13 years old, confusion of the first love, and parents in a panic: what to do? “Let your child worry and make mistakes,” advises psychotherapist Irina Mlodik. “Relationships can only be learned if they exist.”
“It is not easy for parents to observe the experiences of a teenager who has lost his head from love. How to convey to him our adult experience and how to warn against possible mistakes? We are trying to control the situation in order to intervene in time and help. But he does not want to share the details at all: the topic of feelings is that intimate zone where access for parents is limited.
The experience of falling in love is absolutely necessary for a growing person, because he has to form his own image of a man (woman), and this cannot be done without contact with a peer of the opposite sex. Right now, when he is so awkward, it is important for him to make sure that he can be attractive and like him. The feeling of love will teach you to listen to another person who is so different from him and at the same time very valuable to him. It will tell him and about himself — and this is also very important, because a teenager knows so little about himself new, emerging. The fact that he is loved will inspire and support him, he will feel valuable, good, worthy of someone’s warm feeling. We would, of course, prefer that he sit at the lessons, and not run to the cinema, spend hours on the phone or on the Internet. So it would be calmer, because it seems to us: the later the first love overtakes him, the more smoothly it will pass. But this is an illusion. Because relationships need to be learned, and for this you need to be in them. At the age of 13-14, this is the time, because you can afford to make mistakes and even experience unhappy love, but with fewer complications than at thirty and for the first time. First love, of course, is not chickenpox, but … the later it overtakes, the harder it flows.
In order for even an unsuccessful experience to be useful to a growing person, it is important for parents to respect everything that happens to him, just to be there, ready to listen, support, wipe away tears, say: “It hurts you, and now you can’t believe that someday the pain will subside, but still it will happen. When you lose something that is valuable, you always want to cry. His experiences hurt us ourselves, but he needs them as the first experience of suffering. We also need them, because we are convinced that the son or daughter is able to cope with them. After all, in fact, the worst thing is not unhappy love at the age of 13, but the fact that it may not happen in his life … «