Parenting a Teenager When You Don't Know What to Do: When Worry Makes You Want to Step In
Updated: Sep 18
Parenting a teenager can bring a different kind of uncertainty.
A child who once told you what was going on may begin to say less. You ask because you are worried, only to hear:
“Nothing.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m fine.”
And naturally, questions begin to fill the space they have left.
Has something happened?
Are they really all right?
When you are worried about your child, you want to understand why. And if there is something you can do, you want to help.
Yet sometimes, the more you say, the more it seems as though your child is moving away from you.
Many parents find themselves unsure about parenting a teenager:
What should I say?
How much should I ask?
When should I step in, and when should I leave things alone?
I found myself facing many of these questions when my son went through a period when he suddenly became unable to go to school.
Looking back at the conversations we had during that time, I have been thinking about what happens when our wish to help becomes entangled with our own worry — and what it can really mean to “give a child space”.
When You Want to Know Why, but All You Hear Is “I Don’t Know”
My son suddenly became unable to go to school.
Until then, I had not realised that he was struggling to the point where attending school had become so difficult.
At first, I simply could not understand what was happening.
Had something happened at school?
Was there a problem with his friends?
Could my divorce from his father have affected him?Had I somehow failed as a mother?
When there is no clear explanation, it is easy for the mind to search everywhere for one.
The more I thought about it, the more anxious I became.
I spent hours talking with my son.
What had happened?What was difficult?
Why couldn’t he go to school?
I think I simply wanted to find a reason.
I was also speaking to his school about how he was doing.
Yet I still could not understand what had made things so difficult for him that he could no longer attend.
If I knew why, perhaps I would know what to do.Perhaps I could find some way to help him.
But most of the time, his answers were:
“I don’t know.”
“Nothing.”
“It’s OK.”
I wanted to understand.He said he didn’t know.
As a parent, that can make you want to ask even more.
“There must be something.”
“Something must have happened if you can’t go to school.”
But the more I questioned him in this way, the less he talked.
Eventually, I stopped trying to get an answer out of him.
That was not easy.
Sitting with the uncertainty of not knowing what was happening made me very anxious.
Still, I tried to hold back the questions and began instead with ordinary, everyday conversation.
Helping a Teenager Find Words, Rather Than Asking for an Answer
Over time, those ordinary conversations seemed to make it easier for my son to talk a little more.
Even then, when I asked how he felt about something, he would sometimes say:
“I don’t know.”
So I began offering a few possibilities.
“Were you sad?”
“Were you angry?”
“Or did you feel as though it was your fault?”
If one of those seemed close to what he was feeling, we could begin there and gradually explore it further.
Looking back, I was no longer trying to get the “right” answer from my son. I was trying to help him find words for feelings he might not yet have understood himself.
I also had to learn not to expect an immediate answer when he said, “I don’t know.”
What mattered to me was not understanding every feeling he had, but maintaining a relationship in which he could talk when he was ready.
The Hardest Part for Me Was Listening Without Correcting Him
Once my son began talking more, it did not suddenly become easy.
For me, one of the hardest things was listening without immediately contradicting what he was saying.
I would hear him and find myself wanting to respond:
“But that’s not really how it is, is it?”
“You don’t have to think about it that way.”
“Why don’t you just do this instead?”
I have, of course, lived longer than my son and have more life experience.
And when your child is struggling, you naturally want them to find their way out of that pain as quickly as possible.
So I wanted to change the way he was thinking.
I wanted to show him how to solve the problem.
Before he stopped going to school, I had been trying to treat him increasingly as a young adult.
He was getting physically bigger, the way he spoke was becoming more grown-up, and he did not like being treated as a child.
So I tried to talk to him in the way I might talk to an adult.
But there were moments when I found myself thinking:
“Why would you think like that?”
“How can you not understand something like that?”
I would feel myself becoming irritated.
You’re old enough to understand this.
Why can’t you just look at it this way?
Looking back, I think that because my son seemed more grown-up, I had quietly begun to assume that there were certain things he “should” already understand.
But when he stopped going to school and we spent so many hours talking, I began to see a part of him I had not fully recognised before.
He wanted to think for himself.He wanted to make his own decisions.He did not want to be treated like a child.
And at the same time, there were things happening inside him that he could not yet easily put into words.
