When you have babies, nobody has to tell you that they need you. They make that abundantly clear in the form of crying the second you sit down, shower, leave the room while they’re sleeping, or attempt to eat something with both hands. Entire industries exist just to help parents get through those early years: parental leave coordinators, lactation consultants, mommy-and-me classes, and parenting books that tell you what your baby should be doing at every single stage.
Then your child gets older and the message seems to reverse. They can make their own breakfast, stay home alone, and barely acknowledge your presence when you walk into a room. You hear from parenting experts and seasoned parents alike that this pulling away is exactly what’s supposed to happen—and your job is to let it. There’s no middle-school equivalent of tummy time and far less guidance about how involved you should be once your child’s main form of communication becomes a closed bedroom door.
From the onset of early parenthood, we’re warned about the stage when our kids gain their independence, but what’s less clear to us is how to be there for them when they want us nearby one minute and out of their business the next.
Enter “teen-ternity” leave, a term circulating on social media for parents cutting back at work (or stepping away from it altogether) during their child’s teen years. Based on our reporting, there’s little evidence that this is happening on a large scale, but the idea certainly raises a question that’s hard to dismiss: Do teenagers need more of their parents’ time, or do they need us to be available in a different way? Here’s what the experts say.
Why do teenagers seem to want nothing to do with us?
One of the strangest parts of parenting a teenager is that the more they seem to want you to back off, the more you may wonder whether you’re actually supposed to.
There’s a real developmental reason for all that distance. Psychologists call it separation-individuation, which is essentially the process of teenagers loosening some of their ties to their families, connecting more to their peers, and figuring out who they really are outside of being someone’s child.
“What looks like rejection is almost always development doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” explains Lisa Damour, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and author of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. “If I were renaming that clinical term for how it actually plays out in family life, I might call it ‘the season when your kid can't stand to be seen with you,’ because that's often what it looks like from the inside of a household.”
Still, the act of your teenager actually pulling away from you might not look or feel all that predictable. For instance, your child might barely look up from their phone for three days, then suddenly appear in your bedroom at 11 p.m. ready to discuss a friendship problem that started six months ago. That whiplash, Dr. Damour explains, is disorienting for parents, but it’s not a sign something’s gone awry. “It’s a sign that your teenager is doing two things at once: pulling away enough to individuate, and staying close enough to still need you.”
Ken Ginsburg, M.D., M.S.Ed., a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and cofounder of the Center for Parent and Teen Communication, says the teen years are one of the biggest periods of development—second only to the first three years of life. “The difference in adolescence is not whether we are needed but what we do,” he says. “In childhood we ‘do for.’ In adolescence we guide them how to ‘do for’ themselves. In childhood we protect; in adolescence we understand that preparation is protection.”
Does spending more time with your teen actually make a difference?
It turns out, there’s a good reason to care about staying close during these years. A 2023 JAMA Network Open study involving more than 15,000 people looked at how the relationships they had with their parents as teenagers were associated with their health and well-being nearly 14 years later. The study found that the teens who felt close to their parents reported better mental health, more optimism, better overall health, and stronger romantic relationships later on. They also had lower rates of some substance-related problems.
“What stood out most was both the breadth and durability of the associations,” says study author Andrew Pool, Ph.D., M.Sc., director of research, translation, and dissemination at the Center for Parent and Teen Communication. He also points out that these patterns showed up in relationships with both mothers and fathers.
But Pool points out that time together was only one piece of the puzzle. What seemed to matter most wasn’t how many hours parents and teens spent together, but whether teens actually felt loved, close to their parents, and good about their relationship overall.
When it comes to trying to spend more time with your teen, Dr. Damour warns that that can actually backfire. “I hear from a lot of parents who are trying to schedule connection—a standing family activity, a weekly outing—only to be met with resistance, and then they worry that's a sign of a bigger problem,” she says. “Usually it isn't—it's a sign that teenagers want to be the ones who decide when and how closeness happens, because autonomy is the organizing drive of adolescence.”
