Parenting teens

Teenagers are great!

We often hear comments about how infants bring a sense of wonder back into our lives. With teenagers, however, the focus tends to be on how they irritate us and less on how their behaviour can remind us of what is truly important in life.

What is your teen doing that you haven’t done in a long, long time – and maybe wish you were?

– taking myself and my feelings really, really seriously.

– fighting for my right to live how I want.

– caring a great deal about my friends.

– questioning authority.

– seeking excitement.

– experimenting with how I look.

– wondering who I am.

– taking risks.

– sleeping until I no longer feel tired.

– eating what I really fancy.

– courting new friendships.

– testing limits.

– acting on impulse.

– learning by doing.

– going for what I want.

– winging it.

– giggling.

– trying new things.

– railing at life’s injustices.

– believing that a better world is within our grasp.

Thinking of the young people in your life, what can you add to this list of important things that teenagers do?

We asked on social media what people enjoyed about their preteen and teen years and the comments echoed the above list. Here are just a few -please do add yours.

“When people ask if you could go back to being a teen, what would you do differently – having a teen is your chance to do just that, guide them past the mistakes you made, and support them with their own.” Larissa, Norfolk

“I LOVE this age!

So much positivity and hope at this age. Raw emotions that show vulnerability that as adults we try and suppress. Nervous excitement about new things and the look for encouragement from us as parents or teachers.” Lizzie, Suffolk

“I absolutely love her confidence, the ability to see her own beauty and worth and celebrate her attributes without holding back.” Lynsey, Merseyside

The teenage years have their unique challenges, for the teens and their parents. As adults in a teen’s life, we can understand and support them better when we remember what it was like to be a teenager ourselves.

Our teens are great teachers. They remind us of some of the most important things in life. And they feel good when we tell them how much we learn from them. Often those things that irritate us most, could inspire us too.

We’d love to hear what your teen does that you’d like to do too.

Inside Out 2: What’s the upside to this inside?

What a great film – if you’re over eighteen! There’s so much to relate to – the rage that’s triggered by nothing much, the tears that rise up from no-where, and the anxiety. Oh, the anxiety of being a teenager. But I was watching from the point of view of the preteens, who will make up much of the audience, and it was frankly terrifying. Is this going to happen to me? What’s the upside to this inside?

Where in the film were the new emotions that also visit us during adolescence: exuberance, invincibility, and curiosity? Puberty brings emotional gifts as well as challenges. Remember those times when life seemed limitless and amazing, and you just felt so full of your hopes and dreams you could burst. At the same time, with greater self-awareness comes increased self-consciousness, and with that embarrassment, envy, and anxiety. And the teen brain is under reconstruction, so all feelings are felt more intensely. Of course, those feelings don’t last, no feeling does. Feelings are like the weather, they come and then they pass, especially if we don’t suppress them. However, teens don’t necessarily have the tools to deal with this intensity, and they act out, or seem not to be themselves – for a bit. All normal. And mostly manageable when you’re in it. But I don’t want children to dread the teen years (or their parents) and this film reinforces the message that teenage years are hell, and crippling anxiety runs the show.

So, it concerns me that this is the biggest grossing animation, released at the start of the summer holidays viewed by millions of pre- pubescent kids and their parents.

I talked to my 20-something daughter-in-law who loved it. She thought it was a wonderful representation of what it’s like to go through your teens. The friendship dilemmas, the random fury, and that pervasive anxiety. It was entertaining for her to see it characterised by the battle of emotions in this way. Affirming of her experience of the teen years.

By contrast my ten-year-old niece, who also loved it, found it confusing. Her Dad helped her to make sense of it by explaining that the girl lost her sense of self when puberty hit but found a new one. She liked the new characters in the girl’s head, but she didn’t seem to ‘get it’. Yet. She will…

At Rites for Girls we run girls groups for preteen girls, and when talking about growing up I notice many are still age-appropriately naïve. “I’ll never drink, take drugs, have sex before marriage, get piercings or tattoos, dress like that!” They might, later on, but they’re not there yet. And hopefully each girl will feel equipped to make her own choices about these things. And there’s no hurry.

So, after seeing this film how can we chat with our preteens to help them look forward to what lies ahead? And prepare them too.

Here are seven pointers:

Feelings are never wrong. They tell you something important about what you need. It gets complicated if you ignore them.
There are no prizes for coping on your own. Lean on your friends, your family, and other key adults around you. Often, they feel good to be trusted by you. Different people help in different ways, so have a variety, and look out for adults who aren’t your parents for those times when parents feel too close to talk to. Everyone needs an ‘auntie’ or two.
Response-ability is your ability to respond to situations. Your feelings are a guide, but then you use your brain and the advice of others to figure out the best way to respond.
Everyone makes mistakes. It’s how we learn. Just be aware of making the same mistakes, because then you’re not learning. And figure out how to repair things when you’ve messed up.
The coolest people are those who are most able to be true to themselves. They may not be in the ‘cool crowd’ but just you wait, those ‘cool’ kids may not seem so awesome in a few years’ time. Hold onto who you are, the friendships that really feel good, and the things you love to do.
Being a teenager is crazy, amazing, special. You get to explore what makes you ‘you’, enjoy way more freedoms, and experiment. It can be tough at times too, and that’s normal; so, know that you’re not alone. I want you to feel that I’m here for you, your biggest fan, and committed member of your support team.
There’s no hurry. There’s no need to prove to anyone that you’re growing up. Enjoy the journey as well as the destination. Grow up at your own pace – it really isn’t a race.

Kim McCabe, Founder and Director, Rites for Girls

Mother-Daughter Dates this summer

The idea of a Mother-Daughter Date is for you to spend time alone together, once a month for a few hours with your daughter. You might view the school holidays as a greater opportunity to spend more time together or an extra complexity as you try to juggle work, childcare and possibly the needs of more than one child.

