Mother-daughter relationships can often be strained in the teen years, and conflict is often seen as normal. Teen girls are striving to develop their own identities, yet they still desire to have the support of their parents. Thus, moms often feel their teenage daughters vacillate between pushing them away and pulling them close.
Along the same lines, teens don’t need the same level of support, or at least the same kind, and sometimes supporting teen daughters in the same way they would have been supported in their young childhood can be unhelpful or even unhealthy. One mother wrote about this as she navigated caring for her anxiety-ridden daughter. This mother sleeps on teenage daughter’s bedroom floor in this new stage of motherhood, aware that being there for her daughter looks new in these teenage years.
Why This Mother Sleeps on Teenage Daughter’s Bedroom Floor
Mother, Elizabeth J. Spencer, like any other mother does not want her children to be in pain, either physically or emotionally. So, as she wrote in a blog on InspireMore, when she woke up one night with a mother’s intuition and noticed her daughter’s light on, she went to the rescue.
She wrote that she found her daughter crying because she could not sleep when she knew she desperately needed to sleep. According to the mom, her daughter was mature and knowledgeable enough to know the tricks to help an anxiety-ridden mind rest, but none had worked for her this time.
In a moment like this, any mom’s heart would break to see their child in distress, but this mom knew a “bandage” and “a kiss” couldn’t fix this problem like it might’ve when her daughter was a little girl.
In Elizabeth’s blog on InspireMore, she wrote, “When they don’t have friends, we can’t set up play dates for them. When they don’t understand their homework, we usually don’t understand it enough to help them, either.”
Elizabeth, this mother sleeps on teenage daughter’s bedroom floor, knows it’s good for her daughter to have independence as her daughter navigates her struggles. She says, “When someone breaks their heart, we can’t (and shouldn’t) go try to talk them into loving our baby again. When they don’t get the job or the part or the spot on the team, we can’t (and shouldn’t) plead their case with the employer or director or coach.”