Latest news with #FirstLove:GuidingTeensThroughRelationshipsandHeartbreak
Boston Globe
14-02-2025
- General
- 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
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
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. Read the original article on Business Insider
