There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with parenting a teenager. It is not the physical exhaustion of parenting a young child, with its sleepless nights and constant vigilance. It is something more disorienting than that. It is the experience of watching someone you love become, in certain moments, a stranger. Of saying the wrong thing without knowing what the right thing is. Of feeling simultaneously too close and completely shut out.
If you are parenting an adolescent in Melbourne and finding it harder than you expected, you are not failing. Adolescence is, from a psychological perspective, one of the most significant and turbulent periods of human development. Understanding what is actually happening beneath the conflict, the withdrawal, and the volatility can make an enormous difference, both to how parents relate to their teenagers and to whether they seek support before the distance becomes too wide to bridge.
This article offers a psychoanalytic perspective on adolescence: what it is, why it is so difficult for families, and what parents can do when they feel like they are losing the thread.
What Is Adolescence, Really?
In everyday conversation, adolescence is often described as a phase of hormones and rebellion. That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete. From a psychoanalytic perspective, adolescence is something more profound: it is the second major moment of identity formation in a person’s life.
The first happens in early childhood, when the infant begins to distinguish itself from its caregivers and takes up a position in language and in the family. The second moment, adolescence, involves a renegotiation of that position. The teenager must, in some sense, loosen the ties that bound them to their parents as a young child, and begin the work of constructing an identity of their own: their own desires, values, relationships, and relationship to their body.
This is not a comfortable process. It requires something to push against. For most teenagers, that something is the family, and most particularly the parents. The conflict, withdrawal, and emotional intensity of adolescence are not simply bad behaviour. They are, in many cases, the outward signs of a necessary and difficult internal process.
This does not make the experience of parenting a teenager any less hard. But it changes the frame. The question shifts from “what is wrong with my child?” to “what is my child trying to become, and how can I stay connected to them while they do it?”
Why Adolescence Is Hard for Parents Too
There is a tendency in conversations about adolescence to focus entirely on the teenager. But adolescence is also a significant psychological event for parents. It stirs things up.
Watching your child begin to separate, to prefer their friends to you, to challenge your authority, to form opinions that differ sharply from your own, can activate deep feelings that are not always easy to name. Grief, sometimes. A sense of rejection. Old feelings about your own adolescence and the family you grew up in. Anxiety about whether you have done enough, said the right things, prepared them adequately for a world that feels increasingly complex and threatening.
The psychoanalytic insight here is important: the feelings that parents have in response to their teenager’s behaviour are not only reactions to what is happening now. They are often entangled with the parent’s own history, their own adolescence, their relationship with their own parents, their unresolved experiences of rejection, conflict, or loss.
This is not a reason to feel shame. It is a reason to take your own emotional experience seriously and, if necessary, to seek your own support. Parents who have some understanding of their own inner landscape are generally better placed to remain present and regulated in the face of a teenager’s storms.
When Normal Adolescent Struggle Becomes Something More
Not all adolescent distress is part of a normal developmental process. One of the most important and most difficult tasks for parents is learning to distinguish between the turbulence that is developmentally expected and the signs that something more serious is occurring.
It is worth seeking professional support when you notice:
• Persistent low mood or withdrawal that lasts more than a few weeks and is not tied to a specific event.
• Significant changes in eating, sleeping, or school attendance that represent a meaningful departure from previous functioning.
• Self-harm or expressions of hopelessness even if they seem to be said in passing or appear to be attention-seeking.
• Escalating conflict at home that is becoming physically threatening, or that is leaving family members feeling frightened or unsafe.
• Sudden withdrawal from all social connection rather than the normal preference for peers over parents.
• Expressions of confusion about identity including around gender and sexuality, that seem to be causing significant distress rather than healthy exploration.
These signs do not necessarily indicate a serious disorder. But they do indicate that the adolescent may be struggling with something they cannot manage alone, and that professional support, either for the young person, for the family, or for both, is worth pursuing.
A Psychoanalytic Approach to Working With Adolescents
Adolescents are often reluctant therapy clients. They may attend because a parent has insisted, or because a school counsellor has recommended it, rather than from their own motivation. They may be deeply sceptical of adults who claim to want to help, having had experiences of being assessed, labelled, or advised in ways that felt diminishing rather than respectful.
A psychoanalytic approach to working with young people takes these realities seriously. Rather than arriving with a predetermined agenda or a set of skills to teach, the aim is to create a space where the young person can begin to speak in their own terms, at their own pace, about what is actually going on for them, not what the adults in their life think is going on.
This matters enormously to adolescents. A core part of what they are working through is the question of whether they have an inner life that belongs to them, one that is not simply an extension of their parents’ anxieties or expectations. Therapy that honours this, that treats the young person as the authority on their own experience, is far more likely to be engaged with meaningfully.
At Myles Medwell Psychology in Richmond, adolescents are met with the same respect, curiosity, and non-directiveness that characterises the broader psychoanalytic approach. There is no pressure to arrive at conclusions or produce particular outcomes. The work unfolds according to what the young person brings, and what they need.
The Role of Family: Holding On While Letting Go
One of the central paradoxes of parenting adolescents is that the relationship requires you to do two things at once that feel contradictory: to remain genuinely present and available, and to allow genuine separation.
