At the moment we are in an (almost) enviable position where we have one child through the hell that is teenage years, and one not quite there, but definitely on the cusp. Most of the parents I talk to and are friends with now have children around our youngest’s age, and, for the majority, it is their eldest or only who share our son’s peer group. I also have friends who have much, much younger children, and who complain about the terrible toddler years. I just smile and nod, knowing that what comes later is much, much tougher.

Our eldest sailed through most of his teenage years. He’s never been an easy child; ADHD and dyslexia ensured lots of tantrums and tears (and that was just us!), but he was & is a joy to be around. I can remember feeling quite smug when other parents of his peers would tell stories of all night drinking sessions, missed curfews, answering back, mystery stains on clothes and so on. Out biggest issue then was the frequent visits to A&E with rugby injuries.

But then came year 11, and we had a very, very tough few months. Various things happened that were beyond our control – exams, family bereavement, peer pressure, hormones – and they all happened at once. I’m not going into details here, but at the time I felt we would never get through it. I couldn’t see how our beautiful boy would find his way back to us. Older parents told us that as long as we could hold on tight through the storm, we would get through, probably stronger than before. They were right. We did, and although there have been inevitable hiccups along the way, we are better than before. It didn’t kill us, but instead made us stronger.

So now we are standing, looking at the teenage storm that is ahead of us once more. Some of our youngest’s peers seem to be in the storm already, others seem quite naive and a way off.  I think we are closer than we might like to think, but I also think it’s going to be a very different teenage storm to last time; not better, not worse, just different.

I now completely believe that we are meant to have the storm. Just like the ‘terrible twos/threes/fours’ are meant to happen as these little people are becoming aware of themselves and their surroundings, so the teenage storm is meant to happen.  I like to think of the teenage brain as a caterpillar turning into a pupa, getting all mushed up, and then emerging at the end as a beautiful butterfly.  They need to push against us, to test boundaries, to see how far they can go and still come back safely. They need to explore new ideas, new music, new ways of living their lives. They also need to explore these new stronger, heavier, hairier bodies and see how to live with them. They are pupating from children to adults. There is now scientific evidence that shows that their brains do go through a form of rewiring as they learn to cope with hormones, feelings and ideas. They have to have the freedom to find out who they are, while still having us as a much hated safety net. We need to say no when we need to say no, but also to tell them that we love them even though they are smelly, grumpy, stroppy individuals. Even if we think that saying ‘I love you’ will be met with a smirk, an expletive or an ‘I hate you’, we still need to say it because they will hear us, and it will filter through.

We also need to be honest, though. With our eldest there were may days when I didn’t particularly like him, and I definitely didn’t like his behaviour, and I told him so. But I also told him that even when I didn’t like him very much, I always loved him completely. When I thought he wouldn’t listen, I wrote notes. When I thought that I would end up losing it with him and bellowing, I also wrote notes. Sometimes he wrote them back, sometimes I found them scrumpled up in the corner of his room.

Parenting is the hardest job in the world, and I think that the more you try and the better you do, the harder it may seem. However, it is the most important job, and the most amazing job. There are so many highs, but there are also lows.

I think that social media and hashtags like #soblessed #happyfamily #altogether and so on make this worse. We see unreal images of perfect children having perfect family time and the we look at the closed bedroom door, and feel that life isn’t available to us. We feel that we are failures because we don’t have the rose tinted, photoshopped social media life of friends or peers. It’s the same with academics. I remember when GCSE results came out and my feed was flooded with congratulation posts, grades and destinations (and it was the same at A-level). I couldn’t compete with that, as the results in our house weren’t that good. So I just posted how proud I was of him, because I was. He had had a hellish year, and we were just beginning to come out of the storm. I didn’t (& still don’t) care about how many GCSEs he got. I just cared about him, where he was, and how he was.

There are some parents I know who are in the storm.  If you read this, and it feels like this is you, whether I know you or not, please get in touch, either on FB or as a comment here. Don’t ever feel ashamed or worried. Most parents will go through what you’re going through right now, and we need to talk about it more instead of hiding behind our social media facades.