I'm a mom and relationship reporter. Here are 9 tips to help your teen through their first relationships and heartbreaks.
Lisa A. Phillips started researching teen relationships when her daughter started dating.
She learned that parents should validate feelings but not ruminate too much with teens.
Teens have different ideas about sexuality and relationships, and parents shouldn't judge.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lisa A. Phillips, author of First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak. It has been edited for length and clarity.
My daughter was 13 when she started dating. I found myself very worried and preoccupied by her love life to a pretty inordinate degree. I realized that I was being drawn back into my own experiences as a teen, and those were making me feel very protective of my daughter.
I'm a journalist, and this experience sparked my professional curiosity. I started interviewing teens, parents, professionals, and researchers about what young people go through as they navigate relationships, breakups, and crushes.
My daughter is now 20. I've learned through writing my book that parents can learn alongside their child about love, heartache, and relationships while offering support. Here's how.
Many of the young people I talked to say they wish their parents had talked to them more about love and relationships. Ask questions like "Why do you like this person?" or "How do they treat you?"
These show you're curious about your child's romantic life , even if you're just talking about a crush. It's a signal that you value love and see relationships as something that people should evaluate, assess, and reflect on. This opens the door to ongoing conversations.
There's some really serious stuff involved in teenage relationships, but at the same time, it's fun to explore love with your child. One of the experts I interviewed said parents should become romantic philosophers. Engage your kids in conversations about romance, beginning at a young age, with the shows they watch. With time, that can lead to more exploration and complex conversations.
The most important thing parents can do is validate their children's feelings about their relationships. This is key even if the relationship seems insignificant to you. Maybe it was just a crush or a relationship that existed solely online.
Instead of dismissing your child's feelings, recognize that even these small relationships can create a lot of hope for the future. When that ends, it can have a real impact.
It's normal for kids to have intense negative feelings after a heartbreak. They might say, "She hates me now," or "He's such a jerk." Parents should validate what their child is feeling but not ruminate on those negative emotions with their teen. If you do that, you can just stir up negative emotions or obsessive feelings.
Instead, try to problem solve with your teen. For example, if they work with their ex and find that distracting, explore whether they can switch shifts for a bit. Help them learn to manage everyday life without the person they broke up with. This will empower them.
Despite what they might show, many teens still see their parents as powerful moral authorities. So, if you express any judgment — even unintentionally — it can have a big impact on your child. Whether it's about a public display of affection, what your child is wearing, or their choice of a partner, judgment will make them clam up and stop talking.
One thing that surprised me in researching the book is how queer teenagers are today. In my generation, you identified your orientation by a feeling that was too strong to ignore. I wasn't comfortable saying I was bisexual until I fell in love with a woman. But kids today feel they don't have to prove anything. Your daughter might only date boys but still identify as bisexual because she knows that to be true for herself.
Teen relationships don't follow a timeline that most parents are familiar with. There's now a long "talking" period, which involves lots of texting. There are situationships and friends with benefits that aren't defined as a relationship but that still have an emotional impact.
Many parents might reassess their romantic pasts or current relationships as their teens start dating. Seeing your child move through relationships can bring old emotions to the surface, but you shouldn't let your experiences blind you to what your child is going through.
I've come to think of teen dating as a dual-generation right of passage. When your child starts exploring their love life, you must take care of yourself even as you care for them.
