance. In trauma therapy, Peter Levine uses the metaphor of ‘pendulation’ – to lean into and away from connection with the self. And in working with concerned parents, I have found that metaphor quite helpful.

Noticing and navigating these dynamics is key to preventing stuckness – prolonged periods where perhaps our child or teen is maybe overly connected and reliant on us at the expense of developing their independence. Or prolonged periods where the relationship may coast, idle, or stall. Where there is a disengagement that may start to sour into interpretations of disinterest.

Distance may or may not come alongside of active rebellion or conflict – it can just be a long slow drift.

The case study about Jessica and her parents illustrates this. Try to read it in a non-judgmental way. Which parts of this may resonate with aspects of your own teenage experience, perhaps. Or maybe in elements of your family life now?

What are the details that look to you like an opportunity to check in a little more, to look deeper, or signs to look out for?

Jessica, aged 15, lives in a whirlwind of activity. An ambitious young teen – and has her heart set on being a doctor. She’s well aware that this needs really high grades, and that the competition is really tough.

On top of her academics, she’s an excellent violinist, and plays hockey at a very high level. She also takes part in an advanced maths class – which she finds quite fun and helpful for her to be keeping on top of being entered for accelerated maths exams. And she’s involved in an after school club for aspiring medics and vets.

Most nights she’s got a practice, lesson, or club after school, gets home at 6 or 6.30, eats with family, and now is doing 2-3 hours homework every night.

She has a small group of trusted friends and has a really pleasant social life on the whole. She doesn’t get huge amounts of time for going out – and she’s not massively interested in the party scene.

Life is busy. Her relationship with her parents is good. They are hugely proud of her and are always very encouraging. Because she’s always been good at school there has never been any conflict about her getting work done. From their point of view, she’s doing super-well, spinning all these different plates.

A lot of conversation at home is about organising and planning logistics with busy diaries. Very pleasant, practical. Other conversations are about the future – A levels and university.

As her school year has gone on, she’s had various projects, tests, and pieces of coursework which have meant working into the night. Her bedtime has crept up to be around midnight. But her parents know it’s because she’s needing to fit so much in. And she seems to be doing well on it.

Lately Jessica has been finding it harder to get to sleep, feeling a tightness in her chest, or her heart racing for no apparent reason. She is extremely tired in the mornings, and has found herself being snappish with her friends…and the stress with her friends is making it harder to concentrate. Work takes longer and she’s starting to feel exhausted, to doubt herself.

She knows that something’s wrong and need to change. But she doesn’t quite know how to raise this with her parents. She shuts herself in her room so they can’t see how miserable she is. And she finds herself feeling resentful that they don’t notice.

Distance can also be caused by one of life’s many interruptions to connection. A family illness or bereavement that draws the parent eye elsewhere. A step up in challenge – for instance parents returning to career orientation and seeking new roles, promotions, side by side with being less needed for the ‘hands-on’ parenting of the early years and childhood. Or perhaps changes in the family structure – parent separation, divorce, reconfigured families, the advent of step-siblings.

Ensuring the relationship we have with our children is meaningful rather than functional as they grow and life gets more complicated is not always easy. Being in their lives as a reassuring, consistent, interested and trusted source of support is vital and at its best lends vitality to both generations.

It takes discipline to make the transition from being the ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ we inhabited in their childhood years to becoming their loving parent who is trusted and trusts them. Who can be a non-anxious or low-anxious presence in their lives. Who can be their coach and consultant when it’s needed, rather than trying to be their boss. Good leaders trust and relate. They don’t micromanage, overreact, or take things personally.

These are the elements that need to be ushered in to the relationship as they approach adolescence and become increasingly important as they move through it. If we are not able to be flexible in our relationship with our growing child, we will encounter push-back and power-struggles.

If we are constantly on the front foot, monitoring them, organising them, they will step away, step down, and check out…The more intrusive we become, the more avoidant they will be. The more insistent we get, the more their natural need for autonomy and space will usher in elusiveness and even deceit.

Being able to show up in their lives as a low-anxious presence is important. Especially when the world is telling us that life is becoming harder and more competitive. We need to be sure that fear is not diving us – or the false assumptions that we are all prone to. That every grade, every subject is crucial and the stakes are too high for us to let them decide for themselves and stop push, push, pushing them.

Here are some questions to help you consider where you are on a spectrum of connection and disconnection, and thing about where you’d like to make some changes…

1. Do your conversations tend to be practical check-ins about diary commitments, homework, organisation?
2. How good are you at listening to them, without interrupting, or intervening to correct or question what they say?
3. When did you last give them praise – or show them appreciation. What did you say? How did it land…Think about the value of active, constructive praise – which illustrates / explains what you value. This is different from passive, destructive praise…(Oh that’s good / well done – go wash your hands for dinner)…(Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness).
4. When did you last have a conversation that touched upon what they believe in, what they stand for?
5. How aware are you of what it is they enjoy and why– from the activities they do, or from the subjects they.
6. Take a timer and give yourself 3 minutes to jot down ideas about their struggles…then do the same to note down ideas about their strengths. Compare how easy it was to do each side of that task…Were you able to focus on their strengths, or did you get drawn back to thinking about their struggles…
7. What do you know about the quality of their friendships? Who their friends are – and why they are special in your teen’s life… 
8. What would you say is the balance between corrective interactions and warm interactions?

