The Book That Made Me Stop Taking My Teenager Personally
Before I found Lorraine Candy’s Mum, What’s Wrong with You?, my mornings looked like this.
I am going to paint you a picture.
My youngest can’t find his shoes. My middle one is melting down over a hairbrush – an actual hairbrush, in ways I will not attempt to explain here. And my eldest is in her room with the door closed, and I have just said something completely ordinary – something I have said a hundred times – and it has apparently landed as a personal attack.
I am standing in the kitchen, shoes in hand, and I genuinely do not know what I did wrong.
For a long time, I thought the answer was me. That I was doing this badly. That a better mother would have found the right words, the right tone, the right moment. That somewhere between the person I thought I was and the mother my teenager was responding to, something had gone missing.
Then I stumbled across Mum, What’s Wrong with You? – and I stopped believing that.
Table of Contents
Who Is Lorraine Candy?
Lorraine Candy is a British journalist and former editor of ELLE magazine – not a neuroscientist, not a parenting expert with a PhD. She is a mother of four who found herself completely blindsided by the experience of parenting teenage daughters, and who did enough research to understand why – and then wrote it all down in a book that is both genuinely informative and very funny.
The subtitle is 101 Things Only Mothers of Teenage Girls Know. That alone should tell you the tone. This is not a book that talks down to you or presents a perfect methodology. It is a book that says: this is hard, you are not alone, and here is what is actually happening.
The Teenage Brain Is Not What You Think
The section I found most useful – and most relieving – was Lorraine Candy’s exploration of the teenage brain.
I will be honest: I could not give you the exact neurological details now. What I can tell you is the feeling it left me with, which was this: everything that baffles me about my teenager is not a character flaw or a parenting failure. It is biology. The teenage brain is genuinely different – still forming, still wiring itself up, processing the world through a completely different architecture than the adult brain does.
The emotional volatility. The apparent inability to see that I am a person with feelings. The way a neutral comment becomes a provocation. The way she can be warm and funny and completely herself one hour and then absolutely somewhere else entirely the next. All of this has a reason. It is not random. It is not aimed at me specifically.
I cannot overstate how much that helped.
Why Understanding the Why Changes Everything
Here is what I have learned, from Lorraine Candy and from the parenting books I keep reading: the single most useful thing you can do when you are in the thick of parenting a teenager is understand why the thing is happening.
Not so you can fix it. Not so you can outsmart it. But so you stop making it mean something about you.
When I did not understand the teenage brain, I took everything personally. The closed door felt like rejection. The monosyllabic answers felt like punishment. The explosion over the hairbrush felt like evidence that I had done something catastrophically wrong somewhere along the way.
When I understood that this is what the teenage brain does – that it is in the middle of one of the most significant developmental periods a human being goes through, that it is not fully equipped to regulate emotion or read social nuance or understand the impact of its own behaviour – I stopped being the victim of it. I became, instead, the adult in the room who understood more than she did about what was happening to her.
That shift changes how you respond. And how you respond changes everything.
This is something Gordon Neufeld writes about too – the importance of staying the adult, the anchor, the one who doesn’t take the bait. Not because you are suppressing your feelings, but because you understand the bigger picture that your teenager can’t yet see.
You Are Not Imagining It – and Neither Is She
One of the things I love about Lorraine Candy’s approach is that she validates both sides.
Yes, your teenager is genuinely difficult to live with sometimes. You are not imagining that. You are not being oversensitive. The eye rolls are real. The sighing is real. The way she can make you feel, in three seconds flat, like the most uncool and irritating person who has ever lived – that is real.
And also: she is not doing it on purpose. She is not conducting a campaign against you. She is going through something enormous, with a brain that cannot yet process it properly, in a world that expects her to be fine about it. She needs you to stay steady precisely because she cannot.
The two things are both true at once. That is, I think, the heart of this book.
Now that I have two teenage daughters – my eldest at fifteen and my middle one newly into that territory – I find myself coming back to this idea regularly. The dynamic is different with each of them. But the underlying biology is the same. And understanding it, even loosely, even imperfectly, makes me a better mother to both of them than I was when I thought it was all my fault.
Practical Takeaways
Here is some of the science that helped me most – the kind that makes you put the book down and say oh.
- Her sleep is not laziness – it is biology. During puberty, the brain’s melatonin release shifts by roughly two hours. A teenager genuinely cannot fall asleep early – her body clock has moved, and she has no control over it. Her natural sleep window is closer to midnight to 9am. Which means early school starts are asking her to function at what her brain experiences as 5 or 6 in the morning. Matthew Walker covers this in detail – the sleep deprivation most teenagers live with is chronic, and it affects everything: mood, learning, decision-making, emotional regulation. Cut her some slack on the mornings.
- The part of her brain that handles decisions is not finished yet. The prefrontal cortex – the area responsible for impulse control, reading consequences, regulating emotions, and understanding the impact of behaviour on others – does not fully develop until the mid-twenties. When your teenager makes a choice that seems obviously, bafflingly wrong to you, she is not being reckless or stupid. She is working with incomplete wiring. She literally cannot think it through the way you can yet.
- She feels everything more intensely than you do. Teenagers process emotions primarily through the amygdala – the brain’s reactive, emotional centre – rather than through the rational prefrontal cortex that adults use. The same event hits differently in a teenage brain. What you experience as a minor irritation she may experience as genuinely overwhelming. This is not drama. It is a different neurological reality.
- She may be misreading your face. Research shows that teenagers frequently misread neutral adult facial expressions as angry or disapproving. You can be completely calm – not annoyed, not tense, just neutral – and her brain reads threat. You are not doing anything wrong. Her brain is pattern-matching on incomplete information and defaulting to danger. This one, when I first heard it, explained so much.
- Separate the behaviour from the relationship. Her being difficult is not the same as her not loving you. The door is closed. The relationship is intact. These are not the same thing.
- Find the funny. Lorraine Candy is genuinely funny about all of this – and there is something important in that. If you can laugh (later, privately, not in the moment) at the absolute absurdity of a full emotional crisis over a hairbrush, it helps. The absurdity is real. Noticing it is not unkind.
Why This Belongs in Heart
Heart on this blog is about family, parenting, and connection – the closest relationships and what it takes to keep them in good repair.
Lorraine Candy’s book belongs here because it is, at its core, about protecting the relationship with your daughter during the years when she is least equipped to protect it herself. It is about staying connected when everything on the surface looks like disconnection. About understanding enough to keep showing up, even when showing up feels unrewarding.
This sits naturally alongside How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Hold on to Your Kids as part of what I think of as my parenting toolkit – not perfect, not always applied correctly, but there when I need it.
I still have hard mornings. The shoes go missing, the hairbrush causes scenes, the door is sometimes closed or slammed.
But I am no longer standing in the kitchen wondering what I did wrong. I know what is happening. I know why. And I know it will pass.
Et toi? Do you have a teenager who baffles you on a regular basis? Come and share in the Notes from Soph community on Skool – I suspect you are very much not alone.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Book Details:
Mum, What’s Wrong with You? 101 Things Only Mothers of Teenage Girls Know – Lorraine Candy
Published 2021 | HarperCollins
📚 Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0008407258/?tag=websitenote0f-21
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