Sometimes, when I asked “Why?”, he genuinely did not know why.
And something that seemed straightforward to me was not necessarily straightforward to him.
Gradually, I began to realise that what I thought he should do and what he was experiencing were two different things.
So when I wanted to say, “That’s not right”, I tried not to give him my view immediately.
Instead, I tried to begin with:
“I see.”
“So that’s how it felt to you.”
I certainly did not manage this every time.
In fact, I think this was probably the hardest part for me.
By saying “I see”, I was not saying that his interpretation was objectively right.
It meant recognising first:
This is how it feels to him.
Even when I saw the situation differently, I could begin by taking in his experience. If needed, we could think about it together afterwards.
In the past, when my son told me about a problem, I often wanted to respond immediately with, “Well, why don’t you...?”
Over time, I began to realise that he was not necessarily looking to me for an answer.
He was trying to think for himself and find an answer that made sense to him.
Perhaps what I could offer was not an immediate solution, but someone beside him who would listen — and someone he could comfortably ask for an opinion when he wanted one.
Parenting a Teenager When Worry Makes You Want to Fix Things
Even with this understanding, when your child is struggling, it is very difficult not to want to do something.
That was certainly true for me.
My son could not go to school.I did not know what was troubling him.I did not know what would happen next.
Waiting without knowing was deeply uncomfortable.
Will he be able to go back to school?
What if this affects his future?
The further ahead I thought, the stronger the feeling became that I had to do something.
Looking back, however, I can see that this was not only about wanting to help my son.
My own anxiety was there too.
If I could know that he was going to be all right, I could feel safer as well.
Perhaps I could also find some relief from the fear that I had somehow got something wrong as a parent.
For me, this meant sometimes having to ask myself, before saying something to him:
Does he actually need to hear this from me right now?
Or am I saying it because I need to feel less anxious?
Giving Space Did Not Mean Doing Nothing
I am still not particularly good at simply standing back.
When there is a problem, I want to find a solution.
When someone I love is struggling, I want to do something to help.
Part of me still sees that as part of being a parent.
But through my conversations with my son, I realised that not rushing in with an answer could also be part of caring for him.
Giving a teenager space does not mean leaving everything to them.
There are times when a parent needs to speak to a school or seek professional support.
When a child’s health or safety is involved, adults still have a responsibility to respond.
At the same time, there are parts of a young person’s experience that a parent cannot work out on their behalf: what they feel, what they think, and the words they eventually find for what is happening inside them.
How far do I step in, and when do I wait?
I am still working out where that boundary lies.
There Is No Single Right Way to Parent a Teenager
When children are small, parents make many of the decisions.
We keep them away from danger.We help when they are struggling.We explain what they do not yet understand.
But adolescence changes the relationship.
Gradually, some of the things that once belonged to the parent begin to be handed back to the young person.
As our children change, we cannot always relate to them in exactly the same way we did before.
The relationship itself has to change with them.
There is something I have come to understand through raising my son.
Parents have many things to teach their children, but we also learn a great deal through our relationships with them.
I sometimes look back and think that I could have said something differently or responded in another way.
Through those moments of uncertainty and reflection, I am still learning as I raise my son — both as a parent and as a person.
Parenting a teenager can leave us unsure not only about how to respond, but also about what our child is really feeling.
There have been times when I thought I was listening to my son, only to realise something much later that I had not understood at the time.
🌿 When Worry About Your Child Begins to Take Up All the Space
When you are worried about your child, you may find yourself thinking:
Have I handled this badly?
Should I be doing more?
Is it really all right to stand back and wait?
Doing something can feel worrying.
Doing nothing can feel worrying too.
And when you spend so much time thinking about your child, their difficulties and your own anxiety can easily become tangled together.
Rather than immediately searching for the “right” way to respond, it may sometimes help to ask yourself:
What am I so worried about right now?
What am I afraid might happen?
Counselling is not about being told the correct way to parent your child.
It can offer space to talk about the uncertainty, frustration, guilt or worry that has arisen while trying to support your child, even when those feelings are still difficult to make sense of.
If you find yourself thinking, “Perhaps I would like to talk about my own feelings too,” Locus of Life can be a quiet space to do so.
[🔽 Book your free 30-minute online session here]
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