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Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Yahoo
What Happens When Teens Don't Date
Lisa A. Phillips has found herself in a strange position as of late: trying to convince her students that romantic love is worthwhile. They don't believe in overly idealizing partnership or in the clichés fed to them in rom-coms; some have declared that love is a concept created by the media. Phillips, a journalist who teaches a SUNY New Paltz course called 'Love and Heartbreak,' responds that of course relationships aren't all perfect passion, and we should question the tropes we're surrounded by. But also: Those tropes began somewhere. Across cultures, people describe the experience of falling for someone in quite similar ways, 'whether they grew up with a Disney-movie IV in their vein,' she told me, or 'in a remote area with no media whatsoever.' The sensation is big, she tells her students; it's overwhelming; it can feel utterly transcendent. They're skeptical. Maybe if Phillips had been teaching this class a decade ago, her students would already have learned some of this firsthand. Today, though, that's less likely: Research indicates that the number of teens experiencing romantic relationships has dropped. In a 2023 poll from the Survey Center on American Life, 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they'd been in a romantic relationship at any point in their teen years, compared with 76 percent of Gen Xers and 78 percent of Baby Boomers. And the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of about 3,000 Americans, found in 2021 that 54 percent of participants ages 18 to 34 reported not having a 'steady' partner; in 2004, only 33 percent said the same. As I've written, a whole lot of American adults are withdrawing from romance—not just young people. But the trend seems to be especially pronounced for Gen Z, or people born roughly between 1997 and 2012. Of course, you can grow into a perfectly mature and healthy adult without ever having had a romantic relationship; some research even suggests you might be better off that way. In the aggregate, though, this shift could be concerning: a sign, researchers told me, of a generation struggling with vulnerability. A first love, for so many, has been a milestone on the path to adulthood—a challenging, thrilling, world-expanding experience that can help people understand who they are and whom they're looking for. What's lost if that rite of passage disappears? You can experience so much without being in a defined relationship. You can flirt; you can kiss; you can dance. You can have a crush so big it takes up all the space in your brain; you can care about someone deeply; you can get hurt—badly. Plenty of young people, then, could be having transformative romantic encounters and still reporting that they've never been in a relationship. It could be the label, not the emotional reality, that's changing, Thao Ha, a developmental psychologist at Arizona State University, told me. She's found that lots of high schoolers report having 'dated' before—a looser term that might better suit the realities of adolescent courtship today. (In a YouGov poll from last year, about 50 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they'd been in a 'situationship,' or undefined relationship.) Some of that activity might not entail exclusivity or regularity, or any promise of long-term commitment. But it could still help young people with what researchers told me are some core rewards of early romantic exploration: gaining autonomy from parents, developing a sense of identity, what Phillips called an 'existential' benefit—the 'sometimes painful, sometimes amazing trial-and-error process of seeking closeness.' Becoming a well-rounded grown-up, in fact, doesn't really require romantic experience of any sort. Adolescence and emerging adulthood are times of uncertainty; what young people need most, Amy Rauer, a human-development professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me, is often just a cheerleader: a peer, a grandparent, a coach, or someone else making them feel valued, which can set them up to feel secure in future relationships. Teens can also learn social skills—how to make small talk, resolve arguments, empathize across differences—in all kinds of platonic relationships. [Read: The slow, quiet demise of America romance] Some research, Phillips pointed out, actually suggests that young people might benefit from a lack of romantic activity. One study found that, compared with their dating peers, students who dated very infrequently or not at all over a seven-year period were seen by their teachers as having better leadership and social skills, and reported fewer symptoms of depression. After all, young love isn't always positive. It can be an emotional whirlwind; it can distract from schoolwork, or from friends, or from other interests. In the worst cases, it can be abusive. (Adolescent girls experience intimate-partner violence at particularly high rates.) And when it ends, teens—with little perspective and few learned coping mechanisms—can be absolutely wrecked. Despite how common a lack of relationship experience is now—especially but not only for teens—a lot of people still feel embarrassed by it. TikTok is filled with influencers declaring that they're 26 or 30 or 40 and have never been in a relationship, sharing how insecure that's made them feel; commenters stream in, by the hundreds of thousands, to divulge their own feelings of shame. Many of my friends, who are entering their 30s, constantly stress about this: They fear they won't know how to be a good partner if the opportunity arises. But all of a person's interactions, not just romantic ones, can shape how they'll show up in a relationship. One 2019 study, which followed 165 subjects ages 13 to 30, found that strong friendships