“We need a new way to talk about teenage girls.”
This sentence starts Lisa Damour’s book, ‘Untangled,’ and forms the basis of the advice she offers to parents/carers. ‘Untangled’ is full of her respect and admiration for teenage girls, which makes it clear why she sees the ‘unruly teenager’ label as unfair. Throughout ‘Untangled’, she uses her knowledge and years of experience to give readers confidence that they too can take a new and more positive approach to raising teenagers.
‘Untangled’ takes parents through seven strands of development for teenagers. Although the strands are logically ordered, Damour makes it clear that not all strands advance at once, or in order, or evenly across the teenage years. She describes it as a “map of adolescent development” that can be used to guide teenage girls to adulthood. Through reading this book and considering the map analogy, it gave me much more insight into and respect for teenage girls and what they go through! Although at this point, it could be easy to fall into the ‘teenage years are chaos!’ trap, ‘Untangled’ can (as Damour puts it) “help you to understand your daughter better, worry about her less, [and] offer her useful assistance on her journey through adolescence…’ It’s a very ambitious aim, but one that Damour does brilliantly throughout her book.
In exploring each strand of development into adulthood, Damour illustrates key behaviours you can expect to see from your daughter; some of you may already be experiencing them now! She links these behaviours to their purpose - helping girls to become independent and fully-functioning adults in the future. For example, in the strand about “Parting with Childhood” she points out that in order to part with childhood, girls can become “surprisingly mean” and start giving their parents the “cold shoulder.” This is likely also mixed with some times that are positive, chatty, and more like how she was when she was a younger child. Damour uses the very helpful analogy of parents as a swimming pool and daughters as the swimmers to explain this changeable behaviour. The water of the swimming pool is the world around them - it can be fun and exciting to jump or dive in and play. But it can also be stressful and scary, and this is when they return to the edge of the pool - the parents! But this is only a temporary pause to check in. Clinging to the edge of the swimming pool (parents) feels like childish behaviour to a teenager, so they will push off (sometimes in a “surprisingly mean” way!) to get back to the deep-end business of growing into adulthood. She offers reassurance that this is completely normal in teenagers, and advice on how to cope for parents who find this back-and-forth behaviour challenging.
Every strand of development that Damour considers has fantastically relatable examples. Whilst many parents worry that their daughters are ‘out of control’ or ‘too much to handle’ at this age, Damour repeatedly emphasises that the behaviour we see in teenagers serves a very important purpose of supporting their development into adulthood. Handily at the end of each strand, she points out “When to Worry.” In the chapter about friendships and the strand of “Joining a New Tribe,” Damour points out that a lot of the behaviours that might worry parents are actually normal, but worry is justified when girls experience social isolation, experience bullying, or engage in bullying others. If those criteria are met, she gives examples of conversation starters to use with teenagers and ideas of where worrying parents can seek support for their daughters.
Across the seven transitions into adulthood, Damour writes with empathy for young people and their parents/carers. The strands/transitions concept is useful for anyone who loves and supports young women at this intense and challenging time of their lives. The final strand is titled “Caring for Herself.” This is the main goal of raising teenagers - supporting them to be independent and to care for themselves physically, emotionally, and socially. By understanding the developmental reasons behind some of the ‘typical teenage behaviours’, Damour hopes parents can ‘untangle’ themselves from the worry and stress to allow their daughters to flourish.
Dr Lisa Damour has published several books about raising teenagers. She also hosts a podcast called ‘Ask Lisa’ about the psychology of parenting.
