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Girls Gone Wild
Get Your Preteen Off the Fast Track
By Kelly Burgess
*Donna Gibson of Jacksonville, Fla., is at her wit's end with her 12-year-old daughter, Jenna. Jenna was hanging out with a group of kids that Gibson knew had a bad reputation, so she forbade her from seeing them any longer. Gibson thought that had solved the problem, until one evening when she heard a thump and went to investigate.
"The minute I opened Jenna's door, I could tell that the lumps in her bed weren't her," says Gibson. "She had tucked her laundry under her covers and snuck out the window. I didn't know what to do, who to call or how long it had been going on. My first instinct was to call the police, but my husband convinced me to just wait. We turned her lights back off and sat in her room. Very quietly, about two hours later, she snuck back in the window. To say she was startled to see us was an understatement."
Although Gibson was upset and worried, she wasn't entirely surprised to find Jenna gone or to find that the problem they'd had with Jenna's unsavory friends had reached the next level. Jenna had been strong-willed and difficult to discipline since she was a very young child. Gibson's other two children, a boy, 17, and a girl, 14, are really no problem at all, beyond some typical, easily resolved conflicts as they've grown.
According to psychologist Scott Sells, Ph.D., the author of several books on raising troubled adolescents and teens and founder of the Troubled Teen Information Center, children don't usually just turn wild overnight.
"A lot of the problems we see with teens actually start well before the teen years, and parents are rarely taken by surprise by their children's behavior," says Sells. "The child who is throwing uncontrollable temper tantrums at age 6 could very well be the child experimenting with drugs or sexual activities at age 12. In the majority of cases, you can see problems coming. There are exceptions, such as having a child's behavior change negatively due to some sort of trauma, but that's not quite as common."