in adolescence predicted romantic-life satisfaction in adulthood; early romantic experience, meanwhile, wasn't related to future satisfaction at all. (Teens commonly learn how to fight and make up with friends, Phillips told me, but they might be less likely to stick it out with a lover long enough for conflict resolution.) [Read: The dating-app diversity paradox] Overall, when it comes to who you are in a relationship, what matters most is simply who you are, period. And the traits that make you you are likely to remain fairly stable throughout your life. A 2022 study found, for instance, that subjects who were single during adolescence—but had their first relationship by age 26—reported no lower self-esteem than those who'd started dating earlier. Tita Gonzalez Avilés, a personality psychologist at Germany's Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz who has led some of this research, told me that although people often think their relationships will change them, the influence typically happens the other way around: Who you are shapes what kind of relationship you'll have. Research has even shown that people's satisfaction in a relationship tends to remain pretty consistent across their various partners. Given all that, you might think it a good thing that Gen Z has less going on in the romance department. Perhaps young people are busy with other pursuits, focusing on friendship and school and hobbies; maybe they no longer want to settle for a mediocre partner. The transition to adulthood tends to take longer today, pushing back lots of different milestones—steps such as financial independence, buying a home, and, notably, getting married—sometimes indefinitely. In that sense, young people have an eminently rational reason to hold off on seeking partnership: The deadline is extended. But researchers have pointed to other, more worrisome reasons for the romance dip. Phillips has heard a lot about situationships—and scenarios that aren't even well-defined enough to use that label. For her new book, First Love, she interviewed more than 100 young people and parents, and found, as Ha did, that early romance today tends to reside in a gray area. 'You have a long period of we're talking,' Phillips told me. 'You're kind of dancing around the idea of a sexual-romantic connection, maybe even having some of those experiences, but not really talking about what it is.' For some, the lack of strict relationship expectations can be freeing. But many, Phillips told me, find the ambiguity distressing, because they don't know what they have the right to feel—or the right to ask for. Some recounted how they ended up feeling invested in a fling—and described it not only as bad news, but as a personal failure: They said that they 'got caught' (as if red-handed), 'caught feelings' (like an illness), or succumbed to 'dumb-bitch hour' (when late at night, defenses down, they texted a crush and—God forbid—let themselves feel close to someone). 'Young people would be hard on themselves,' Phillips told me, 'because they would think, Okay, this person let me know this wasn't going to be a thing. And then my heart let it be a thing.' The young-love recession, in other words, might reflect a real shift in how comfortable Americans are, on the whole, with emotional intimacy. Generational researchers have described Gen Z as a cohort particularly concerned with security, averse to risk, and slow to trust—so it makes sense that a lot of teens today might be hesitant to throw themselves into a relationship, or even just to admit they care whether their dalliance will continue next week. In a 2023 Hinge survey of Gen Z daters, 90 percent of participants said they wanted to find love—but 56 percent said that fear of rejection had kept them from pursuing a potential relationship, and 57 percent said they'd refrained from confessing their feelings about someone because they worried it would 'be a turn-off.' Those reservations can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, Phillips said, in which young people keep a romantic prospect at arm's length—and then, when they feel confused or get hurt anyway, they become even more wary of relationships. 'Why would I want to go any further in this world,' she said many wonder, 'when I had this flirtation that seemed to be very close and very promising and went nowhere?' [Read: The people who quit dating] I heard something similar from Daniel A. Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life: People still badly want connection, but among Gen Z, 'there's a real sense of anxiety about how to go about it.' That social nervousness affects platonic and romantic relationships alike; he's found, in fact, that people who spend more time with friends are also more likely to have dated regularly during their teen years. 'Trying to forge romantic connections and be vulnerable—it's really difficult,' he said, 'when you're constantly worried about being hurt or being taken advantage of.' Some of that self-protective instinct has probably trickled down from older generations, especially when it comes to dynamics in heterosexual relationships. As Cox has found while reporting a forthcoming book on the gender divide, men and women seem to be growing ever further apart. Young men are shifting rightward, and many are feeling misunderstood. Women, meanwhile, have become more suspicious of men. Fear of sexual assault has increased significantly in recent years, and so has concern about dating-app safety. If so many grown women are feeling vigilant, imagine how girls and younger women feel: at a vulnerable age, still learning about the world and already surrounded by the message—and, in plenty of cases, the reality—that boys and men are dangerous. Imagine, too, how some boys and young men feel: just figuring out who they are and already getting the message that they're not trusted. Perhaps