And they call it puppy love.

Have you heard this before: “But Mom, I love him,”? And have you given in to the temptation to roll your eyes in disbelief? I think that as parents we all fall into dismissing our teens feelings out of hand. We have good reason to doubt the depth of their feelings, last week she may have loved someone else, and hated this particular boy. But the one thing that we need to avoid is making our teens feel like we don’t believe them, or don’t understand them. We all want to be validated in life, so we need to offer that to our
children as well.

The key is to let your son or daughter know that you understand what they are going through, and that for teens these emotions seem to be amplified until they overshadow everything else that is going on in their lives. The reason for this is that the teen brain is not finished maturing and developing until they are in their middle twenties. The part of their brain that they do the most of their reasoning in is actually the part of the brain that feels emotion. Teens don’t necessarily think something through, they feel something through.

You also don’t necessarily want to go too far the other way and indulge your teen into thinking this relationship is the major focus of their lives. A balance needs to be struck on validating your teen yet not over indulging them. Remember, you were young once too, and wanted to be respected. So make sure you show the same respect to your teen.