I have raised five teens, and for one stretch, all five of them were teenagers at the same time. Five. If you are currently in the thick of it with one, I need you to sit with that number for a moment.
I am surviving. Barely. I have learned a lot and I am better at seeing the patterns, but I am not done yet. What has carried me through more slammed doors, eye rolls, and “you don’t know anything” moments than I can count is a theory I keep coming back to.
Here is how the “Alien Theory” works
I call it the “Alien Theory.” Here’s how it works. At some point between the ages of 13 and 19, your child comes and goes. The kid you have fed, comforted, cheered for, and known better than anyone on earth is still in there. But some days, someone else entirely shows up in their place. Someone who finds your presence embarrassing, challenges every word out of your mouth, and will take life advice from a random person on the internet before they will hear a word from you.
In my house, we have a name for it. We say the aliens have taken over. The alien is not a person, it is a personality, a mood that possesses your kid without warning and drives off with your car keys and your patience.
The unrecognizable version of your teen peaks as they are making their biggest decisions
It is not permanent, but the 17, 18, and 19 year stretch has been the hardest with almost all of mine, and the unrecognizable version tends to peak right around the time they are making their biggest decisions, a genuinely terrifying combination.
I once had one of mine look me dead in the eye and inform me, without a trace of irony, that she knew everything. She was 16, and spectacularly wrong about several things at the time. But that is the deal. They do not know what they do not know, and they are certain they do.
Here’s what makes this maddening, I am a certified nutritionist and trainer, I coached and
judged gymnastics at a high level, and I have lived the exact information my kids have needed at every stage of their athletic development.
My children will take advice from a stranger before they’ll take it from me
It did not matter, my most athletic daughter would take nutrition advice from a stranger online before she would take it from me. The knowledge I had spent decades accumulating was worthless because it came from her mother.
I used to take it personally, pushing harder, explaining more, laying out my credentials, trying to make them see I was right. That strategy has a 100% failure rate, and I am sharing this so you do not waste years on it like I did.
Teens save their worst behavior for the person they are closest to, not because they do not love you, but because they do, because they know your love is not going anywhere. You are the safe place, and being the safe place means you absorb the worst of them while the rest of the world gets the version they are carefully managing.
You are your kids’ safe place
It is not fair, but it is also, in its own painful way, a form of trust. They are not doing it to hurt
you, they are doing it because you are the one person they are certain will still be there
tomorrow. So I stopped fighting it.
I named what was happening instead of taking it personally, reminding myself their brains are literally rewiring, and pulling away from me toward peers is biology doing exactly what it is supposed to do. That knowledge did not make it less exhausting. But it helped.
I learned to plant things I was not allowed to water. My advice was not landing, but that did not mean it disappeared. I would say it once, without a lecture, and let it go. I cannot tell you how many times an older kid has come back to me with something I said at 17 that they swore they never heard. They heard it, just with the volume turned down.
The goal is that they get the information, not that I get credit for giving it
When they would not hear it from me, I found the back door, a coach, a sister, a mentor, a book. My second often hears things best when they come from her oldest sister instead of me, and that is fine, the message still lands. I handed off what mattered without making it about being right, the goal was that they got the information, not that I got credit for giving it.
And I learned to hold the line on what mattered and let the rest go. Conflict is fuel for this season of parenting, and I learned to starve it, and to keep showing up warm and available even to a teenager actively pushing me away. Connection is the whole game, even when they reject you, they need to know the door is open.
The young adult years are not automatically easier, they are just differently hard
Then there are the young adult years, which come with their own version of this. The frontal lobe is not fully developed until around 25, so just when you think you have made it through the worst of it, you find yourself in a new dynamic entirely. The child who once knew everything now knows one very specific thing, that you have a wallet, and you go from being irrelevant to being an ATM. I say this not to discourage you but to prepare you, the young adult years are not automatically easier, they are just differently hard.
But here is what I know from the other side.
My oldest called me recently, 21 now, out in the world doing extraordinary things, and asked me how I knew so much. That question, from the same person who once acted as though my existence was a mild inconvenience, made me smile for a week. They come back. Your kid is still in there, building on what you gave them even when they refused to acknowledge it. You have not lost them.
They are passing through something hard, and so are you. Hang on. They are coming home.
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