Latest news with #adolescence
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
The 3 Stages Of 'Teen Separation', According To A Psychologist
A clinical psychologist has identified three stages teens go through when 'separating' from their parents – and it's resonating with a lot of people on social media. In a video shared on TikTok, Dr Lucie Hemmen said 'one of the most triggering things about teenagers is their separation process' from their parents, which often happens in a handful of stages (more on that in a moment). First of all, why do teens distance themselves from their parents? Adolescence occurs between the ages of 10 to 19 – it's the period between childhood and adulthood where tweens and teens experience 'rapid physical, cognitive and psychosocial growth', according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). As part of this, teens can begin pushing away from their parents, which adolescent therapist Ashley Hudson said is part of a typical developmental process. 'Teenagers want and subconsciously push for independence. Their biological clock ticks inside of them saying, 'Hey! You've got to figure out this adulting thing, because you are going to be on your own soon',' she explained. This might mean your teen is pushing back on boundaries, engaging in risky behaviours or simply spending more time with friends or romantic interests. This period is all about finding out who they are as a person outside of the family unit – and for parents, it's tough. The child you have nurtured and who might've idolised you for years all of a sudden doesn't want to know. What are the three stages of separation? Dr Hemmen said the first stage you might notice as your teen begins to pull away is disagreements. 'So a lot of times when a kid turns 13 or 14, their parent says: 'Oh my god, everything is an argument',' she explained. During arguments, the key advice for parents is to try and stay calm – as parental aggression is likely to be mirrored with teen aggression. The NHS advises ensuring your body language reflects your willingness to listen, and to give your teenager personal space during an argument. If things get very heated, don't be afraid to take time out. Explain you are going for a walk and will come back again in half an hour. The second stage of teen separation, added Dr Hemmen, is withdrawal. 'They often spend more time in their rooms because they're really craving independence,' she explained. This might also look like spending more time with friends. Again, teens withdrawing is a normal part of their emotional development – they're going off on their own, forming 'their own opinions, identity and values', according to psychologist Dr John Townsend. When this begins to happen, coaching site Reach Out urges parents not to take it personally – instead, keep an eye on your teen while also giving them the space and time to 'handle their own lives' (easier said than done, we know). Of course, sometimes withdrawal can be a red flag, which is why it's important for parents to avoid taking their foot completely off the pedal. If you're worried about your child, don't be afraid to be present, patient and share open-ended and emotionally neutral questions or statements like, 'I've noticed you seem quieter lately. That's totally OK, but I just want you to know I'm here anytime you want to talk'. (You can find more helpful, therapist-approved advice here.) Lastly, stage number three of teen separation is bending the rules and pushing the limits, according to Dr Hemmen. 'Let's face it, there's a spectrum. Some teenagers do this a little bit, some teenagers do it a lot. Obviously it's very triggering when they go way off road,' said Dr Hemmen. 'But the positive intention in that behaviour for teenagers is to explore the world and to think for themselves – and they often learn a lot about boundaries through crossing them and living with the impact of that.' Parents of teens are relating hard In response to the video, one parent wrote: 'I miss my sweet baby boy! Having a teenage boy is like trying to have a relationship with a guy that's not interested.' Their comment clearly resonated with a lot of people, as it had over 400 likes at the time of writing. Another said: 'I'm in stage 3 and I'm learning to walk a fine line of still parenting and letting my daughter grow up.' Making space for a teen's autonomy can clearly pay off in the long run though, as one parent commented: 'I learned that when I didn't push back, but openly encouraged and supported their autonomy and normalised and accepted their priorities and values being different than mine, they really matured.' Hang on in there! Related... Therapist Shares 5 Phrases To Use When Teens 'Talk Back' Martin Lewis Urges Parents Of Teens To Do 1 Thing When They Turn 18 WTF Does 'Crashing Out' Mean When Teens Say It?
