Written by Claire Burgess, Family Consultant. The blog which was bravely written by our 13 year old teenage friend (who we will call Jemma), is a really powerful read and she has been very honest about the issues she is facing in her teenage years. Parenting teenagers is always talked about in quite negative terms with comments such as “wait until they are teenagers”, “typical teenager, “I don’t envy you with teenagers!” etc. Teenagers do tend to have a bad reputation, but this is actually not all that different to the way people view the toddler stage and interestingly enough there are a lot of similarities between the two developmental stages. The brain is going through huge changes at both these points and so this is when we typically see more challenging behaviour and high emotions.
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