For parents feeling overwhelmed during the teenage years, this episode provides a comforting hand and expert advice. Dr. Dobson and counselor Sharon Hirsch delve into the intricacies of adolescent change, from the hormonal shifts to the social pressures that influence teenagers today. Sharon shares her hand-in-hand mothering approach, emphasizing the power of connection over control and offering parents a path to become allies for their children in moments of emotional upheaval.
Hello, everyone. You’re listening to Family Talk, a radio broadcasting ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Dr. James Dobson, and thank you for joining us for this program.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Roger Marsh. You know, for many parents, the teenage years bring unexpected challenges that can leave even the most prepared families feeling overwhelmed. Today’s young people face pressures that previous generations never experienced, from social media bullying to unrealistic body image standards that seem impossible to achieve. When your once happy child suddenly becomes moody, withdrawn, or even hostile… it’s natural to wonder what went wrong. But the truth is, even loving, dedicated parents can find themselves navigating stormy emotional waters with their teenagers. And if you’re feeling lost in the chaos of adolescent drama, you are not alone. On today’s edition of Family Talk, Dr. James Dobson speaks with licensed professional counselor Sharon Hirsch, author of the book, Mom, I Hate My Life. Sharon brings decades of counseling experience along with her own journey through the teenage years with her children to her ministry. She offers practical wisdom for parents who want to stay connected with their kids during these turbulent years. So let’s get into it now with part one of this fascinating conversation on today’s edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk.
SPEAKER 04 :
We’re going to talk today about one of the most difficult circumstances that can come along, one that can create enormous anxiety. And it deals with the adolescent years for some kids much more than others. They vary tremendously. Everything seems to go haywire. Parents whose kids sail through that time may not fully understand the level of fear and depression that loving moms and dads can experience when the child that they brought into the world and love beyond measure suddenly begins to go off the deep end. These parents have no idea how this happened. They certainly didn’t intend it. And many of them have given it their very best shot. And many of them have done well. They’ve been good parents. And it still happens for hormonal reasons and other things, social reasons. And I don’t know that there’s a whole lot in life. that creates greater angst than this one because you care about those kids more than anything on earth. That’s what matters to you. Your job and your home and your car and all the other things that are, you know, kind of accompanying your journey through life don’t mean anything compared to those children. And when they’re not only angry all the time but are threatening to do things that you know best, could affect them for the rest of their life or even shorten their life. It is very, very difficult. And that’s why we’re doing this program today. And fortunately, we have a guest here today who specializes in this kind of relationship difficulty. She’s a licensed counselor, and her name is Sharon Hirsch. We have only met her today. She wrote the book, Mom, I Hate My Life. She’s helped many moms and daughters bridge the chasm between them. She also speaks from experience because she’s the mom first. of a daughter that’s just going off to college and Graham, a son Graham, right? Yes, that’s right. And you have managed to get through the adolescent years pretty well yourself, but you’ve seen it. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?
SPEAKER 01 :
I do, and I think as you spoke, I thought of a lot of moms listening out there who may be like me, really thought they were doing everything right. Yeah. And sometimes it’s shocking and feels like a huge betrayal when children who we’ve poured our hearts into and we’ve loved and we’ve tried to guide and lead in good ways and the ways of God—
SPEAKER 04 :
And you’ve prayed for them.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, yes. And all of a sudden, they’re stomping their feet, slamming their doors, telling us that they hate being in our family, and really considering choices that, as you said, are pretty scary. And one of the first things I do is encourage moms that it’s inexplicable to me why some girls grow up in families where there’s not a lot of supervision and there’s not a lot of guidance, and they make good choices.
SPEAKER 04 :
They do fine.
SPEAKER 01 :
And then some girls grow up in homes with loving parents where there is a lot of guidance and instruction. And yet, as you said, something goes haywire.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
And moms get lost in the craziness as well as daughters during that time.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, it’s not possible to be entirely rational during that time. Not for either mother or daughter. Both generations are caught up in the passion of what’s going on. And it’s very easy for a mother to begin to act like an adolescent, begin screaming and begin overreacting to minor things.
SPEAKER 01 :
Absolutely. I think of the first adolescent girl I saw in my counseling practice. Her mother called. She was 15 and she was going to her room and slamming the door and not talking and not wanting to interact with the family, didn’t want to go to church anymore, even hated the family dog. And mom said, can you help? And I was a young counselor and I had gotten an A in adolescent psychology. And I thought, just bring this girl to me and I will counsel her into happiness.
