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Recently, my 12-year-old was showing me a school project about his future, including going to college across the country.

The idea of him going away to college wasn’t a fun one, but as cheerfully as I could muster, I said, “I can’t wait to visit you there.”

He blurted back, “You’re not invited!”

He quickly added, “Just joking!” but I got the message.

This little guy—who used to greet me so enthusiastically that onlookers thought we’d been separated for days, not hours—was telling me that he’s not so little anymore.

Our children start out as helpless infants who almost feel like an extension of our own bodies. Someday—in the not-too-distant future—they will be self-sufficient adults, possibly living across the country. It is their job to get there, and our job to support them as they grow, mature, and separate from us. Toddlers want to “Do it myself!” as they strive for independence. Your 8-year-old might like snuggles at home but don’t be surprised when she suddenly drops your hand on the way to the bus. “Someone might see us!” (Yup, it happened to me recently.)

Your child really starts in earnest on the road to independence in the tween/teen years. These can be some of the hardest you face as a parent. Kids this age can seem like children one minute and wise beyond their years the next. They take 2 steps away and one step back.

Not only is your child experiencing the physical upheaval of puberty or pre-puberty, his brain is rewiring and this can be a source of emotional upheaval.

Amid all of this, your child is doing his job and separating from you. You both will experience growing pains.

As a parenting coach and the mama of a teenager, a tween, and a pre-tween, I know how hard these years can be. You are not alone: a recent article stated that “The years surrounding the onset of adolescence are among the most difficult times for mothers. Compared to mothers of infants, these women experience the lowest levels of maternal happiness and are even more stressed than new parents.” It’s hard to move out of the center of your child’s life—let alone be excluded from the circle.

The whole point of parenting is to raise children into adults who no longer need you. That doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Sentences from my two oldest often start with “No offense, Mom…” I often get karate blocked when I go in for a hug. I’m no longer the first to know how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking.

But I also know certain tweens and teens (ahem) who still ask for tuck-ins and like me to walk them to the door in the morning to say good-bye, who seek me out to pour out their ideas and their hearts when they are in the mood.

How do we stay close to our kids when they are (developmentally appropriately) beginning to move away from us?

We need to parent for both connection AND independence. We have to hold on so they can let go.

Here are some strategies you can use and ideas to keep in mind as your growing child transitions from your little one to an adolescent and eventually, to an adult.

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“You’re moving?” the other mother said to me.

I looked at her in confusion.

“I am?”

Apparently, this news had come to her by way of my kindergarten-age daughter, who had announced to some of her classmates that we were moving. The impending move was news to me.

I looked at my daughter, who stared back at me impassively. Her face betrayed nothing: no guilt, no shame, no trace of wrongdoing.

“Maybe she is,” we laughed, “but the rest of us aren’t.”

A few years ago, I would have been appalled by my daughter’s bold-faced lie, which seemed to have come out of left field.

The rivers of my horror would have been deep, except that her older brother had already taken me for a swim in those waters.

A few years before at school pick up, my son’s preschool teacher and I struck up a conversation. She asked me how my husband’s job in Washington, D.C. was going. I looked at her blankly. My husband was traveling but he’d only gone a few hours away, not coast-to-coast. Had she confused me with another parent?

No, she had not.

My son, it seems, had told his class at circle time that his daddy was working in Washington, D.C. for the foreseeable future. He’d said it with such assured confidence and great specificity that multiple teachers believed it to be true.

It wasn’t the only thing that he’d said. Over the course of a week or so, he’d shared vast quantities of information with Room A: his grandparents had come to live with us, we’d had pizza for the previous night’s dinner, and he had a pet snake. Unfortunately (or fortunately in the case of the snake), none of it was true.

My heart sunk. If he could tell such off-base whoppers with panache at four, what deceptions would he be engaging in later in life?

His future flashed before me: It was a barren wasteland, full of disgrace and awash in criminality.

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We don’t do anything well when we’re tired.

We don’t drive well, perform surgery well or screen airline baggage well when we’re tired.

And as millions of us know from experience, we don’t parent well either.

Science gives us some clues as to why. When we don’t get enough sleep, the frontal and parietal control regions of the brain don’t raise activation as well as normal, and there is reduced activation in the visual sensory cortex.

In plain language, our brains don’t work right. Studies have found that just one night without sleep causes impairment in tasks requiring flexible thinking, that people who are sleep deprived are more irritable (duh!) and that sleep deprivation makes it difficult to multitask.

So why do we expect ourselves to be good parents when we’re exhausted?

Maybe because being tired seems like the very definition of parenthood. Newborn babies wake frequently to eat, older babies and toddlers wake from teething pain and separation anxiety, older children wake when they have nightmares, and everyone sleeps poorly when they’re sick.

Luckily, most sleep disturbances are relatively short-lived, and research suggests that our brains go back to normal after getting some good sleep. But until we can get that sleep, how do we manage our children and maintain our commitment to positive parenting?

As the mother of two children who regularly wake me up in the middle of the night (often repeatedly!), I have a lot of experience parenting with minimal sleep. I’ve learned that although it’s hard to be the parent I want to be when I’m tired, it is possible if I keep a few simple things in mind.

Below are some of the tricks I’ve learned to be the best parent I can be when I’m tired.

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We all know that children are naturally inquisitive. We also know their inquiry sometimes manifests itself in annoying ways or at inopportune times, “Are we there yet?” or “Is that lady having a baby?” being among the most common examples.

Our culture inundates us with examples of parents losing their cool with inquiring youngsters, from Al Bundy to Homer Simpson. In malls and grocery stores across the country, mothers and fathers are telling their little ones to stop asking, be quiet, or shut up.

In so doing though, they run the risk of stifling their children’s curious nature, which could hamper learning and close the door on possible futures at a very early age.

How to Respond to Questions You Can Answer

When our little (or not so little) ones ask us questions, we are presented with an opportunity to explain the world to them. Kneel down so you can be eye-to-eye and discuss dinosaurs or stars, or which bugs hide under rocks or why we have belly buttons, but the doll doesn’t. If you’re driving, turn down the radio (you’ll hear the song again) and address the question.

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Don’t you just hate it when you try to offer positive encouragement to your child, but it falls completely flat?

It happened to me just this week. My oldest came home and proudly showed me the ‘A’ he got on his biography of Lord Admiral Nelson. I was so impressed that I immediately said, “Good Job!”

He looked at me expectantly for a few more seconds. And then his face fell.

“Ugh. That’s what you always say!” he said, and he snatched his paper out of my hands, obviously disappointed.

“But,” I stammered, “I really think you did a great job!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” he muttered as he walked away dejected.

I felt like the carpet had been pulled out from under my feet. Here I was thinking that I’d been encouraging my son. Apparently though, “good job” wasn’t the way to go.

This is not the case in just our house. Research has shown consistently that generic praise like “good job” may actually do more harm than good.

There is even research which suggests praising children on how they did can cause your child to instinctively reject the praise or, even worse yet, deliberately do the opposite. If they don’t believe they did a good job, having you say “good job” means nothing. Children result in feeling manipulated to perform and they will rebel against the manipulation.

Too much “good job” praise from parents can also cause children to lose their internal motivation. They achieve only to receive approval from you and not because they are interested in what they are learning or feel good about succeeding. This creates adults who are unable to find satisfaction because they don’t have practice in feeling what makes them satisfied.

So, if we are to avoid blanket praise like “good job”, what can we say instead that will show our kids we really are proud of them and impressed by their achievement? How can we offer our kids positive encouragement?

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