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pan by Michael Clune review – a stunning debut of teen psychosis
The narrator of American nonfiction author Michael Clune's first novel is the 15-year-old Nicholas, who lives with his father in a housing development so cheap and deracinated it inspires existential terror. It's a place exposed to 'the raw death of the endless future, which at night in the midwest in winter is sometimes bare inches above the roofs'. Just as frightening is Nicholas's sense that 'anything can come in'. One day in January, what comes into Nicholas is the god Pan – a possessing, deranging, life-threatening spirit. Or that, anyhow, is how Nicholas comes to interpret his increasingly disabling anxiety. Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence. It shows more successfully than any other book I've read how these can be experienced as black magic – indeed, it allows that they might be black magic. Nicholas successfully prophesies trivial events (the wind rising, someone saying the word 'diabetes') and is haunted by a dead mouse's squeak. Another boy finds a means of divination in a schlock fantasy novel. Even the pop anthem More Than a Feeling is a path to the uncanny; it's a song with 'a door in the middle of it … like the door on a UFO'. Nicholas becomes convinced that he is perpetually at risk of leaving his body – specifically, that his 'looking/thinking could pour or leap out' of his head – and his friends, also being 15 years old, are ready to believe it, too. They are easy prey for Ian, a college-age man who sets himself up as a small-time cult leader among these high-school kids. Ian particularly targets Nicholas, telling him that only they are capable of real thoughts; the others in the group are 'Hollows' who have 'Solid Mind', a deterministic mentality with no animating self. 'The sound of words from a Hollow mouth,' says Ian, 'contains an abyss.' Soon the group is staging rituals incorporating sex, drugs and animal sacrifice. Meanwhile, Nicholas loses his ability to sleep and spirals toward psychosis. Clune is brilliant on the loss of control and exaggeration of terror that follows. Falling out of your face can be transcendence, but can also represent extinction. When Nicholas sees a black-and-white photograph of a group of long-dead priests, he reflects: 'Now they'd all stepped out of their faces … The faces hung there like rows of empty sneakers in a shop window. The priests had stepped out.' At his hardware-store job, Nicholas sees the racks of garden tools and realises, 'These are animals too … These are the husks, the waiting bodies, the body traps of animals.' He knows that if he stares at the hand spades and rotary tillers long enough, he can inhabit them; even household objects now have a door in the middle of them. Nicholas's reality becomes fluid. Among his friends, he becomes the object of semi‑religious, semi-voyeuristic fascination. What is truly remarkable here is that the extravagance feels meticulously true to a certain state of altered consciousness. I doubt that anyone has had Nicholas's exact experiences, or even ones that resemble them in obvious ways. Still, anyone who has experienced mental illness – and many who have just been 15 years old – will find even Clune's most phantasmagoric pages uncannily familiar. There are trade-offs to fiction that strives to be honest. Here, one is that the other characters never fully become people. They're external experiences that inform the way Nicholas relates to his own mind, and it's often very credible that they are 'Hollows' with no real consciousness. This may be a truthful depiction of the isolation characteristic of extreme mental states. It also means the story is unrelentingly solipsistic. The plot centres on inner epiphanies. While these present themselves as life-saving answers, they all turn out to be brief respites, some evanescing so quickly that they're forgotten seconds later. It's no surprise that Sisyphus appears as a reference here. This is certainly true both of coping with mental illness and surviving adolescence. It also risks making the reader feel as if we're going nowhere. But this is not really to criticise the book: it's just to say what it is and isn't. A reader who approaches Pan expecting the usual rewards of a coming-of-age story will be sorely disappointed. It offers not answers but visions; not growth but lambent revelation; not closure but openings. 'Good writing,' Nicholas tells us, is 'the careful, painstaking replacement of each part of this world with a part that [looks] the same, but [is] deeper, more mysterious, richer.' This feels like a fair description of Clune's own process, with the proviso that he is not replacing but supplementing; not substituting for reality, but adding to it. Nicholas ends his inner journey without arriving at the cure he has been pursuing. But when we close the book, we find ourselves in a larger world. Pan by Michael Clune is published by Fern Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@ You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pan by Michael Clune review – a stunning debut of teen psychosis