SPEAKER 04 :
Lots of luck.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, well, after about 15 minutes of silence from her, which is a long time in the counseling office, I felt like this little yippy dog who was nipping at her heels, trying to get her to answer any question or interact with me in some way. I thought, how do you get through to a moody, sullen teenager? My children at the time were about eight and nine, and she started shaking her foot furiously. She was wearing at the time those trendy, clunky Doc Martin shoes, which I did not know could become weapons in the counseling office. And before I could even anticipate what would happen, she pulled off her shoe. She threw it through my window, which cracked into pieces. And she said, I am not the problem here, and stormed out of the office as I followed her to the lobby and said to her, Mother, you’re right. Your daughter needs counseling.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah. Take her to a good counselor.
SPEAKER 01 :
I knew I had a lot to learn about adolescence at that time and anticipated my own daughters. I knew soon arriving adolescence and remembered what it was like to be female and thought, surely that love that you talked about, Dr. Dobson, that we have for our children ought to count for something here. Yeah. And what I’ve discovered is that it does. But first of all, we have to face some pretty mighty storms sometimes.
SPEAKER 04 :
Sharon, as a mom, you would have given your life for your kids, wouldn’t you?
SPEAKER 01 :
I still would.
SPEAKER 04 :
There’s nothing you care about more than that.
SPEAKER 01 :
And yet when they’re grouchy and irritable and ungrateful, I don’t sometimes even want to give them five minutes. And I think that’s what we as parents have to begin to tell the truth to ourselves and one another that sometimes our teenagers, especially teenage girls, can be mean and hard to get along with, irrational, as you said. And we throw up our arms and think, who, who can bear this?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah. Sharon, you have dedicated this book essentially to the mother-daughter relationship. Why not mothers and sons? Why did you focus specifically on daughters?
SPEAKER 01 :
Probably for two primary reasons. It’s been who I’ve been privileged and humbled to know in the counseling office. Mothers and daughters who show up week after week, day after day, and I get phone calls in the middle of the night. My daughter won’t speak to me. She’s run away. We don’t know where she is. I found a razor blade in my daughter’s bedroom. I don’t know what she’s doing. Is she cutting herself? What does that mean? Desperate mothers have forced me to learn far more than often you learn in those adolescent psychology classes. Yeah. And my own daughter, as well, has taught me so much. And I do believe, Dr. Dobson, that there is something uniquely special about the mother-daughter bond.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, man, I’ve been writing that for years. There is a mother-daughter thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
There is.
SPEAKER 04 :
And sometimes it bonds, and sometimes it’s two women in the kitchen. Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
And… What I want to encourage moms is to perhaps let go of some of the anxiety and fear that inevitably comes when our daughters are making scary choices. It’s often mothers who wake up in the middle of the night and who know something is off center with my daughter. Something’s gone awry. There’s a friend that I don’t have peace about. I think that intuition where God’s Spirit speaks to our inner voice intending us to connect with our children, that connection gets broken when we are filled with panic or disgust or embarrassment at our moody teenager daughter’s behavior.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah. I want to go back to something we implied a minute ago, but we really need to start at this point. There is not a one-to-one correlation between being a good parent and having a teenager who sails through adolescence. Those things don’t always connect at the same time. You can be a great parent and go through very difficult things in the teen years, can’t you?
SPEAKER 01 :
I’m so glad you said that, and I think that will be relieving to so many mothers in particular because we moms are experts at feeling guilty. I think that will be relieving for them to hear for a moment, and then we think, okay, but what do I do? Yeah. First of all, I think it’s important that we understand what the forces are at work that really are out of our control, that are going on inside of the hearts, souls, minds of our teenage girls.
SPEAKER 04 :
And one of them is a hormonal firestorm.
SPEAKER 01 :
It really is. During adolescence, during puberty, girls’ bodies are constantly flooded with hormones. And so she’s got this internal craziness going on. But then you take another component, which I think has changed since I was a teenage girl, and unfortunately appears to be intensifying, and that is some external chaos. Teenage girls ages 9 to 19 are the most victimized segment of our culture.
SPEAKER 04 :
I have no doubt about that.
SPEAKER 01 :
Even in the Denver Post, they did a study on harassment that said that bullying among girls has eclipsed bullying among boys.
SPEAKER 04 :
Isn’t that incredible?
SPEAKER 01 :
So we have sexual harassment and bullying, and then we have just meanness among teenage girls, and then all the things available via the Internet and the culture that suggests to girls models and images that are unrealistic for them to attain to. You have this external chaos collide with the biological, inevitable internal chaos, and And no wonder we have a culture of girls who are suffering with depression, eating disorders, and alcohol and drug abuse greater than any other time in our history.
SPEAKER 04 :
The body image thing at this time is a national crisis and disgrace. It is. Where Hollywood and entertainment industry and television hammers away at the fact that you’ve got to be bone thin and you’ve got to have all these characteristics. And teenagers don’t have them. I mean, not one in a hundred even comes close and they look at themselves in the mirror with total disgust. It’s only one little step from there to hating everybody around.
