What Changes During Adolescence?

Find a therapist to support kids and teens

Adolescence can feel confusing, emotional, and unpredictable.

Parents can help shape teens more through modeling than lectures.

There are ways to strengthen trust, communication, and emotional safety.

Practical tools can help support resilience, reflection, and connection.

If I described someone whose mood had suddenly shifted—someone more irritable, emotionally reactive, inclined to take risks, withdrawn, and harder to communicate with—you might worry something serious was happening.

But what I’ve just described is also a normal part of human development: adolescence.

For many parents, the transition from childhood to adolescence can feel sudden and disorienting. One day, our child seems open and eager to connect. The next, we find ourselves wondering: What happened?

As parents, we may feel confused, rejected, powerless, or sad. And yet adolescence—with all its intensity and unpredictability—is also a necessary and meaningful stage of growth.

Rather than viewing adolescence only as a problem to manage, it can help to see it as a developmental cocoon: messy, active, confusing, and full of transformation. My friend and colleague, Dr. Assaf Oshri of the University of Georgia’s Center for Developmental Science, describes attunement—the ability to accurately sense, understand, and respond to a teen’s emotional state—as one of the most important protective factors in adolescent development and mental health. When we overreact, overcontrol, or move too quickly into judgment, we can unintentionally create distance and rupture.

Our role is not to control every part of adolescence. Our role is to help our teens emerge from it with greater emotional steadiness, psychological flexibility, and a stronger sense of self. In other words, we want to help them move from A—adolescence—to B—balance.

Here are five “B’s” that can help.

Teens learn far more from what we do than from what we say.

They watch how we handle........

© Psychology Today