The narrator of American nonfiction author Michael Clune's first novel is the 15-year-old Nicholas, who lives with his father in a housing development so cheap and deracinated it inspires existential terror. It's a place exposed to 'the raw death of the endless future, which at night in the midwest in winter is sometimes bare inches above the roofs'. Just as frightening is Nicholas's sense that 'anything can come in'. One day in January, what comes into Nicholas is the god Pan – a possessing, deranging, life-threatening spirit. Or that, anyhow, is how Nicholas comes to interpret his increasingly disabling anxiety. Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence. It shows more successfully than any other book I've read how these can be experienced as black magic – indeed, it allows that they might be black magic. Nicholas successfully prophesies trivial events (the wind rising, someone saying the word 'diabetes') and is haunted by a dead mouse's squeak. Another boy finds a means of divination in a schlock fantasy novel. Even the pop anthem More Than a Feeling is a path to the uncanny; it's a song with 'a door in the middle of it … like the door on a UFO'. Nicholas becomes convinced that he is perpetually at risk of leaving his body – specifically, that his 'looking/thinking could pour or leap out' of his head – and his friends, also being 15 years old, are ready to believe it, too. They are easy prey for Ian, a college-age man who sets himself up as a small-time cult leader among these high-school kids. Ian particularly targets Nicholas, telling him that only they are capable of real thoughts; the others in the group are 'Hollows' who have 'Solid Mind', a deterministic mentality with no animating self. 'The sound of words from a Hollow mouth,' says Ian, 'contains an abyss.' Soon the group is staging rituals incorporating sex, drugs and animal sacrifice. Meanwhile, Nicholas loses his ability to sleep and spirals toward psychosis. Clune is brilliant on the loss of control and exaggeration of terror that follows. Falling out of your face can be transcendence, but can also represent extinction. When Nicholas sees a black-and-white photograph of a group of long-dead priests, he reflects: 'Now they'd all stepped out of their faces … The faces hung there like rows of empty sneakers in a shop window. The priests had stepped out.' At his hardware-store job, Nicholas sees the racks of garden tools and realises, 'These are animals too … These are the husks, the waiting bodies, the body traps of animals.' He knows that if he stares at the hand spades and rotary tillers long enough, he can inhabit them; even household objects now have a door in the middle of them. Nicholas's reality becomes fluid. Among his friends, he becomes the object of semi‑religious, semi-voyeuristic fascination. What is truly remarkable here is that the extravagance feels meticulously true to a certain state of altered consciousness. I doubt that anyone has had Nicholas's exact experiences, or even ones that resemble them in obvious ways. Still, anyone who has experienced mental illness – and many who have just been 15 years old – will find even Clune's most phantasmagoric pages uncannily familiar. There are trade-offs to fiction that strives to be honest. Here, one is that the other characters never fully become people. They're external experiences that inform the way Nicholas relates to his own mind, and it's often very credible that they are 'Hollows' with no real consciousness. This may be a truthful depiction of the isolation characteristic of extreme mental states. It also means the story is unrelentingly solipsistic. The plot centres on inner epiphanies. While these present themselves as life-saving answers, they all turn out to be brief respites, some evanescing so quickly that they're forgotten seconds later. It's no surprise that Sisyphus appears as a reference here. This is certainly true both of coping with mental illness and surviving adolescence. It also risks making the reader feel as if we're going nowhere. But this is not really to criticise the book: it's just to say what it is and isn't. A reader who approaches Pan expecting the usual rewards of a coming-of-age story will be sorely disappointed. It offers not answers but visions; not growth but lambent revelation; not closure but openings. 'Good writing,' Nicholas tells us, is 'the careful, painstaking replacement of each part of this world with a part that [looks] the same, but [is] deeper, more mysterious, richer.' This feels like a fair description of Clune's own process, with the proviso that he is not replacing but supplementing; not substituting for reality, but adding to it. Nicholas ends his inner journey without arriving at the cure he has been pursuing. But when we close the book, we find ourselves in a larger world. Pan by Michael Clune is published by Fern Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@ You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting
The Guardian
08-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
I spoke for my brother when he was too afraid to answer — now, he speaks in melodies, and I have learned to listen
When my brother was small, he barely spoke, and certainly never around strangers. He could speak, there was no developmental delay, he just mostly chose not to. We were close in age, under two years apart, and – out in the world – I spoke for him. This is, perhaps, a common dynamic: chatty big sister, quiet little brother. I was sometimes reprimanded by well-meaning strangers. 'Stop talking over your brother,' they'd chide. 'I asked him a question.' And I would quieten down, shamed. My brother would say nothing, but entreat me with frightened eyes to step in. As a small child, I felt my brother spoke without language. I heard his voice in my head, and I believed I was his translator. To me, this felt natural. It's easy to scoff – the delusions of childhood – but as toddlers we read everything around us. Through immersion in family, we acquire language. