From crush to breakup: A parent's guide to teen relationships

Boston Globe

14-02-2025

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I wish someone had told me that in 1998. Luckily, today's parents have Lisa A. Phillips, whose new '
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In honor of Valentine's Day, we talked about how parents can help their kids navigate first relationships with empathy and a little perspective.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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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