![]() Building Emotional Wellness in Kids and Teens. ![]() Understanding how they feel gives kids a sense of control and helps them manage stress. We can define a sense of self that is connected to but yet independent from our children’s identities. While your middle schooler might act as though they don’t need your help, they do They still need help learning how to identify, express and cope with their feelings in healthy ways. We can take the time to reconnect with friends or our significant other and to rediscover hobbies that we might have neglected along the way. We are now freed up to have interests of our own that we can enjoy. We can start pouring time and energy towards creating a fulfilling life that isn’t dependent on our child’s moods or performance on any given day. So this is the time to recalibrate and to find ourselves again, apart from our children, who no longer need (or want) us to define ourselves through their successes. We start to become aware of obvious gaps in our lives that have been filled with our children’s needs and wants. This is why the middle school years are so difficult as our kids pull away. We can inadvertently become overly invested in their lives to the neglect of our own. Raising Teens in a New Country: A Guide for the Whole Family, was created for parents and teens who are new to the U.S., and for the service providers. As we are immersed in an “intensive parenting” culture, many of us have been encouraged to define our identities based on our children’s structured activities and performance. As our children are staring into their phones and responding to us with grunts instead of conversations, there is less of a sense of warmth and connection.ģ. Mothers start to become weary of the frenetic pace of their lives. In middle school, moms are still engaged in all of the activity planning and driving around town that occurs during the elementary years, but it is increasingly becoming more of a tiring and thankless job. Culturally, many moms are exhausted from “intensive parenting”–in other words, parenting has become “all joy and no fun” (as written by Jennifer Senior in her book of the same title ). Biologically, moms might be experiencing the onset of perimenopause, with common symptoms of fatigue and increased irritability. ![]() But what makes this period even harder is that this time in our kids’ lives happens to coincide with difficult developmental shifts occurring in mothers’ lives as well. Taken from this perspective, that’s quite a handful for adolescents and their parents to grasp and to manage.
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