On Saturday my younger son had a 9am baseball game, so we let the older one sleep in and miss it. He's thirteen, it was early, there was no reason to drag him out.

At nearly noon, he was still asleep. So I woke him up. The reaction I got back was something else. One after the other, anger as if a beast had been awakened.

Most mornings are like above nowadays, it’s how we start our day. He wakes up with a bad attitude and is basically hangry. He'll be rude, he'll be short and at some point food goes in and a switch flips. He becomes himself again. Funny, warm, the kid I know.

So we've learned to just wait. Internally, I know he’s a teen and is going through hormonal changes so between waking up and eating, I ignore nearly everything. Mostly because there’s no version of that conversation that goes well at 8:40 in the morning: what I can't always tell is whether I'm being wise or just avoiding it.

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But there’s one question I'd actually like solved: how much of this do you write off as puberty, and how much do you address as a line being crossed?

Weirdly, both answers are available and wrong on their own.

Excuse all of it and you've taught a thirteen-year-old that how he speaks to people doesn't matter as long as he's tired.

Address every instance and you've got a war every morning with somebody whose brain is currently rewiring itself.

Nobody tells you where the line sits. You work it out by getting it wrong a few times.

I went looking for what's actually happening, and one article made sense.

Everyone knows the broad story - hormones, the prefrontal cortex still under construction, the parts of the brain that generate emotion maturing years ahead of the parts that regulate it. That's all true and it's all been said.

But researchers at San Diego State found something more specific. As puberty kicks in, a child's ability to recognise other people's emotions temporarily gets worse. Their accuracy at reading faces drops, and their reaction time slows. The lead researcher described it as a "noisier brain" - a surge of activity in the prefrontal cortex that makes it harder, for a while, to process what's in front of them.

Sit with that for a second.

At the exact age they become hardest to live with, they are also, briefly, less able to see what they're doing to you.

That is not a free pass. But it reframed something for me: when I assume he can see my face perfectly well and is choosing to carry on anyway, I may be giving him credit for a skill he's temporarily lost.

Everything you read about this is about managing the teenager. Almost nothing is about what it does to the parent.

It's been harder on my husband than on me. He hasn't learned to let it go yet. He takes it personally and he gets hurt and withdraws: if that's how you're going to treat me, I'm not going to spend time with you.

So I end up talking him down - “he still loves you, it's fine. He's thirteen.”

I'm not excusing any of it. But somebody has to be the one who isn't wounded that day, and in our house that's usually me partly because I'm around more, and partly because I've had more time to get used to it.

If you're the parent who's taking it personally: that's not weakness. You're being spoken to badly, repeatedly, by someone you love. Of course it lands.

Four things, and none of them happen at the moment.

1. I don't address it while it's happening. If he's being disrespectful, I walk away.

That is never the conversation. His adrenaline is up, mine is up, and nothing said in that window gets heard by anybody.

2. I bring it up later, usually as a joke. When he's in a decent mood, it can come out sideways and land properly.

My younger one has started doing an impression of how his brother behaves in the mornings and everyone laughs, including him. He sees it. Nobody got lectured.

3. I ask him a question. In the moment, occasionally, I'll just say: do you think that's disrespectful? Do you think that's okay to say?

He doesn't answer. He goes quiet because he knows.

For me, that's enough. I don't need the answer. The question does the whole job without anybody raising their voice or anybody having to climb down.

4. I pick what's worth it. Not every rude comment gets a response. Most don't. I'm choosing the ones that matter and letting the rest go past, because I only get so many of these conversations before he stops having them with me.

He's a funny kid. I think that's part of what makes him good at acting.

What he does is turn up a few hours later and announce: "I was a different person then. I'm a new person now."

That's the apology and I'll take it because what it tells me is that he knows. He knows what he was like, he knows it wasn't okay, and he's found a way to acknowledge it that doesn't require him to be humbled in front of his mother.

A forced apology would be worthless. He'd be performing it and we'd both know. This one's real, it's just wearing a joke.

Here's the thing I actually hold onto when I want to go in hard.

If every small thing becomes an explosion, you don't get a better-behaved teenager. You get a teenager who's learned that going to his parents produces an explosion.

Then, when something genuinely serious happens and it will, they won’t come to you. Not because they don't trust you with it, but because the last fourteen conversations went badly and they have no reason to expect this one won't.

That's the trade. Every morning I let something small go, I'm protecting a conversation I haven't had yet and can't afford to lose.

So: deep breath. Walk away. Come back to it later when there's room.

If you can't get calm and some days nobody can, bring somebody else in. A partner, a grandparent, a coach, a teacher, someone they listen to. You don't have to be the one who handles every round of this.

Everything here is about ordinary adolescent moodiness,  the kind that's situational, passes within hours, and doesn't change who they fundamentally are.

If what you're seeing doesn't lift. If the irritability or low mood runs for weeks rather than hours, if they've dropped things they used to love, if sleep or appetite have shifted and stayed shifted that's worth a conversation with your doctor. Only because you shouldn't be the one making that call alone./

A friend of mine has a daughter about the same age and she said recently that she can't stand to be around her at the moment. The attitude, the ungratefulness, the disrespect about everything. She's not fun to be around.

I knew exactly what she meant, and I think a lot of us would rather not say that out loud about our own child.

So here it is: this stage is not fun. You're allowed to find it unpleasant. You're allowed to be relieved when they're at school.

It's also not permanent, and it's not personal, and some mornings it genuinely isn't even deliberate.

Wait for the food. Walk away from the rest. Come back later.

See you next week,
Lakshmi 💛

P.S. Try the one question: do you think that was okay to say? 

Don't fill the silence. Just let it sit there. It works far better than anything I've said at volume.