it's not surprising that people are trying to control their romantic feelings, whether by focusing on friendships or by keeping situationships allegedly emotion-free. Even under conditions of a gender cold war, many girls might get on fine—but boys could suffer more. When psychologists told me that young people can flourish in the absence of romance, that was assuming they have close friends to rely on and to teach them social graces (including one as simple as making conversation). Boys and young men, who aren't as likely to have such tight bonds, tend to learn those skills from women. Maybe they have a sister or a mother or female friends who can help with that—but if not, Cox told me, being single might put them at a real emotional and developmental disadvantage. That might make them less prepared to date. [Read: The golden age of dating doesn't exist] A rise in skepticism toward romance is a loss, not just for boys but for society as a whole. Romantic love isn't better or more important than platonic love, but it's different—and telling yourself you have no need for it doesn't necessarily make it true. Phillips talked to her students about an excerpt of Plato's Symposium, in which—at the beginning of time—Zeus splits each human in two in order to foil their plan to overthrow the gods. From then on, everyone wanders around yearning for their other half. Falling in love, according to the story, is when you finally find it. Alas: Her students hated the story. They didn't like the idea of only one other person being meant for each of us, or the suggestion that they'd be incomplete without such a reunion. They told her they wanted to be whole all by themselves—not dependent on a soulmate. They had a point. And yet, Phillips still felt there was something sad about their reaction. They didn't seem to understand that 'relationships are an interpersonal exchange,' she said: that 'they involve both feeling expanded by someone else and then some genuine sacrifices.' You are at least a little dependent on someone in a relationship; that's what the symbiosis of love requires. It's scary—but it can be interesting, and beautiful when it's good, and sometimes formative even when it doesn't stay good. You might want to find out for yourself. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
10-03-2025
- Atlantic
What Happens When Teens Don't Date
Lisa A. Phillips has found herself in a strange position as of late: trying to convince her students that romantic love is worthwhile. They don't believe in overly idealizing partnership or in the clichés fed to them in rom-coms; some have declared that love is a concept created by the media. Phillips, a journalist who teaches a SUNY New Paltz course called 'Love and Heartbreak,' responds that of course relationships aren't all perfect passion, and we should question the tropes we're surrounded by. But also: Those tropes began somewhere. Across cultures, people describe the experience of falling for someone in quite similar ways, 'whether they grew up with a Disney-movie IV in their vein,' she told me, or 'in a remote area with no media whatsoever.' The sensation is big, she tells her students; it's overwhelming; it can feel utterly transcendent. They're skeptical. Maybe if Phillips had been teaching this class a decade ago, her students would already have learned some of this firsthand. Today, though, that's less likely: Research indicates that the number of teens experiencing romantic relationships has dropped. In a 2023 poll from the Survey Center on American Life, 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they'd been in a romantic relationship at any point in their teen years, compared with 76 percent of Gen Xers and 78 percent of Baby Boomers. And the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of about 3,000 Americans, found in 2021 that 54 percent of participants ages 18 to 34 reported not having a 'steady' partner; in 2004, only 33 percent said the same. As I've written, a whole lot of American adults are withdrawing from romance—not just young people. But the trend seems to be especially pronounced for Gen Z, or people born roughly between 1997 and 2012. Of course, you can grow into a perfectly mature and healthy adult without ever having had a romantic relationship; some research even suggests you might be better off that way. In the aggregate, though, this shift could be concerning: a sign, researchers told me, of a generation struggling with vulnerability. A first love, for so many, has been a milestone on the path to adulthood—a challenging, thrilling, world-expanding experience that can help people understand who they are and whom they're looking for. What's lost if that rite of passage disappears? You can experience so much without being in a defined relationship. You can flirt; you can kiss; you can dance. You can have a crush so big it takes up all the space in your brain; you can care about someone deeply; you can get hurt—badly. Plenty of young people, then, could be having transformative romantic encounters and still reporting that they've never been in a relationship. It could be the label, not the emotional reality, that's changing, Thao Ha, a developmental psychologist at Arizona State University, told me. She's found that lots of high schoolers report having 'dated' before—a looser term that might better suit the realities of adolescent courtship today. (In a YouGov poll from last year, about 50 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they'd been in a 'situationship,' or undefined relationship.) Some of that activity might not entail exclusivity or regularity, or any promise of long-term commitment. But it could still help young people with what researchers told me are some core rewards of early romantic exploration: gaining autonomy from parents, developing a sense of identity, what Phillips called an 