Too much holding on, through monitoring, controlling, and demanding closeness, and the teenager experiences the family as a suffocating force to escape from. The conflict intensifies, the secrecy deepens, and the distance grows. Too much letting go, through disengaging, withdrawing, and leaving the teenager to navigate everything alone, and they lose the anchor they still, despite appearances, need.
The psychoanalytic concept that is useful here is what Donald Winnicott called the ‘holding environment’: a relational space that is reliable and consistent enough to be safe, but spacious enough to allow the person within it to explore, fall apart, and reconstitute themselves. Parents who can maintain this for their teenagers, who can weather the rejection and the anger without either retaliating or collapsing, provide something deeply important: proof that the relationship can survive the storm.
This is easier said than done. It requires a level of emotional regulation that most parents find genuinely difficult, particularly when they are also managing work, relationships, and their own mental health. It is not a sign of inadequacy to need support with it.
Family Conflict: What It Is Communicating
Family conflict during adolescence is almost universal. But the form it takes, and what drives it, varies enormously. Some families experience conflict that is primarily about control, about who makes decisions and on what terms. Others experience it as a kind of emotional flooding, where small disagreements rapidly escalate into crises. Others find themselves in a cold war: a household characterised by silence, withdrawal, and mutual avoidance.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, conflict is always communicating something. The question is: what? It may be communicating that the teenager feels unseen or unheard in their individuality. It may be communicating that there is something painful in the family system, an unspoken grief, an unresolved tension between the parents, an anxiety about the future, that is being expressed through the adolescent’s behaviour. It may be communicating that the teenager is struggling with something they cannot put into words, and that the only language available to them at present is the language of conflict.
This does not mean the conflict should be tolerated without limit. But it does mean that approaching it with curiosity rather than simply with authority is often more productive. “What are you trying to tell me?” is sometimes a more useful question than “why are you behaving like this?”
When to Seek Professional Parenting Support in Melbourne
There is still a tendency, in many families, to seek professional psychological support only when things have reached a crisis point. This is understandable. It reflects both the practical realities of busy family life and the cultural weight that continues to attach to seeking mental health help.
But waiting for crisis is rarely the most effective approach. The families who tend to navigate adolescence most successfully are those who reach out early, when the conflict is escalating but has not yet become entrenched, when the distance is widening but the relationship is not yet broken, when the parent has a growing sense that something is not right, even if they cannot quite articulate what it is.
Professional support can take several forms. It may involve individual therapy for the adolescent, to give them a space that is genuinely their own. It may involve support for the parents, either individually or together, to work through their own responses and develop more effective ways of staying connected. In some cases, family sessions may be appropriate, particularly where the conflict has become structured in a way that has taken on a life of its own.
At Myles Medwell Psychology, the practice is experienced in working with adolescents, young adults, and the families that surround them. Sessions are available in person at 53 Erin Street, Richmond, with telehealth options for families across Melbourne, Victoria, and Australia-wide. Medicare rebates are available under a Mental Health Care Plan, and NDIS funding is also accepted.
What Parents Can Do Right Now
While professional support can make a significant difference, there are things parents can do in the meantime that research and clinical experience consistently support:
• Stay curious rather than reactive. When your teenager does something that provokes you, try to pause before responding. Ask yourself what they might be communicating, rather than what they have done wrong.
• Maintain the relationship even when they push you away. Small, consistent gestures of connection, a shared meal, a brief check-in, a text message that asks nothing in return, keep the door open even during the most difficult periods.
• Take your own emotional experience seriously. If you are finding the parenting experience genuinely distressing, that matters and deserves attention. Seeking support for yourself is not a distraction from supporting your teenager. It is often a prerequisite for it.
• Avoid the trap of total surveillance. The impulse to monitor every phone, every friendship, every movement is understandable. But it often communicates to the teenager that they are not trusted, and closes down exactly the kind of openness you are trying to create.
• Know when to ask for help. Parenting is not a solo endeavour. Reaching out to a trusted friend, a GP, or a psychologist is a sign of commitment to your child, not a sign of failure.
Adolescence is a storm. It passes. But the quality of the relationship that survives it, the degree to which parent and teenager come out the other side still genuinely known to each other, depends in part on what happens during it. That work is worth doing, and it does not have to be done alone.
About Myles Medwell
Myles Medwell is a Clinical Psychologist based in Richmond, Melbourne, specialising in Lacanian psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapy. He works with children, adolescents, and adults across a wide range of presentations, with particular experience in working with young people navigating identity, anxiety, family conflict, and complex emotional difficulties. He holds a Master of Psychology (Clinical) from Federation University, is registered with AHPRA, and is a member of the Australian Clinical Psychology Association. He is currently in ongoing training at the Freudian School of Melbourne.
Practice address: 53 Erin Street, Richmond Melbourne VIC
Website: www.mylesmedwell.com.au
Free 15-minute phone consultation: Available for new clients and families exploring whether this is the right fit. In-person (Richmond) and telehealth sessions available.
For more information and advice about parenting a teenager, read this blog from the Triple P Program.