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Maybe, my brother's non verbal cues felt like language to me. So much of what is communicated between people involves attunement, a subtle reading of one another's emotional states, micro-expressions and non verbal cues. Perhaps I just hadn't learned to distinguish. Attuned, I read him as if he was speaking. We'd always been close, but in adolescence our world was engulfed by grief. We lost my sister and father to suicide, six years apart, while we staggered towards adulthood. I became quieter, but my brother was almost mute. During this time, he was learning guitar, and his music rose to fill the space. The language of loss, the language of yearning. So plaintive, so expressive. There are other ways to speak. Unlike me, my brother doesn't remember much of our childhood. Trauma has erased it, the way it sometimes seems to. He has no memory of our sister, who we lost when he was 10. In this, we are opposites. For years now I have been writing about what happened in my family – in memoir, in fiction, in essays. Each memory glistens like a pearl on a string. Sometimes, I mourn that he has lost the memory of how adored he was. Baby brother, slant-eyed-smiler, boy of few words. Always the easiest of humans to love. When he read my memoir, Staying, he said, 'You've given me back my childhood'. I'm not so deluded that I don't see that I'd only given him mine. Nowadays, my brother is a man who leaves space for silence. If you want to hear him speak you must learn to be quiet. I have taught myself how to bite my tongue. And, there is always the music. Joy, wonder, melancholy, sadness, drama, so much drama. Tension, release, surprise, awe. My brother's music moves through many moods. In song, his vocabulary is vast, his story unique. All instrumental, it speaks of many influences. The sounds of our childhood. Dylan, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Neil Young, CSNY, Joe Cocker, Tim Buckley, Roy Harper, Bruce Springsteen, Billie Holiday, early pre-disco Bee Gees, The Beatles, Bob Marley, early Paul Kelly, Paul Simon, Judy Garland, John Lennon, Prince, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, Sade, and Sting. Listening, you can catch hints of all this, plus the intensity of an inner world rarely expressed verbally. It's alive, it's pulsing. All the history, all the feeling. In books, I gave him my childhood. In music, he gives me his. Here I am, still talking for him! I hear those well-meaning adults from our childhood: 'I asked him a question.' Go! Go listen to his songs! Jessie Cole is the author of four books, including the memoirs Staying and Desire, A Reckoning. Jacob Cole is a guitarist. His latest album Slow Gold is out now.
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
I spoke for my brother when he was too afraid to answer — now, he speaks in melodies, and I have learned to listen
When my brother was small, he barely spoke, and certainly never around strangers. He could speak, there was no developmental delay, he just mostly chose not to. We were close in age, under two years apart, and – out in the world – I spoke for him. This is, perhaps, a common dynamic: chatty big sister, quiet little brother. I was sometimes reprimanded by well-meaning strangers. 'Stop talking over your brother,' they'd chide. 'I asked him a question.' And I would quieten down, shamed. My brother would say nothing, but entreat me with frightened eyes to step in. As a small child, I felt my brother spoke without language. I heard his voice in my head, and I believed I was his translator. To me, this felt natural. It's easy to scoff – the delusions of childhood – but as toddlers we read everything around us. Through immersion in family, we acquire language. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Maybe, my brother's non verbal cues felt like language to me. So much of what is communicated between people involves attunement, a subtle reading of one another's emotional states, micro-expressions and non verbal cues. Perhaps I just hadn't learned to distinguish. Attuned, I read him as if he was speaking. We'd always been close, but in adolescence our world was engulfed by grief. We lost my sister and father to suicide, six years apart, while we staggered towards adulthood. I became quieter, but my brother was almost mute. During this time, he was learning guitar, and his music rose to fill the space. The language of loss, the language of yearning. So plaintiff, so expressive. There are other ways to speak. Unlike me, my brother doesn't remember much of our childhood. Trauma has erased it, the way it sometimes seems to. He has no memory of our sister, who we lost when he was 10. In this, we are opposites. For years now I have been writing about what happened in my family – in memoir, in fiction, in essays. Each memory glistens like a pearl on a string. Sometimes, I mourn that he has lost the memory of how adored he was. Baby brother, slant-eyed-smiler, boy of few words. Always the easiest of humans to love. When he read my memoir, Staying, he said, 'You've given me back my childhood'. I'm not so deluded that I don't see that I'd only given him mine. Nowadays, my brother is a man who leaves space for silence. If you want to hear him speak you must learn to be quiet. I have taught myself how to bite my tongue. And, there is always the music. Joy, wonder, melancholy, sadness, drama, so much drama. Tension, release, surprise, awe. My brother's music moves through many moods. In song, his vocabulary is vast, his story unique. All instrumental, it speaks of many influences. The sounds of our childhood. Dylan, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Neil Young, CNSY, Joe Cocker, Tim Buckley, Roy Harper, Bruce Springsteen, Billie Holiday, early pre-disco Bee Gees, The Beatles, Bob Marley, early Paul Kelly, Paul Simon, Judy Garland, John Lennon, Prince, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, Sade, and Sting. Listening, you can catch hints of all this, plus the intensity of an inner world rarely expressed verbally. It's alive, it's pulsing. All the history, all the feeling. In books, I gave him my childhood. In music, he gives me his. Here I am, still talking for him! I hear those well-meaning adults from our childhood: 'I asked him a question.' Go! Go listen to his songs! Jessie Cole is the author of four books, including the memoirs Staying and Desire, A Reckoning
