Need Advice For Your Tween? Small Changes That Made Our Hard Days Easier
Last Tuesday, I stood at the stove stirring boxed mac and cheese – the blue kind my 11-year-old Lila swears is the only edible kind – when I heard the front door slam hard enough to rattle the wind chime by the entry. Her backpack thudded down right on top of my scuffed, 10-year-old rain boots, and I wiped my hands on my jeans to go greet her. “How’d the clay owl project go?” I asked, leaning against the doorframe. She’d been chattering about this thing for 10 days, staying up after bedtime to texture the feathers. She just stared at the floor, shoulders hunched, and yelled “It was stupid. Everything is stupid” before turning and running up the stairs, slamming her bedroom door so hard a picture frame shifted on the landing.
I used to do what a lot of us do: I’d chase after her, knock repeatedly, tell her it couldn’t be that bad, offer to drive back to school to talk to her art teacher, fix whatever went wrong. That always ended with her yelling louder to leave her alone, me standing in the hallway feeling like I’d messed up again, then scrolling local parent groups at 10:30 that night, seeing the same question I had typed out over and over: Need advice for my tween. What am I doing wrong?
That day, I didn’t chase her. I went back to the stove, turned the heat down on the mac, poured myself a glass of iced tea, and waited. An hour and a half later, she came down, hair messy from face-planting into her pillow, didn’t apologize, just grabbed a bowl and sat at the table scrolling TikTok. I didn’t bring up the owl. I didn’t push her to talk. We just ate, I loaded the dishwasher, and she went back upstairs.
The next day, I picked her up from soccer practice, it was sprinkling, and the car still smelled like the fast food fries we got after practice the day before. We were driving home, no radio on, just the sound of the wipers swiping back and forth, when she said out of the blue, “Mia made fun of my owl’s beak. Said it looked like a potato. And Ms. Henderson put it on the back shelf instead of the display by the office.”
I almost opened my mouth to say “Oh that’s just Mia being rude, I bet your owl was great” or “I can email Ms. Henderson if you want” but I stopped. I’d learned that trick a few weeks earlier from the school counselor, when I went in for a routine parent check-in. Instead, I just said, “That sounds so embarrassing. I’d feel totally crushed if that happened to me.”
She was quiet for a minute, picking at a loose thread on her soccer shorts, then said “Yeah. I wanted to throw it in the trash on the way out.” I said “That makes sense. Squishing it would probably feel really good.” She laughed a little, and that was it. We didn’t talk about it again. I didn’t fix anything. That was enough.
Over the past year, as Lila moved from little kid to tween, I’ve dumped all the big, vague parenting advice I used to rely on. The “communicate openly” and “set clear boundaries” rules aren’t wrong, they’re just useless when you’re standing in the hallway staring at a closed bedroom door. The small, concrete things I’ve picked up are what actually work.
First, stop talking when you’re both amped up. When a tween slams a door, they don’t want to solve the problem right then. Their brains are flooded with feeling, and they can’t process anything you say. Instead of knocking and pushing, just walk away. Do the dishes, fold that load of laundry that’s been sitting on the couch, drink your tea while it’s still hot. Save the conversation for a side-by-side moment later, when no one’s upset: a car ride, folding socks together, walking the dog around the block. Face-to-face talks feel confrontational for tweens; side-by-side feels safe.
Second, name the feeling before you do anything else. Don’t minimize to make the bad mood go away. “It’s not that big of a deal” or “just ignore her” makes them shut down because it tells them their feelings don’t matter. Just say what you see: “That sounds so rude” “That would make me mad too” “I’d be embarrassed too”. You don’t have to add anything else. Just validating it is enough.
Third, give them an out when they’re overwhelmed. A few weeks ago, Lila refused to go to her cousin’s 10th birthday party. She said everyone was going to take a million photos and post them, and she hated how she looked in all of them. I used to force it: “We already RSVP’d, you promised, we’re going.” That would end in screaming, a miserable car ride, and a party where she stood in the corner the whole time. This time, I said “Okay, we’ll go for 20 minutes. We’ll say happy birthday, have a slice of cake, and if you still hate it, we can leave. No yelling, no guilt.” She agreed. She ended up staying an hour and a half, playing four square with the other kids, and didn’t even mention the photos. The exit plan took all the pressure off. She didn’t feel trapped, so she could relax.
I still mess up all the time. Last week, when she told me she didn’t make the 7th grade volleyball team, I immediately jumped in and said “We can practice every weekend after school, you’ll get it next year” and she just shut down, walked straight upstairs. I had to go back 20 minutes later, knock on her door, and say “I’m sorry I started fixing it before I even asked how you felt. Not getting what you wanted sucks. That hurts a lot.” She opened the door, let me sit on the end of her bed, and showed me the text her friend sent her about making the team. It wasn’t a big fix, just a do-over.
When I see other parents posting online that they need advice for their tween, I don’t tell them it’s just a phase or that it gets better. I tell them the small things: walk away when the door slams, wait for the car ride, validate the feeling first, give them an out. Some days are still terrible. Some days we don’t speak more than 10 words to each other from after school to bedtime. But these small changes have made more of a difference than any big parenting book I ever read. We’re still figuring it out, one day at a time.
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