'existential' benefit—the 'sometimes painful, sometimes amazing trial-and-error process of seeking closeness.' Becoming a well-rounded grown-up, in fact, doesn't really require romantic experience of any sort. Adolescence and emerging adulthood are times of uncertainty; what young people need most, Amy Rauer, a human-development professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me, is often just a cheerleader: a peer, a grandparent, a coach, or someone else making them feel valued, which can set them up to feel secure in future relationships. Teens can also learn social skills—how to make small talk, resolve arguments, empathize across differences—in all kinds of platonic relationships. Some research, Phillips pointed out, actually suggests that young people might benefit from a lack of romantic activity. One study found that, compared with their dating peers, students who dated very infrequently or not at all over a seven-year period were seen by their teachers as having better leadership and social skills, and reported fewer symptoms of depression. After all, young love isn't always positive. It can be an emotional whirlwind; it can distract from schoolwork, or from friends, or from other interests. In the worst cases, it can be abusive. (Adolescent girls experience intimate-partner violence at particularly high rates.) And when it ends, teens—with little perspective and few learned coping mechanisms—can be absolutely wrecked. Despite how common a lack of relationship experience is now—especially but not only for teens—a lot of people still feel embarrassed by it. TikTok is filled with influencers declaring that they're 26 or 30 or 40 and have never been in a relationship, sharing how insecure that's made them feel; commenters stream in, by the hundreds of thousands, to divulge their own feelings of shame. Many of my friends, who are entering their 30s, constantly stress about this: They fear they won't know how to be a good partner if the opportunity arises. But all of a person's interactions, not just romantic ones, can shape how they'll show up in a relationship. One 2019 study, which followed 165 subjects ages 13 to 30, found that strong friendships in adolescence predicted romantic-life satisfaction in adulthood; early romantic experience, meanwhile, wasn't related to future satisfaction at all. (Teens commonly learn how to fight and make up with friends, Phillips told me, but they might be less likely to stick it out with a lover long enough for conflict resolution.) Overall, when it comes to who you are in a relationship, what matters most is simply who you are, period. And the traits that make you you are likely to remain fairly stable throughout your life. A 2022 study found, for instance, that subjects who were single during adolescence—but had their first relationship by age 26—reported no lower self-esteem than those who'd started dating earlier. Tita Gonzalez Avilés, a personality psychologist at Germany's Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz who has led some of this research, told me that although people often think their relationships will change them, the influence typically happens the other way around: Who you are shapes what kind of relationship you'll have. Research has even shown that people's satisfaction in a relationship tends to remain pretty consistent across their various partners. Given all that, you might think it a good thing that Gen Z has less going on in the romance department. Perhaps young people are busy with other pursuits, focusing on friendship and school and hobbies; maybe they no longer want to settle for a mediocre partner. The transition to adulthood tends to take longer today, pushing back lots of different milestones—steps such as financial independence, buying a home, and, notably, getting married—sometimes indefinitely. In that sense, young people have an eminently rational reason to hold off on seeking partnership: The deadline is extended. But researchers have pointed to other, more worrisome reasons for the romance dip. Phillips has heard a lot about situationships—and scenarios that aren't even well-defined enough to use that label. For her new book, First Love, she interviewed more than 100 young people and parents, and found, as Ha did, that early romance today tends to reside in a gray area. 'You have a long period of we're talking,' Phillips told me. 'You're kind of dancing around the idea of a sexual-romantic connection, maybe even having some of those experiences, but not really talking about what it is.' For some, the lack of strict relationship expectations can be freeing. But many, Phillips told me, find the ambiguity distressing, because they don't know what they have the right to feel—or the right to ask for. Some recounted how they ended up feeling invested in a fling—and described it not only as bad news, but as a personal failure: They said that they 'got caught' (as if red-handed), 'caught feelings' (like an illness), or succumbed to 'dumb-bitch hour' (when late at night, defenses down, they texted a crush and—God forbid—let themselves feel close to someone). 'Young people would be hard on themselves,' Phillips told me, 'because they would think, Okay, this person let me know this wasn't going to be a thing. And then my heart let it be a thing.' The young-love recession, in other words, might reflect a real shift in how comfortable Americans are, on the whole, with emotional intimacy. Generational researchers have described Gen Z as a cohort particularly concerned with security, averse to risk, and slow to trust —so it makes sense that a lot of teens today might be hesitant to throw themselves into a relationship, or even just to admit they care whether their dalliance will continue next week. In a 2023 Hinge survey of Gen Z daters, 90 percent of participants said they wanted to find love—but 56 percent said that fear of rejection had kept them from pursuing a potential relationship, and 57 percent said they'd refrained from confessing their feelings about someone because they worried it would 'be a turn-off.' Those reservations can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, Phillips said, in which young people keep a romantic prospect at arm's length—and then, when they feel confused or get hurt anyway, they become even more wary of relationships. 