How to handle daughter's first heartbreak

[Jukesgrrl]

Thanks for the update. They sound like kids with good heads on their shoulders. And good moms. Best to all.

[JammBoy]

Show her how pathetic teen relationships are and she'll eventually get over it.

[sfcambridge]

Originally Posted by Wmsn4Life

I vividly remember the time my high school boyfriend (of 3 years) and I broke up, and I could not stop crying.

After I had gone to bed and still kept crying, my dad came in my room, sat next to my bed, and started reading Anna Karenina out loud (it was a school assignment!).

It was really not like him to do something like that, and he never told me to stop crying or to get over it. He just helped me think about something else until I fell asleep.

I thought it was a very cool thing to do.

That is so sweet...

[charolastra00]

Originally Posted by malamute

With mine it was a teenage son who stopped eating and moped around. You read of too many teenage suicides over breakups --- I didn't know how serious to take it. So I got mad at him and told him "this is why I told you that you were too young to date" and he insisted he wasn't too young to date and I told him "look at how you're acting, if you can't handle a breakup, you're not mature enough to be dating in the first place", and he replied he was handling it just fine but that he was just a little bit sad.

Then I told him that not eating and moping for so long didn't look to me like he was handling it and that almost no one ends up with their first "love" forever, breaking up is just part of it all, getting dumped is just part of it all. He snapped out of it soon after.

Some of it's just drama queen stuff. I'm not sure what the signs of a real problem reaction might be.

Not old enough to date? You just described every breakup of a longish term (6+ months) relationship that either myself or a friend has gone through, and we're in our mid-20s! Things feel much more intense when you're a teenager. At least an adult, you can still feel sad but you have the coping mechanisms to deal a bit better.

But the way you interacted with your son is much the way my parents interacted with me in my first breakup. I learned right then and there that my parents were not capable of supporting me emotionally. 10 years, one rape, and one cancer diagnosis later, they haven't proven me wrong yet (though I do not give them much of a chance to do so because I still feel the pain of being told to suck it up when I needed a little coddling the most).