You don’t even know when the time has passed and in the place of the affair, in front of you is a boy whose voice is hoarse or a girl with the air of a young lady. He is still your child, only now he is going through a period of great transformations, both physical and emotional.
Do you want to understand him better and communicate with him? Try to remember how you, at their age, went through these changes that seemed at least surprising to you. Also remember that the physical changes were accompanied by strange moods: maybe you cried for no reason or, on the contrary, contradicted everyone.
Or you wanted to be independent and not have to account for every minute spent on the way home from school, maybe you wanted to have the rights of an adult with… the responsibilities of a child at the same time.
Use a calm tone
Many teenagers find it difficult to open their souls or they tend to isolate themselves from their parents, to close the door of their room in order to have some privacy. Don’t force things, be open and understanding. Be patient and keep telling him/her that you love him/her because you know him/her best and he/she will find the help he/she needs from you. It’s nice to see how they get the shape of big people, that you have smart interlocutors when you talk to them about what concerns them, but you feel how hard it is for them to cope with the inconveniences that they produce, for example, the pimples that appear without number and spoiling the once velvety skin.
Talk to your daughter about the changes of puberty, including menstruation. By age 12, boys should learn about erections and pollution. The clearer the explanations are, the less anxiety will decrease when these manifestations appear.
Nowadays, teenagers can come into contact very easily with a lot of information about what puberty means and the changes inherent in this period.
Hormonal changes, followed by changes in the set of values and interests, in the reorientation of attention from the family group to the group of friends and the continuous and ambivalent process of making the transition from the stage of dependence to the stage of autonomy are defining this period. As a parent, you need to know some important things to cope well with this period by staying close to your child.
1. What you think is good for your child does not mean that it represents the good that he wants, says psychologist Cristina Sterie.
2. The child, now a teenager, needs to perceive that you trust him. Allow him to make his own decisions and bear the consequences of those decisions. Only in this way will he be able to become a responsible adult.
3. Be open to his questions and curiosities and talk to him about your personal experience, with friendship and as an equal. Life lessons and moralizing monologues are not attractive to the teenager.
4. Act as if you had an adult in front of you and ask for his opinion, involve him in decisions and take his opinions into account.
5. Treat puberty as a normal period, because it is just a stage of development that we have all experienced.
