Continuing the topic from last week..about peer orientation and how being with their friends 24/7 affects how their brains 🧠 work and reacts to everyday stress. Listen more as to how peer orientation not only affects your daughter, it also affects how you feel about yourself.

I’m going to introduce you to the signs and the symptoms that your teen daughter is orientating towards her friends rather than you, and how it moves our girls out of right relationship with you and how being with their friends 24/7 increases their anxiety.

Listen to the full episode here or if you prefer to read, carry on going to the exciting news at the end..

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Insight 1: Peer orientation is at play when your teen daughter comes in from school, gets changed, legs it and goes out with her friends. coming back at nighttime, possibly having a bit of dinner, going to bed and getting up again in the morning and doing the same thing. She doesn’t want to be on her own because she is anxious.

This is one of the key ways of understanding what’s going on with our teen daughters, by understanding about this whole friendship issue that is pushed on us by education, by society, by culture, that we don’t need our Mums when we get to a certain age and actually what we do need are our friends, our Mums can’t help us but our friends can 24/7.

As I said in last week’s episode our prefrontal cortex and I know I keep going on about it, is not fully online till our daughters are in their mid 20s so no wonder risk taking, consequences, understanding, time management, responsibility, knowing what’s going on for other people - none of that is online till their mid 20s.

So an example of this is my teen daughter tonight, when she and hubbie were going to go out to do something that she wanted to do and he was down here waiting for her. They were due to go out of the door at quarter past as it’s only 10 minutes up to the hall in the village, the meeting started at half past. She was down at 20 past, she was still faffing around with her shoes and they got out at about 22 minutes past. Yeh ok they can walk fast, they can get up there but time management out the window, tidying up out the window. Their brains are full of so much stuff right now, their brains are full of work, their brains are full of ‘can I do this?’ or on my daughter’s part because of the chronic fatigue ‘have I got the energy to do this?’, ‘can I manage this?’, ‘what do I need?’, ‘what don’t I need?’ blah di blah.

They also have the other pressures of their developmental stages, also what’s going on in their brain, society pressures, worries going round in their heads, ‘what am I going to do in my future?’, ‘what’s going to happen tomorrow?’, ‘what’s going to happen here?’, ‘how am I going to manage that?’, their period, ‘how am I going to cope with the bleeding?’, ‘am I ok with my emotions?’, ’I’m not feeling hungry’, ‘oh my god, what’s happening there?’, ‘oh my god I can’t get to sleep’.

Can you understand it, it just keeps building and building and building so if they’re speaking to their friends looking for all the answers to all these questions, all those dilemmas. Their friends don’t know the answers either and aren’t going to cope, so then their friends are going to get anxious and your daughter’s anxiety is going to increase, so it’s like just full on.

Insight 2: If you’re not in your right relationship with your teen daughter, so the fact that you are the alpha Mum; you are going to struggle. Remember you are the adult at the end of the day because your daughter is still a teenager, she is still a child until that pre frontal cortex comes online, and at the end of the day you gave birth to her. You are the Mother, she is the daughter and if she is peer orientated, then it’s going to affect all of your role as her Mum.

It is going to affect how you feel about yourself, it’s going to affect how you interact with you daughter, it’s going to affect how much time you spent together. You start to see signs that she doesn’t want to hang out with you as much as you did in the past. Some of the signs are

• that resistance from her that feels like rejection

• you feeling that something’s not quite right

• she’s not checking in with you

• you can’t remember the last time you had fun and were connected to one another where you felt relaxed and at ease

• you feel like you’re walking on eggshells which takes up all your time and energy and it’s heartbreaking

• you feel like you have lost her

For your daughter her signs are:

• increasing anxiety

• obsession or focus on her friends 24/7

• not coming to you with anything that’s going on for her

Insight 3: We are creatures of attachment, especially as girls and we need that connection with our daughters to feel that love. She needs that connection with you to feel that love. If she is getting all of her connections with her friends, when she comes home she is totally knackered and then she can’t connect with you because she is overwhelmed, because something has gone on in the group that you’re not going to know about and that she feels she can’t bring it to you because she hasn’t spent enough time with you, therefore she then hides in her room and when she comes out of her room, she goes rarrr at you. It becomes a vicious circle that she’ll get stuck in time and time again. It also increases that nervousness, that nervous and anxious energy, that wanting to be with her friends all the time, or how many friends does she have on snapchat or fb or insta and when that phone pins, she should respond to it straight away, rather being with you.

Being with her friends is never going to provide her with the security she needs to grow through the teen years, and yeh to thrive. Those friends are likely to be peer orientated and are possibly saying things like ’parents just get in the way’ ‘you just need to get around them, ‘they’re taking away all the fun’ and ‘who needs them?’, ‘that’s what parents do’. When your daughter has a healthy relationship with you, then you have a nourishing relationship in place and this is where healthy guidance and health dependence go hand in hand as your teen daughter grows throughout the teenage years.

Where we see the impact of peer orientation is through the dangerous behaviours such as bullying, teen suicide, self harm, suicide. You can see the way that these kids are relying on feedback from their friends to the point where they take their own life as they’re not getting approval in the way they ‘need’ from their friends.

That level of approval they are craving comes from a healthy relationship with their Mums and this is why our teen girls need to be orientated towards us.

It is totally natural. It’s just culture telling us that it’s not natural.

I want you to know that by reading this blog, this is your first step to getting your teen daughter back again. The second step is to make space for yourself each and every day because if your teen daughter can see that you are doing something for yourself, then that will mirror back onto her so she will start making changes into her life. The third step is to come and join me in my brand NEW community membership that starts in January.

There will be twice monthly calls; one will be me mentoring you with whatever is going on for your teen daughter and the other is a space where we talk about a topic that I think is really important for us as Mums of teen girls. The space is about building a community, a connection with other mums knowing you’re not alone, knowing you’re not isolated, knowing you’re not the only one going through this shite.

There is a different way from society expectations of peer orientation, knowing that you can love your teenage daughter, you can spend time together, you can get that trust and respect without that normal traditional parenting of coercion, punishment, grounding, and being downright nasty to your teenage daughter.

Let’s build a community of like minded Mums together

So if you are interested and you want to find out more, sign up for the waitlist below and I will be sending out information shortly. If you want to talk to me, book in a connection call via my website which is www.positivetouch.net

I’m on insta at teen.whisperer.nature

I’m also opening a slot in my diary for a Teen Whisperer 90mins Power Call where you can tell me what’s happening for your teenage daughter so click the link

If you would love to reconnect with your teen daughter and have the relationship you’ve always dreamt of, check out my programmes:

Teen Whisperer Community Space

The Ripple Effect Joint Programme with your Teen Daughter

Teen Whisperer Individual Mentoring

Teen Whisperer 90mins Power Call

Feel free to get in touch or book in a call to talk more.

I look forward to connecting with you and working with you, take care Rachel x

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