'Why would I want to go any further in this world,' she said many wonder, 'when I had this flirtation that seemed to be very close and very promising and went nowhere?' Read: The people who quit dating I heard something similar from Daniel A. Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life: People still badly want connection, but among Gen Z, 'there's a real sense of anxiety about how to go about it.' That social nervousness affects platonic and romantic relationships alike; he's found, in fact, that people who spend more time with friends are also more likely to have dated regularly during their teen years. 'Trying to forge romantic connections and be vulnerable—it's really difficult,' he said, 'when you're constantly worried about being hurt or being taken advantage of.' Some of that self-protective instinct has probably trickled down from older generations, especially when it comes to dynamics in heterosexual relationships. As Cox has found while reporting a forthcoming book on the gender divide, men and women seem to be growing ever further apart. Young men are shifting rightward, and many are feeling misunderstood. Women, meanwhile, have become more suspicious of men. Fear of sexual assault has increased significantly in recent years, and so has concern about dating-app safety. If so many grown women are feeling vigilant, imagine how girls and younger women feel: at a vulnerable age, still learning about the world and already surrounded by the message—and, in plenty of cases, the reality—that boys and men are dangerous. Imagine, too, how some boys and young men feel: just figuring out who they are and already getting the message that they're not trusted. Perhaps it's not surprising that people are trying to control their romantic feelings, whether by focusing on friendships or by keeping situationships allegedly emotion-free. Even under conditions of a gender cold war, many girls might get on fine—but boys could suffer more. When psychologists told me that young people can flourish in the absence of romance, that was assuming they have close friends to rely on and to teach them social graces (including one as simple as making conversation). Boys and young men, who aren't as likely to have such tight bonds, tend to learn those skills from women. Maybe they have a sister or a mother or female friends who can help with that—but if not, Cox told me, being single might put them at a real emotional and developmental disadvantage. That might make them less prepared to date. Read: The golden age of dating doesn't exist A rise in skepticism toward romance is a loss, not just for boys but for society as a whole. Romantic love isn't better or more important than platonic love, but it's different —and telling yourself you have no need for it doesn't necessarily make it true. Phillips talked to her students about an excerpt of Plato's Symposium, in which—at the beginning of time—Zeus splits each human in two in order to foil their plan to overthrow the gods. From then on, everyone wanders around yearning for their other half. Falling in love, according to the story, is when you finally find it. Alas: Her students hated the story. They didn't like the idea of only one other person being meant for each of us, or the suggestion that they'd be incomplete without such a reunion. They told her they wanted to be whole all by themselves—not dependent on a soulmate. They had a point. And yet, Phillips still felt there was something sad about their reaction. They didn't seem to understand that 'relationships are an interpersonal exchange,' she said: that 'they involve both feeling expanded by someone else and then some genuine sacrifices.' You are at least a little dependent on someone in a relationship; that's what the symbiosis of love requires. It's scary—but it can be interesting, and beautiful when it's good, and sometimes formative even when it doesn't stay good. You might want to find out for yourself.
Boston Globe
14-02-2025
- Boston Globe
From crush to breakup: A parent's guide to teen relationships
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up I wish someone had told me that in 1998. Luckily, today's parents have Lisa A. Phillips, whose new ' Advertisement In honor of Valentine's Day, we talked about how parents can help their kids navigate first relationships with empathy and a little perspective. Sign up for Parenting Unfiltered. Globe staff #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ Subscribe * indicates required E-mail * Boundaries matter; social media ups the ante. Remember when you could set a cryptic AOL Instant Messenger away message and peace out? Social media means that today's kids are accessible all the time. Kids share charged information — and photos — in ways we never did. Even if a relationship happens largely online, it still warrants all the necessary cautions and boundaries, if not more. 'Online relationships can become very controlling. It's: 'Why did it take so long for you to get back to me?' A kid with a crush might text: 'I like you; do you like me?' If they don't get the answer they want: 'How about now?'' Phillips says. Advertisement Just because the behavior is online doesn't mean that kids should write it off. Plus, as more young people cope with mental health issues, Phillips sees more teenagers relying on partners — just kids themselves — for support. Parents should realize that first relationships are naturally intense, but there are ways to measure whether they're healthy. 