This is an automatically translated description

Laurent Kennedy has written a survival guide for her teenage daughter. «Mum, are you normal?!» – is a light at the end of the tunnel for those parents who have already given up hope that this emotional swing will one day come to an end and life will shine with colour again.

Motherhood is not always a joy. It is often loneliness, hopelessness and despair. It is not only happiness that you want to tell your friends about, but also shameful moments that you can't tell anyone about. Just yesterday, your daughter resembled an angel and fell asleep to your lullaby. Today, she holds you up to an ATM, asks you to turn off your outdated playlist in the car, is embarrassed in front of friends, doesn't thank you for the gifts you've been saving for a whole year in the hope of comforting your child... in short, she lowers your self-esteem - and this is when you yourself are going through a midlife crisis.

There are 1001 features of teenage girls that you didn't even know about until you encountered them yourself.

We were warned that teenagers have hormones that are as high as pregnant women's, they can be aggressive and dramatise even innocent things. But we had no idea that they would steal your peace with their mood swings and spontaneous wild ideas, make you drink sedatives in an attempt not to go crazy yourself.

The book is written in a light, ironic style.

The author is a psychologist and columnist who has been writing about parenting for years. Laurent Kennedy is a mother of four children, three of whom are teenagers.

«Mum, are you normal?!How can parents, especially mothers, survive under the same roof with their teenage daughters without going crazy? And what if this tsunami hits your family ship at the same time as your own midlife crisis? What are synapses, separation and teenage logic and how does it all work? Where is the limit of normality in teenage behaviour? What are the most effective strategies for building relationships with teenagers? British journalist and writer Lorraine Candy will lead you along the path of learning all these wisdom. A loving and thinking mother of four children, three of whom are girls, she easily, with humour and self-irony, based on her own experience and information gleaned from many dozens of competent sources, shares recipes for solving problems, warns against possible mistakes, inspires and convinces that everything is transient, and the result of properly directed efforts will be a wonderful young person, the pride of his family, a worthy and responsible member of society.

Quotes from the book:

Signs that you have a teenager:

It takes forever to get to bed. Bedtime is getting later and later. Then (around the age of eleven) you just lose control of it on the weekends. Suddenly, the bedtime becomes a formality - you can't watch what you want on TV anyway, and soon, after saying goodnight, you start going to bed first. It's so infuriating...

«Are you okay? Almost every line ends with these words. Even if you tell them that you have invented a cure for cancer, they will still give you an unfriendly, incredulous look and ask you "Are you normal?" as if you have done something so terrible that you should fall through the ground in shame.

Suck it up. Now you know how your parents felt. It's a shocking thing to see. Especially when you notice them at breakfast (not to mention how you have to blush at parent-teacher conferences). Teenagers are also hypocrites: they walk around with hickeys themselves, but as soon as they see these external traces of love on you, they start imitating vomiting sounds, muttering something like "how disgusting..." and hurriedly leave the room.

***

Talking to teenagers:
– You'll never guess what I learned to do today!

***