Is a smartphone-free culture possible for our children?

We think yes… and no!

When smartphones were invented 15 years ago, they seemed like a great idea – at first. We could work on-the-go, connect, watch videos, find our way, and we had Google in our pocket. All very appealing for most, but not good news for our children. Smartphones are inadvertently damaging their mental health. Depression and suicide in children has rocketed since 2012. Why? Well, researchers have concluded that it’s a lot to do with the impact on children of having a smartphone and exposure to social media.

How bad is it?

Right now, 97% of 12-year-olds in Britain have a smartphone, showing us how important it is to focus on this issue, especially as 92% of UK parents think social media negatively impacts teens’ mental health. Parents didn’t grow up with smartphones and social media, so we’ve no model for how to introduce it safely into our children’s lives. That’s what we now have to figure out.

Social media apps are designed to turn a profit which they do by selling ‘our attention’ to advertisers – we are the product they sell! The more we can be tempted to watch and scroll, watch and scroll, the more money they make from advertisers. Addictive algorithms hook us in and keep us online. Our children are particularly vulnerable to the unregulated content which is designed to capture attention by creating longing or giving dopamine hits. Particularly since 2020 with the explosion of Tiktok, we’ve seen a rapid escalation in just how addictive the content has become. While Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms traditionally responded to the popularity of the person posting, Tiktok’s algorithm is more responsive to the user: it primarily relies on the different actions a user takes on the platform in real-time. If you ‘like’, ‘save’, or watch all the way through a video, the next video TikTok offers you will be similar. This reinforces your views, connects you with others who share your opinions, and then leads you down the rabbit hole of gradually exposing you to more extreme content, including themes of suicide and violence, in the platform’s attempt to keep you on the app. The evidence that social media and gaming is harmful to children is irrefutable.

When children create their own social media content, their self-worth becomes entwined with gaining likes and followers. Their self-esteem is further damaged by trolls posting negative comments and, at its worst, cyberbullying has led some teens, such as 14-year-old Mia Janin, to take their own life in despair. Unattainable beauty standards, particularly for girls, causes body confidence issues, and self-hatred. Filters, editing, and the dreaded FaceApp leads commenters to compare themselves negatively and wonder how an influencer’s skin looks so “perfect” not realising that it’s not real.

Social media has also led to children spending less time outside or with each other. Dr Vivek Murthy identified a 70% decrease in our young people spending time in person with friends from 2000 to2020 because they’re communicating across an app instead. Tweens tell us they feel more comfortable communicating by text than face-to-face. They’re losing the ability to strike up a conversation in person and are becoming socially reticent.

We can change this!

Those who care most about children’s well-being can protect them by acting collectively. Parents, grandparents, and those who work with children can gain influence by working together. Parents can communicate (using smartphones!) to agree age restrictions for phone use, to liaise with schools, and to petition parliament.

First steps

It’s too easy for our children of any age to open a social media account. While all social platforms have an age restriction, there’s no requirement to provide proof of age. So, let’s change that by making the social media companies responsible for policing their age restrictions. Recently Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that will ban under-14s from social media – and will remove any existing under-14 accounts from social media platforms. Any platform violating these rules will have to pay a fine of up to $50,000 – a great way to put pressure on these companies, hit them where it hurts.

Locally, what can we do? Daisy Greenwell co-founded Smartphone Free Childhood in the UK, which exploded in February 2024 with over 10,000 new members and counting, in regional groups across the UK. Daisy was inspired by a phone call from a teacher who plans to turn his network of 25 primary schools across the South West into smartphone-free schools by only allowing retro-style phones, no smartphones, and to make it a part of the uniform policy.

Author and Rites for Girls founder, Kim McCabe says: “It is possible to create a smartphone-free culture and to hold firm despite pushback from our youngsters. Now that smartphones have become such a generally accepted feature of our children’s lives, this will certainly take resolve, but parents are uniting as recognition is growing for the need to protect our children better. Parents and teachers can take a stand and lead the way. First, we check our own smartphone use. We cannot ask children not to do what we are doing. For the adults: no phones at mealtimes, or in classrooms, phones left downstairs at bedtime, apps installed to limit social media use. First, we reduce our addiction; we model healthy phone use, and only then can we insist that our children follow our lead. ’Social media breaks’ and ’digital detoxes’ have been on the rise in recent years, as we all recognise how rarely we find our mood improved by time spent on social media and yet how hard it is to put down.”

“In addition to reducing time online, we also need to teach our children how to be healthy online. Just as we taught our children road safety, we must walk alongside them in the digital world too. So, again, first we need to learn how to do this ourselves. Preparing our children for a digital world has become part of our parenting job. While we want to keep them away from the destructive effects of social media for as long as possible while they’re young, we also need to prepare them for living with it as they grow up. It’s not all bad. We want them to have access, in as healthy a way possible, to the huge potential for learning, connection, and power to effect change. This is the adult’s role, to figure this out and be involved. Luckily there’s lots of free guidance online for how. Together we can do this.”

“Then look out for smartphone-free zones for your children. You can’t play football and scroll, you can’t be at drama club, or play in the garden or park, or ride your bike and scroll. At Rites for Girls our Girls Journeying Together groups are phone-free, and offer a safe place for girls to make friends, and learn what they need to know as they grow up to take care of their social, emotional and physical well-being.”

What could work for your family?

Is the answer going back to retro phones? Is it having smartphone-free Sundays? Is it collaborating with other parents to ensure children are often free from the clutches of their phones? We’re curious about what you think.

And if you’re a mother (or concerned adult) who wants to work with children and keep them away from smartphones, and you’re interested in learning how we’ve created smartphone-free spaces for girls, you can learn more about training with us here.