'Acknowledging this baseline intensity is important, even though it's a hard thing for parents to deal with. They're basically looking at their kid's first attempt to replace their parent as their primary adapting figure, and that's pretty challenging stuff,' she says. If you worry that your child is trapped in a damaging relationship, ask: ''Does this person make you feel like a larger person — literally, an expanded person?' This touches on the self-expansion model of close relationships: In close relationships, we expand our resources and perspective. Or, 'Does this person make you feel smaller and like less of yourself?' This is a question that parents can engage with their children on, and it's also something parents can observe,' Phillips says. If your child experiences acute strife over a relationship — or its ending — take it seriously. Don't be afraid to bring it up out of short-term awkwardness or fear, because the alternative could be worse. "First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak" is being published Tuesdsay. 'This is a reality of relationships: They can be a factor in a mental health crisis and even suicidal thinking or even, horribly enough, the decision to die by suicide. We want to be able to take these things seriously,' she says. Advertisement Intense relationships aren't always damaging ones. A connection that might seem a bit overzealous to you might be an important developmental phase for your child. Unless your kid displays signs of depression, isolates from friends, or demonstrates other red flags, a level of fixation and bedazzlement is normal, and sometimes even beneficial. In her book, Phillips talks about a rural teenager, Elise, who chose her urban college based on where her boyfriend went to school. Her parents were aghast: Why was their daughter reshaping her life based on a high school relationship? Even though the relationship ultimately ended, moving to a larger city was healthy and opened up more possibilities; now an adult, Elise has no regrets. 'This question of 'too serious' or 'too intense' has a lot of nuance to it, and I think that it's a journey,' Phillips says. If you think that your kid is over-invested in the relationship — or putting all their 'eggs in one basket,' as my Nana used to say — remember that parents have the perspective of years, and we can help our kids take the long view by asking nonjudgmental questions. 'We have an advantage as parents because we see things retrospectively, while young people are imagining what their future is going to be. We can help them think about the story of their life as they'll tell it later: 'How am I going to explain this to myself later?'' she says. 'You're not telling them to break up: You're saying that your main purpose in life is to focus on what you're becoming. If another person holds too much sway, it may be a difficult thing to reckon with later, when you realize what you gave up.' Advertisement Breaking up is universally horrible; don't try to sugar coat it for your child. Still makes me cringe: My first breakup happened via email — then a novel way to communicate — on Valentine's Day after a three-year relationship that spanned high school into college. I remember logging into my Hotmail account from a massive Apple II GS and staring at the message with disbelief that melted into devastation. Much drama ensued, and I behaved like such a lunatic that I probably would've broken up with me, too. I thought I'd be miserable forever (I wasn't). I thought I'd never meet anyone else (I've been married for 19 years). My life was ruined. My parents were perplexed and, I have to admit, not very sympathetic. Why on Earth was someone with 'a lot going for her' (thanks again, Nana) making a fool of herself over a high school boyfriend? The more they told me to get over it and how great I was, the more pathetic and misunderstood I felt. Instead, 'The first step is always validation,' Phillips says. 'We tend to want to shrink our children's pain, because we know how painful it is. We want to bandage the skinned knee. But there's no way around this. Validate that this hurts, because love is so important to our world, and losing it is so important and so painful,' she says. Breakups can be especially tough on boys, Phillips says; don't assume that if your son is quiet, he doesn't care. Check in. 'Relationships are one place boys are 'allowed' to be vulnerable, and losing that can be a really big deal. They don't have the kind of natural networks of support that are more common in girl culture,' she says. Advertisement To help your lovelorn child, 'Think about what I call brain breaks: 'Let's go see a movie. Let's go for a hike,' if your child would do that with you. Or: 'I'm going to give you some money to go out with friends' — so they're not focusing on the relationship and just getting a break,' she says. Eventually, help your child make meaning from the heartbreak. Pick your spots, but when the time feels right, guide your kid toward framing the relationship as a lesson. 'It's helpful for parents to be aware that research shows that we recover from breakups better when we make meaning out of them and see them as growth experiences, which is a choice that you can help your child to make,' Phillips says. Ask: What do you think happened here? What type of person might you want to look for in the future? What did you learn about yourself? 'It's about assessing the gains and the losses of the situation, because young people [can] stay in this place of: 'I don't know why that happened; I must be a terrible person,'' she says. 'They don't have any kind of story around it — a story that shows that you can redeem the difficulty of the breakup by turning it to a story of personal growth.' Or, you know, into a parenting column. Kara Baskin can be reached at