SPEAKER 01 :
It’s very connected to the subject that we’re talking about today. When girls’ emotions go out of control, they often look for something that they can control. And for a growing girl who’s bombarded with images from her culture about how she’s supposed to look, that is one thing a girl pretty quickly discovers. I can control how much I eat, any way she thinks she can control, how much I eat and what I do with my body and how I appear. So what we need to ask ourselves is eating disorders are no longer a big secret like they were when I was a teenage girl. Why is knowledge alone not helpful?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, I want to come back to the specifics of eating disorders and cutting, you know, self-mutilation and other things that teenagers do. But let’s go back to some of the general principles that you started with in this book and a phrase that you have coined called hand-in-hand mothering. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER 01 :
Hand-in-hand mothering really refers to the posture that we assume with our children. As you know, posture, how I sit or stand or lay, makes certain activities possible. And we have postures in parenting as well. In the book, I talk about four different postures in parenting, where you place yourself in relationship to your child. And none of these are wrong. They’re all appropriate at times. But then I move us into the hand-in-hand posture, which I think especially during the adolescent years can be most powerful and effective. Some of those other postures could be standing above our children, lecturing, nagging, disciplining, setting boundaries, posture that is certainly most appropriate when they are younger and they need those boundaries and that safety. Or there is a posture of being beneath your child, which is feeling like she’s most important and that your needs are not important as a mom and you’re just going to sacrifice everything for your child. And some of that is good at times, although certainly not always. There is the hover mother posture, which is my favorite because it’s one that I tend to, where we think we can fix everything for our children. And believe me, when it comes to emotional well-being, if you’re set out in a course to always make your daughter happy, you’re either going to be mad at her for not going along, or you’re going to feel incredibly ineffectual and powerless as a mother. She’s going to be mad at you, too. You’re absolutely right. That’s a huge responsibility for her to bear, to always have to be happy. But hand-in-hand mothering really adopts a posture that says our relationship can be a haven from that cruel, cold world that you have to go into as a teenage girl. And that I am willing to always lend a hand and learn whatever means possible to guide you into emotional maturity.
SPEAKER 04 :
All right. How in the world do you go through the day-by-day experience of parenting when your kid is saying, I hate you and screaming and crying, bursts through the door at night, coming home from school, is weeping, goes straight past you, goes into the bedroom, slams the door? And it leaves the impression that this is all your fault and you didn’t know what in the world you did. She didn’t want to talk to you. She doesn’t want to come out. She’s depressed. And when she does, she is a tiger to live with. How do you get hand in hand with somebody like that?
SPEAKER 01 :
It’s tough. When we are in pain, we look for someone to blame. And that’s where moms often become the emotional containers for all that our girls are going through and experiencing out there. And so they come home from a day where they have been called all sorts of names in the It might be relieving to moms to know that only 10%, some experts say, of a teenager’s emotional unhappiness has to do with what’s going on at home. Some experts say that 90%, and that by the time a girl is 16, one-third of her emotional experiences have to do with what’s going on with the opposite sex, with boys in her peer world. But if we add to those statistics the knowing that if a child feels unloved and rejected at home, Rejection or hurt by a peer is experienced a hundredfold. So moms, first of all, we have to grow ourselves up. And then when your daughter comes home and says, I hate my life. I had a horrible day. I don’t have any friends. I wish that I could just die. My daughter has told me that the most helpful thing that I have ever said to her during the adolescent years is this. I know you are feeling that way right now. But to say, I understand you are feeling what you are feeling. And in saying, I understand you’re feeling that way right now, it suggests to her that I know it hasn’t always been this way, and I know it’s not going to always be this way in the future. And depending where she’s at, she may just file that away and go to her room and still slam her door or turn her music up loud. Probably the second most important thing I can tell mothers to say during these chaotic, tumultuous times is, It is to let your daughter have that space to say, wow, you must have had a really bad day today. Maybe we can go get a cup of coffee later on. And so mom says, I see what’s happening. In other words, I’m not going to look the other way. I’m not going to walk on eggshells and pretend that you’re not in a miserable space that is impacting me. But I will always offer reconnection. And that’s where we as moms fall down. Our daughter slams the door in our face and we think… All right.
SPEAKER 04 :
Forget you. Who needs this?
SPEAKER 01 :
Exactly. And we get to imitate God when we say, how about breakfast tomorrow morning? We get to be like the one who said, here I am knocking at the door. Well, answer. I’ll come in and eat with them and they with me. We get to do that with our daughters. That’s where these tumultuous times become the perfect context to not only develop a relationship with our daughters that outlasts the mom, I hate my life stage, but to offer them a taste of God.
