Understanding and Supporting Your Moody Teenage Daughter: A Parent's Guide

I’m so so ashamed of this. My daughter is 13. I adopted her last year. She is my husband’s biological child, but the biological mother hasn’t been in the picture since my daughter was 18 months old. I genuinely love the girl and want the very best for her, but holy hell I don’t LIKE her.

I am a stay at home mom and I dedicate my life to her and her brother (my biological child). I take her to all of her activities and talk to her about her interests and hobbies and know her friends and have sleepovers and take her to events and try to have mother daughter bonding time as much as possible. Truthfully I spend more time with her than I do with my biological son or my husband, just because of the nature of her schedule and activities.

On paper, she is a good kid. She gets good grades and doesn’t do drugs or anything of that nature.

At home she is a terror. She is moody, sullen, rude. I have to walk on eggshells around her every day. Any single comment I make is met with some rude snarky comeback. She is sneaky and a compulsive liar. Every day, I pick her up from school, and I have her favorite snacks or drinks waiting for her. I have music she likes playing in the car. I try to greet her with a bright and sunny smile, and I ask her about her day. Most of the time I’m met with ‘awful’. I ask her what’s wrong, or what happened, and she’ll bring up some incredibly menial thing like ‘my friends were all trying to talk to me at once and I was so annoyed.’ Or ‘I lost my pencil and I’m pissed off.’ The very smallest things can completely ruin her day. She gets stuck in her emotions. She has no perspective of how nice her life is. She’s pushed away all of her friends except one because her moods and attitudes are so hard to deal with.

We recently started therapy, because clearly she can’t communicate with me, and my feelings about her aren’t going to help the matter. Wednesday will be our second session. I feel so anxious about it, I want to get the root of her issues as soon as possible, so we can go back to being a happy family. I genuinely don’t know why she is so unhappy and angry all the time, but it’s weighing on me so much. It’s at the point where I’m having seriously negative thoughts about her and I dread interacting with her.

I know part of the issue is that I feel like I am trying to be a good mom and she’s still angry and sullen and thinks her life is awful. I also know these are normalish teenage behaviors. I feel resentful of her. I grew up in a household where I had to walk on eggshells around an abusive alcoholic father and volatile, mentally ill mother. I wasn’t allowed to show resentment or anger. I think this makes me even angrier at her. It’s miserable.

EDIT Adding some context

Therapy is for her. We decided to start after she had a particularly bad bout of anger and cut all her hair off and told me she did it so she wouldn’t cut her skin. I asked her thoughts and opinions on it, and she was open to the idea. The therapist wants to have regular sessions with both of us as well. The first session my daughter requested I be present as she wasn’t comfortable talking alone yet.

She is diagnosed with ADHD. I also have ADHD. Possibly a less severe or differently presenting type than hers. She is medicated. It doesn’t seem to affect the anger one way or another. Taking medicine is also her choice. She takes it on weekdays and chooses not to on the weekends.

This behavior is fairly recent. Up until she was about 12 things were wonderful. No one is perfect, myself clearly included, but there wasn’t a sense of anger emanating from her all the time like there is now.

I adopted her because I love her, I asked her permission, and I want to always be a part of her life if she’ll have me.

I recognize a lot of people are saying I need my own therapy. I agree. I can also see how maybe it’s possible I’m overcompensating to be a ‘great mom’ because of my own issues. That part is a tough one for me to tackle.

I love my daughter. Always have and always will. I just, again, don’t LIKE her very much right now. Those insinuating otherwise seem to be projecting their own issues onto my post. I wish you all well.