Richard Hogan: My 14-year-old daughter says she doesn't want to go back to school

"I think what you’ve described here will resonate with many parents in this country. Teenage girls are currently the loneliest group in the world."

Dear Richard,

Can you please give me some advice? My daughter is 14 and becoming anxious. 

She was always a bubbly girl, but last year something happened with her best friend and now she has no one to meet. 

She has spent the last two months up in her room, and we are really worried about her. She has told us that she doesn’t want to go back to school. 

When we ask her about it, she says she is fine, but I know she is not. It has been very hard to watch our lovely, confident girl change like this. We really need advice. 

My husband loses his temper with her because she doesn’t even want to come down for dinner. I think she has an issue with food, also. 

Please can you give us some advice?

I think what you’ve described here will resonate with many parents in this country. Teenage girls are currently the loneliest group in the world. 

But this is not simply about technology or beauty standards; your daughter has experienced a rupture in her close relationship with her best friend. 

This has really impacted her. Everything in that teenage brain is designed for social connection. That has been disrupted. 

I don’t know what has happened, but it is significant enough that they have currently stopped being friends.

Depending on what happened, the friendship might heal by itself, or it may need a little intervention to help them back into their friendship, or it may be that she needs to start thinking about making new friends. 

In my experience, losing a best friend like this can be devastating to a teenage girl. It sounds like she overly relied on this one friend to meet her social needs.

So, developing new friends will be an important step out of this current predicament. But making new friends at 14 is riddled with land mines that teenagers want to avoid at all costs. 

They don’t want to seem needy or desperate and so they don’t reach out to other friends. I think you need to talk to her about making new friends. 

The first thing I would do, if this were my own daughter, is talk to her about what has happened. I would try to ask her sensitive questions about this incident, and try to figure out if there is the potential for a rekindling of the friendship.

Try to avoid judgment, and just ask very simple, direct questions such as: Would you like to have the friendship back? What do you think needs to happen to be friends again? 

Are there other friends you could start meeting while this friendship is struggling? What is the most disappointing thing about what has happened?

I would be trying to get a sense of where the friendship is, and also helping her to see that she should start to make other friends. It sounds like they have been friends for a long time, so hopefully you know her friend’s parents. 

I would contact them and ask them what their perception of the relationship fallout is, and I’d be asking them what you can both do to support them back into friendship.

It sounds like your daughter has an issue with control. I’d imagine she feels out of control at the moment and is really struggling to regulate her emotions. 

Teenagers often control food to manage their feelings. I would talk to her about her feelings and ask how she is coping with uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.

When we are fearful, we have two main responses: one is to control everything, and the other is to avoid. It sounds like your daughter is also avoiding social interactions. 

I wonder why this is? Has she experienced a social embarrassment? Has something happened that she is avoiding?

It doesn’t sound like she has explained to you what has happened, and I wonder about that too. She is communicating something through her reticence to tell you, and that sounds like embarrassment to me. 

Again, I would have a very sensitive conversation with her and explain that we all make mistakes and we all embarrass ourselves from time to time, and there is nothing wrong with that, because that’s how we learn.

Offer her an invitation to tell you what is going on. Don’t push her, just invite the conversation and leave it with her, and see what happens. 

You said your husband loses his temper with her; when we lose our temper, it tells us that our competency is being pushed. This is not helpful.

You don’t want her to feel like you are both annoyed with her because she is going through this difficult time. She needs to feel like you are both there for her and that you will not judge her for whatever has happened.

His bad temper is telling you that he is stressed. He must learn how to manage that stress without upsetting his daughter. 

I think you might all benefit from speaking to a family therapist. Maybe explain it that you need advice as a family on how to deal with the tension in the house. That way, she won’t feel like she is being brought to therapy, and might tell the therapist what has happened.

Her negative feelings about school should come out too, and this may really help to alleviate all that is going around in her head. Hopefully, this friendship will heal, and things will settle down.