SPEAKER 04 :
And it won’t last forever.
SPEAKER 01 :
It won’t.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s not propaganda. It won’t last forever. Sharon, you mentioned prayer. Have you ever fasted for your children? That’s a personal question.
SPEAKER 01 :
I have not.
SPEAKER 04 :
I strongly recommend that. Not that you’re bribing God. Not that your purpose is to… to hurt or to kind of have an ascetic approach to your faith. But it’s just a way of saying once a week, Lord, here I am again. You know that I can’t fix this kid, but everything’s in the balance now. This is the most important time of her life or his life. And I want to do the right thing. I want to say the right thing. You know the answers and I don’t. You can also work within that that child. And so for this day, I’m putting aside food simply to talk to you about this. And whenever I think of eating, I will think of you and hold this precious child up to you. She was born in love. You gave her to me. And I brought her through these toddler years and childhood years. And now we’ve come to a kind of a A juncture where things could go really wrong. You know that. And I don’t want to make it worse. Give me wisdom and work in the life of my child. Boy, I tell you what. You start praying that kind of prayer. And especially in a context of fasting. I don’t know why. That matters to God. But Jesus didn’t say, if you fast. He said, when you fast. He assumed that we were going to do this.
SPEAKER 01 :
That sounds powerful. It makes me think of the story of the prodigal son, which is a story about hunger. And since many of the girls that I work with are prodigals and their parents are waiting for them, As the father did in the story, wincing with hope for them to return, I often think how it is our hunger as babies that makes us need our mothers. And as our daughters grow, their hunger for acceptance, for belonging, for connection, sometimes leads them to look for that love in all the wrong places. But it’s that hunger. that offers the potential for us to connect with them. And it is in turn our hunger for God, as you said, that takes us to him on our knees, absolutely desperate. I cannot do one thing for this child who I love more than life. Help me. That we then can in turn offer a taste of God to our children. And that’s that circle of give and take that it’s such a privilege in parenting to be involved in.
SPEAKER 04 :
Sharon Hirsch is our guest, and she’s written this book called Mom, I Hate My Life, Becoming Your Daughter’s Ally Through the Emotional Ups and Downs of Adolescence. I think you’ve got a real good fix on this subject. I want to do another program with you, and I would like to talk next time about the specifics. How do you recognize adults? and an eating disorder. Okay. And what do you do about it? How do you recognize potential suicide? What do you do when your teenage girl begins to dress in very, very provocative ways that you know are not right and that lead to the difficulties what do you do we’re gonna get to the how-to’s next time thank you sharon for being with us and for the work that you do with teenagers mom i hate my life that’s a great title because most parents have heard that one way or the other it’s good to have you here today we’ll pick it up next time if you’re willing to be with us that’d be great good
SPEAKER 03 :
Sharon Hirsch’s wisdom reminds us that even in the midst of teenage storms, love finds a way to rebuild the bridges that seem broken. Her hand-in-hand approach shows us that connection, not control, is what our kids need most during these turbulent years. You’ve been listening to Family Talk and Dr. James Dobson’s conversation with counselor Sharon Hirsch about navigating the emotional ups and downs of adolescence. Now, if you missed any portion of today’s broadcast or if you’d like to share it with another parent who’s walking those same challenging years with you, visit drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk. And when you’re there, be sure to also look for information on how you can order a copy of Sharon Hirsch’s book called Mom, I Hate My Life. That’s drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk. And if you’re looking for daily encouragement in your parenting journey, I want to invite you to connect with us on social media. We share practical parenting insights, inspirational quotes and biblical wisdom for families on Facebook, X, YouTube and Instagram. It’s a great way to stay connected with our community of parents who are navigating these same challenges together. Just search for Dr. James Dobson on any of those platforms to join our growing community of parents and grandparents. Here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we’re committed to strengthening families through biblical truth and practical guidance. Every day we hear from parents who tell us how these broadcasts have given them hope during their most challenging moments. When you support the work of Family Talk, you’re helping us to reach countless families who desperately need to know that they’re not alone in their struggles. Your financial partnership enables us to continue bringing trusted voices and biblical wisdom to parents everywhere. To make a secure donation, go to DrJamesDobson.org. Our newly updated and relaunched website is so much easier to navigate. That’s DrJamesDobson.org. You can also give a gift over the phone when you call 877-732-6825. That’s 877-732-6825. And of course, to send a donation through the U.S. Postal Service, our ministry mailing address is Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, P.O. Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado, the zip code 80949. Well, I’m Roger Marsh, and from all of us here at Family Talk, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time for part two of this powerful conversation featuring Dr. Dobson and Counselor Sharon Hirsch. That’s on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. The voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
