"My pre teen daughter doesn’t want to spend time with family"

Query: My 11-year-old daughter spends a lot of time talking to her friends over the phone, chats and just about everywhere. I want her to also spend time with the family, but she finds excuses. It feels like she is getting emotionally distant. Is this a normal part of growing up or something is wrong.
Response by Komal Mishra, Counselling Psychologist, Kaleidoscope: Hello Reader! Thank you for the query.You mentioned that your daughter is 11-year-old, so she is moving towards the adolescent period. During teens and pre-teens, it is common for children to get engrossed in their own life and wanting to spend time with their friends. Children during this age often get overly engaged in their social media, however, this is a crucial stage to establish and sustain the emotional connection with your daughter. Children at this age go through a lot of changes and everyone reacts to the same differently, depending on their experiences and the kind of support they get from family and friends. But they learn the most from modelling. Preaching them about something won’t make a difference unless the same is shown to them through actions.
To get connected with your child, you can use the following strategies:
• As parents, we tend to always give instructions to our children and forget to listen to their problems. The first strategy to build an emotional connection with your child is to listen to them effectively.
• All humans fear judgements, so do our adolescents. Hence provide your child with a free space to discuss their emotions and have unconditional positive regard so that your child feels that she can disclose her emotions.
• Do not trivialize their feelings and emotions.
• Do not impose restriction on them and neither give constant instructions.
• Disclose to them about your emotions and open a window for emotional disclosure.
• Do not restrict them from talking to their friends completely.
• Get in family recreational activities.
• You can provide her with emotional support by creating an open space for her to talk to you, with no judgements, this will encourage her to open- up with you, deepening the emotional bond.
• In addition, you can set some “house rules” with your daughter, asking her to take some time every day without her phone and engage in a family activity such as helping lay out the dinner table, playing some game or watching T.V. together, but don’t impose this on her, ask your daughter to find time in a day when she would like to do this.
• Give her some space, try to rationally think if she is actually making excuses or does something keep coming up. With everything happening online, it may be possible that she is also struggling to find a balance between home, school and social life.
Adolescence is a very crucial stage in a child’s life. It’s the stage where a child starts finding meaning to their life, explore themselves, and come out of the fairy tale fallacies. At the same time, children also go through multiple biological changes in the adolescent phase, which promotes their risk-taking tendency. They also start believing and behaving on the thought that – “This is only happening to them and nobody else has experienced this”. In this process, they get pulled away from parents and trust more in their friends.
It is advisable for the parents to believe their children what they say about their experience and make them feel special since it is their first time in adolescence. Self-disclosure will also prove helpful – parents can disclose some of their personal experiences of adolescent age. This will help them gain trust in you. Getting worried about your child may make you enter into helicopter parenting, but it is a big NO. Become a friend of your child if you want to be a part of their decisions and experiences.
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