Teens: Changing Bodies, Changing Connections

Teen growth spurts

When your teenager was an infant and a toddler, you carefully monitored his physical growth. At each appointment with the pediatrician, she probably updated you on where his weight and height were in relation to the norm for that age. You also became a great observer of your child and how these growth spurts affected his behavior. Most parents intuitively recognize the signs of a growth spurt in their child: irritability, clumsiness, increased appetite, sleeplessness, and often tears. Just before the big growth spurt, which can measure as much as one centimeter, or three-eighths of an inch, in one twenty-four-hour period, the body seems to implode on itself. After the spurt, your child probably returned to his more normal behavior and perhaps slept a bit more than usual.

Well, guess what? Your teenager is still going through these same spurts, but you're just not tuned into them the way you used to be. When you spotted the growth spurt in your infant, you allowed for the irritability and all the rest. In fact, you probably put your arm around your spouse and together said something along the lines of, "Ah, a growth spurt. Isn't it remarkable?"

Fast forward thirteen years:

You've just had a barbed interchange with your teenage daughter as you cleared the plates from dinner. You each got in a couple of good shots before she stormed out of the kitchen and up to her room. In the meantime, after your deep breathing exercises have failed, you've taken the dishes out of the dishwasher to wash by hand—a strategy you learned in a recent stress management class. Now imagine, really imagine, how you would feel and respond if minutes later your daughter came back down to the kitchen, stood next to you with her arm around you and said, "I'm sorry for what I said, Mom. It's just that I'm in the midst of a growth spurt and it's making me crazy!" In all likelihood, you would sympathize with her; indeed, you would offer to get her some ice and aspirin to help with the inevitable joint and bone pain associated with growth spurts.

Sometimes his moodiness is as simple as a growth spurt, and you can use this information to further your connection with him. Take a moment to consider how a growth spurt affects your teenager's basic sense of coordination. During a spurt, or just thereafter, he needs to readjust to this new body of his. Nothing is quite as it was before, most noticeably his hands and his feet, the parts of his body most out of his awareness. For proof of this, take a second look at your teenager the next time he spills his glass at the dinner table—you probably won't have to wait too long. Rather than immediately picking up the glass and cleaning up after himself (as you would do and as you wish he would do), he'll stare off into space for a while. Actually, it's a specific type of staring. First at the spilled glass, then at his hand, and then up and away, off into the distance. It's as if he were corroborating for himself that it was his hand that knocked over the glass; but he is also going further than that, because in the last look—up and away—he is actually updating the mental image he carries of his body.

If your eyes are open, this is magic in action. Growing one centimeter over the course of a single day makes anyone clumsy; for most of us, that lack of coordination plays out mainly in our hands and our feet, where a miscalculated centimeter is the difference between bumping into the coffee table or not; between tripping on the step or not; and yes, between spilling the glass or not. In short, intermittent bouts of clumsiness and uncoordinated movement are normal for teenagers.

I'm not saying that this explains every instance of knocked-over milk in your teenager's life, far from it. Sometimes their miscalculations are caused by inattentiveness, sometimes by fatigue, sometimes by boredom. But more than a fair share of their awkward crashes with the dining room chairs are a result of their changing bodies, which gives you a golden opportunity to connect.

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