Parenting Adolescents Through Middle-School Despondency

Source: Carl Pickhardt, Ph.D.

There can be a mix of sadness and anxiety in a young person at the outset of adolescence (around ages 9–13) from the emotional price this major developmental change demands.

To move on, one must let go of how childhood comfortably used to be and begin to dare redefining in older, uncertain, and more challenging social terms. It can feel discouraging at times.

Suffering from the demands of growing change, experiences of despondency can sometimes ensue, the young person feeling like an oddball or loner trapped in a sad and scary emotional place.

Many years ago when I started counseling this age group in what was then a junior high back east, that’s what I thought this stage of the educational passage was for many young people—a school of misfits.

Entering Adolescence

Growing up requires giving up and moving on. There is no painless other way. As a consequence of this necessary change, three losses can sadden the young person as treasured connections that formerly supported contentment and self-esteem can feel broken:

• There is loss of childhood identity: “I can never go back to being a little child again.”
• There is loss of family attachment: “I’m not as close and companionable with my parents.”
• There is loss of easy relationships with friends: “Instead of playmates, now I must fit in with peers.”

While there is interest, enjoyment, and excitement in pursuing the challenges of acting older, this advancement does not come free of charge. For many young people, particularly during the vulnerable middle-school years, this transition can bring sad and anxious feelings until adjustment to older functioning is made.

Consider these inevitable three losses one at a time.

Loss of Childhood Identity

While the child was content to be traditionally defined as younger, puberty revolutionizes self-concept in adolescent terms. Now bodily changes cause surprising physical growth; the onset of sexual maturity creates sexual interest; and the need to act older alters social identity. Not only do emotions and urges become more intense, but also, as expectations to act socially older increase, self-dissatisfaction rules: “I’m not as grown up as I need to be!”

Now, preoccupation with physical appearance and social dress begin to take center stage in the young person’s life, each day beginning with that painful mirror encounter to see the appearance one has to take to school for everyone to see. Now there is danger of embarrassment from more self-consciousness as how one looks assumes increasing social importance. And now relationship with the other sex feels more awkward but important to have, while popular youthful media icons of how to appear and dress become more powerful: “I wish I looked like that!” As appearance becomes wed to popularity, the social contentment of childhood can feel very far away.

Loss of Family Attachment

Adolescence disenchants the parent–child relationship. As the child pulls away (socially separates) for more independent room to grow, parents must deliberate when to still hold on and when to start doing more letting go. Gatekeepers to growing freedom they become, sometimes frustrating the young teenager on that account: “You never let me do anything!”

Now the adolescent can never go back home to the simplicity, sheltering, and security of childhood again. Lost are their adored and idealized parents as the young person pushes against and pulls away from their authority, complaining when new freedom is denied. More critical of her or himself, the young person often becomes more critical of parents: “You don’t understand!”

While the mostly dependent and attached young child often subscribed to power assumptions about parents—they are faultless, they are expert, they are in control, they can protect, they can always help; the more independently detaching adolescent now sees them in less capable terms:

• “My parents aren’t perfect."
• “My parents don’t always know best."
• "My parents can’t make me or stop me."
• "My parents won’t be there to keep me safe."
• "My parents can’t heal my hurts or fix my problems.”

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As for parents, they can be suffering painful losses of their own:

• “We will be less fully informed.”
• “We won’t share as much in common,”
• “We won’t be our child’s favored company.”
• “We won’t have such an easy time of getting our way.”
• “We will have to contend with more disagreements than before.”

The onset of adolescence can be a disenchanting time for both child and parents.

Loss of Easy Relationships

In the competition to secure social standing and belonging, five kinds of social cruelty can increasingly occur as young people jockey for standing and belonging: teasing, exclusion, bullying, rumoring, and ganging up. While all these mean behaviors do not happen to everyone, and while everyone does not participate in these harmful acts, everyone sees them happening to someone and can feel the threat: “That could happen to me.” Particularly during the more developmentally changing middle-school years, the world of peers can become more socially unsafe. (See my 2010 book, Why Good Kids Act Cruel.)

As adolescent peer relationships become harsher, it’s important that home and family are kept comfortable: no teasing or other hurtful put-downs of each other is allowed: “And if any acts of social meanness happen to you at school, please tell us so at least we can be there to listen and provide support. Wrongful treatment of you doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you, but with those who are deliberately acting to do you harm.”

When Despondency Occurs

Should signs of youthful despondency occur during the middle-school years—sadness, withdrawal, silence, social isolation, talk or acts of self-harm—parents should become actively concerned. They can encourage positive ways the child can connect to themselves and others during this transitional, out-of-step, catching-up, growing-up time.

And if the young person becomes painfully stuck in sadness, this is a good opportunity for short-term counseling. Such help can provide caring company, emotional support, and social coaching to catch hold of growing older, embracing new challenges and opportunities that becoming adolescent positively brings.