What Changes During Adolescence?

Find a therapist to support kids and teens

Recognizing a teen’s developmental needs helps parents adjust their responses to a teen’s behavior.

Teens are inherently insecure as they mature.

While teens want independence, they need a secure base in parents from which to explore their autonomy.

Teens are on the cusp of adulthood in a moment of accelerated emotional and physical growth. In other words, they can be a "hot mess."

And their behavior can be horrible: they’re now wise enough to be incredible jerks one moment, yet utterly insecure and childish the next.

Of course, they’ll get through it, and so will you, but adolescence doesn’t have to be a time of resentment, hair-pulling, and ongoing conflict.

For nearly 20 years as a therapist, I’ve worked with parents and teens together, and I’ve seen that when parents better understand what’s actually going on emotionally for their teen—and what the teen is developmentally trying to master—parents can find completely new ways to interact and respond to their teen’s troubling behaviors.

Here’s what’s going on inside the teen’s mind, and what parents can do.

They want independence/autonomy

Teens consistently tell me how desperately they want to be independent, to be in charge of themselves and separate from their parents. For many teens, this is also a scary proposition: they know they are being swept down the river of time and will soon be adults, but adulthood often seems too much to handle.

To be independent, teens often feel........

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