One of the most challenging things about being a parent of a teenager is that constant uncertainty that you’re getting the whole story. It’s not that you think they are lying to you. It’s not to say that it’s even a conscious effort to withhold information: they likely don’t even know themselves whether they’re telling the whole story. Being awash in hormones and emotions that are all new to them, young teens have only started trying to figure out who they really are, who they ultimately want to become, what they want to be, what they want to achieve. You’re never quite sure if everything is all right of the mannerisms, the silence, you suspect it’s not. And when they say, “No, I’m fine. I’m just tired,” you wonder if they’re fooling you, fooling yourselves, or fooling everyone.
“Are you all right?” That’s probably the most spoken word in the household with one or teens.
We try to replay our own teen years in our head in such situations, and realize that sometimes we wouldn’t want to talk. It was just that. Nothing was wrong. It was no depression or anger. We just didn’t feel like talking. But it’s so different when you’re on the other side. There must be a reason you don’t want to talk. There must be a reason for everything, because that is what parenting feels like sometimes: looking for reasons.
“I’m just tired,” comes the response. That was an excuse we used, t0o.
The thing is, we have no more answers now as adults that we did kids, and while all adolescent identity are instructed in a swirl of questions, it still feels like we as parents have more questions. Certainly more questions and answers.
It all just illustrates my childhood was usually the easiest part of any one’s life in the modern era. What questions has children were simple, when we trusted the adults in our lives about the answers they gave. Even later in life what do we realize that not all those answers were correct or healthy, we usually remain in blissful ignorance of all these doubts as children.