Stocking up on the quality of our relationship with our children as they grow will mean we can truly be a resource for them – which they themselves recognise and are therefore motivated to use.

It doesn’t cost money – and it does not have to take huge amounts of time. But it does take being mindful of the quality of the time and attention we offer them. We talk about attention in economic terms – paying attention. Are we in credit there? Are we able to let them lead and listen without imposing an agenda. Or diverting into a rabbit hole of our own preoccupation like checking up on homework assignments.

I have had the privilege of talking to many thousands of children through my years of teaching and school leadership, as well as a trainer leading workshops on the social, emotional and relational life of young people between 9 and 18. And these are the following pieces of feedback I think are most worth parents bearing in mind:

• From Year 5 (9 or 10 years old and onwards) children feel that their relationship with their parents pivots more around school work, organising homework and keeping up with sports or music practice.
• Around the age of 13 or 14, teens say they are less likely to confide in adults – because they feel they do not listen. They want to be heard, and they want advice. They don’t want to be pushed or forced.

As a school leader, in charge of wellbeing and safeguarding, I often found that the young people who seemed most challenging, disaffected, rebellious, withdrawn, discouraged, hurt, would be forthcoming when they were taken seriously, and where they had space to speak and have their thoughts and feelings land without an immediate overlay of reaction and emotion.

They became more expansive, and were able to digest and process their difficult feelings over time. Being able to do that in a professional context, first as an educator, then as a coach, is an incredibly powerful thing which can be transformative for the young person who is able to release uncomfortable or even painful aspects of their inner lives and become more open to choices, chances for them to make change.

If only it were as readily achievable in homelife as a parent on the hoof! Despite my experience and training, I know that I am easily able to make things all about me. It takes practice and discipline to recognise my cues to slow down and lean in to what our daughter has on her mind without trying to wrestle the conversational steering wheel out of her hands.

Fundamentally there is a process to learning how to relate to others in high-stakes situations which is – ideally- modelled in our multiple and therefore highly influential interactions with our children:

1. Our teen comes to us with some emotional content…or the conversation we are having opens up into something problematic in their inner lives or in their relationships.
2. We feel our ‘whoosh’ – fight/ flight reactions – see ourselves coming (recognising that our emotional buttons are being pressed) and de-escalate ourselves…
3. We ground ourselves in a sense of fundamental OK-ness – that there is no imminent danger – and slow ourselves down with a breath or two and enter a listening mode.
4. We listen actively and attentively – enabling them to feel that they are seen.
5. We hold our ego in check – even if they are presenting us with a complaint about us! (God forbid!). We manage our own sense of parent guilt – when we blame ourselves for situations that we should’ve /could have foreseen. Preserve the space to hear the thing that is on their mind – whatever it is…
6. We ask questions and listen to learn, not wade in with solutions.
7. We ask them what they think and feel, we get curious about the impact on them, the values that are important to them.
8. We help them steer, we don’t take control. We ask them about what they want, what their choices are, what steps they can take, what problems they might forsee, what help they might need.
9. We show that we understand and respect their feelings and what we’ve learned from their thinking…We show that we appreciate their trust and confidence. We check in with what they’re going to take away from the conversation.
10. We help them feel good about coming to us and being open / vulnerable / courageous.

If we want to be connected with them – such that they will trust us with their inner-life stuff – then with teens, it’s just like the lore surrounding vampires. They have to let us in. We have to show that we are safe and trustworthy and won’t suck the lifeblood and joy out of everything.

If we don’t do this for them – who will? In my experience, they may have access to some really great listening and support from friends. But this is not always going to be reliable and consistent. And those friends don’t have the same wit, wisdom, life-experience of a trusted adult. Only we know that golden thread of their personality and history from birth.

Teens also find advice online. This can be good, bad, and sometimes ugly: manipulative and even abusive. We need to think about what it is about the online space that is so facilitating for them -and make sure we can compete with it. Teens find more neutral space to express themselves – there is a certain anonymity for them to test the waters.

Online, they may feel more in control – even if that sense of control is illusory. Unless they are opening up to someone who they actually know they can trust, they are taking a risk. AI generated ‘friends’, and even AI generated counsellors can bring a sense of validation – but there are limits to the illusion of connection they provide.

These large language models can mirror back language, reflect back received wisdom on certain themes harvested from a wealth of online content of variable quality, and learn approaches that garner approval. So they can be reassuring. They may have their place, for fun, for role-playing social confidence perhaps – but they really ought to be no more than a side-dish in any nutritious relational diet.

It’s never too late to repair ruptures and reconnect relationship patterns that don’t serve us well in family life. The work starts with us. The adults in the room.

Extract from forthcoming book – Belonging – Supporting tweens and teens with finding friendship and belonging with peers. Copyright Emma Gleadhill 2025.