My fourteen-year-old daughter has been having more and more unforeseen emotional outbursts lately. She’s worried about going to school after ninth grade, about her grades, about leaving choir because she won’t be able to take vocal lessons if she goes to college. I understand it all, and I try to support her, but it amazes and frightens me when she can be rude and insulting to me without any reason, or when she stoop to wrecking everything around her.
Recently something upset her at dinner, while she was looking at her phone, and she either accidentally or deliberately knocked over a cup of tea on the floor. The cup was smashed to pieces, and my daughter was yelling at me not to scold her.
My heart sinks when I don’t understand what it is that makes her so mad. My mom has noticed this in her granddaughter, too, and she has done much worse to her – definitely spitefully knocked over the tiles in the bathroom after they got into an argument about the “fashionability” of the renovation. Mom was standing on the fact that the fashion is back and these tiles are trendy, my daughter, of course, bent her mind, and then it’s all – broken tiles, my mother in tears and demanding not to let her granddaughter to her anymore.
It seems as if she can’t contain her emotions and expresses her anger in every way she knows.
Some people say it’s all because she’s growing up with just me, while her trucker father is always somewhere; my parents think she’s overextended adolescence and something needs to be done about it urgently; her teacher insists that it’s all stress from her studies and the pressure of school. And I don’t know what to think.
But how do I behave with her in the future? Let the situation go and be supportive? Even when she breaks things around and does it on purpose? Someone might suggest taking her to a psychologist, but have you ever tried suggesting that to a teenager? I mean, he’ll be offended and think that even his own mother thinks he’s not all right.
