How Do I Deal With My 14-Year-Old Daughter?

A few basics a parent may need to develop to deal with 14-year-old girls are

• Stop raising your voice, and start listening
  • Especially when tempers flare and you get upset. If you fly off the handle, you erode the connection with your child. If you listen and try to see things from your child's point of view, you create a bridge of understanding that will last the rest of your life.
  • To do this, you need to regulate your own emotions. Kids lose respect for parents who indulge in their own tantrums.
• Foster emotional intelligence
  • Kids with high emotional quotients make better choices because they aren't driven by the need to prove themselves to their peers or their emotions that they can't manage.
  • To raise an emotionally intelligent child, start by offering emotional safety, comfort, and empathy.
  • Teach the kids to express their needs and feelings without attacking others.
  • Finally, allow her expression of all emotions, even when you limit behavior.
• Stop punishing
  • You don’t always need to punish your child to teach her a lesson.
  • Just set whatever limits are necessary with empathy (which means acknowledging your child's perspective).
  • Punishment can erode the parent-child relationship, so your daughter loses the desire to cooperate and follow your lead. It also makes her more likely to lie to you.
• Prioritize the relationship
  • Kids can't articulate it, but they want to know that you love them, believe in them, and find such value in them that caring for them makes you happy.
  • When constantly giving them the message that other things (phones, work, their siblings) are more important, they don't develop the unshakable inner happiness that allows them to make good choices in life.
  • When kids feel disconnected, they act out. So, strengthening and sweetening your interactions with your daughter develops cooperation, as well as a better relationship.
  • The most important thing you could do to help your daughter thrive is simply making her comfortable by accepting her flaws and letting her know in the way she understands it.

Fourteen-year-olds struggle in developing a sense of who they are. They begin to realize that they play different roles with different people, such as daughter, friend, teammate, student, and worker. Some may have questions about their sexuality. 

Young teens may be able to think more like adults, but they still do not have the life experience that is needed to act like adults. As a result, their behavior may be out of step with their thinking. 

For example, your child may participate eagerly in a walk to raise money to save the environment but litter the route she walks with soda cans. She may spend an evening on the phone or exchanging e-mails with a friend talking about how they dislike a classmate because she gossips. 

It takes time for young teens and their parents to adjust to all these changes. However, the changes are also exciting. They allow a young teen to see what she can be like in the future and develop plans for becoming that person.