Instead of reconfiguring your schedule to get more hours with your teen, she recommends focusing on being around in the kind of way that makes it easy for your teen to come to you when they’re ready. “That's a different, and honestly more achievable, goal,” she adds.
What does “being available” to a teenager actually look like?
Sadly, announcing that you’re emotionally available and open to hearing their innermost thoughts and feelings probably won’t lead to the genuine, heartfelt conversation you hoped.
Your best bet is to be what Dr. Damour calls “quietly available”—folding laundry in the room where your teen’s watching TV, hanging around the kitchen while they make a snack, or simply being nearby and interruptible without repeatedly trying to get them to open up.
That’s also why she says cars are one of the best places to connect, since nobody has to make eye contact, the conversation has a built-in endpoint, and the parent isn't positioned as the one running the conversation. A teenager who had absolutely nothing to say at dinner may suddenly become fascinatingly chatty the second you’re ready to go to sleep.
“The through-line in all of these moments is that the teenager is the one in control of when the conversation starts and when it ends,” Damour says.
It might feel wildly inefficient to make yourself casually available for an hour on the off chance your teenager decides to say something during minute 57, but experts say that’s often how it happens. What feels like throwaway time to us may feel much safer and less loaded to them.
Ginsburg says meaningful presence is really about becoming the kind of parent your child wants to approach when they’ve made a mistake, feel anxious, or simply need help figuring something out. “People say parenting is a 24-hour job, but that doesn’t mean you have to be present all the time,” he says. “It is really about emotional availability and showing up when needed. You don’t even need the perfect words; just being there matters.”
How can you tell normal distance from a genuine cause for concern?
This is where things can get tricky, because a perfectly happy teenager and one who’s struggling may both spend a significant amount of time in their room with the door shut.
Your best bet, according to Dr. Damour, is to pull back and look at their life as a whole. If they’re spending less time with you but still seeing friends, partaking in extracurricular activities, and keeping up with their schoolwork, they may be just fine. What deserves a closer look, she explains, is a teen who starts withdrawing from everyone—not only their parents. "The rule of thumb I use is: distance from parents alone is expected; distance from everyone is a signal to look closer,” she adds.
For Suzanne Alderson, author of Never Let Go: How to Parent Your Child Through Mental Illness, that difference became terrifyingly clear when her 14-year-old daughter, who had been severely bullied, attempted suicide.
At first, Alderson’s presence was a matter of physical safety because her daughter couldn’t be left alone, but she soon realized a different kind of safety was necessary—an emotional one that would give her daughter the confidence to come to her without being judged, pushed to talk, or made responsible for managing her mother’s fear.
The type of support her daughter needed also kept changing. Sometimes Alderson had to attend appointments, navigate school meetings, or advocate on her daughter’s behalf. Other times, being there meant making dinner, watching TV together, or just sitting in the same room without asking question after question.
“I had to learn that presence and intervention are not the same thing,” Alderson says. She also learned that recovery wasn’t a straight line. Her daughter could seem more independent for a while and then suddenly need much more support again. Looking back, Alderson says she had confused her daughter’s growing independence in daily life for needing her less emotionally.
“I wish I had understood that teenagers don’t simply need less from us as they get older—they need something different,” she says.
So, do parents need to take “teen-ternity” leave?
For Alderson, stepping away from her business wasn’t a carefully thought-out lifestyle decision. Her daughter couldn’t safely be left alone and there was no realistic way to keep working while protecting her simultaneously.
Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at New America, says she has heard anecdotally about some parents cutting back during their children’s teen years, but teen-ternity is still “not showing up in the statistics as a widespread trend.”
In fact, the data is telling a slightly different story: Most parents are still working. Across all families with children under 18, nearly three-quarters of mothers and 94 percent of fathers are employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For many families, quitting or taking an extended break from work isn’t a realistic option. Schulte points to the rising costs of housing, health care, education, child care, food, and gas, adding “jobs have become more precarious and poorly paid and as employers and policymakers haven’t raised wages enough to keep up with the rising cost of living.”
Alderson’s experience shows that there are instances where a parent may sometimes need to make a big change for their child’s safety, but notes that leaving work’s not the standard for being a good parent to a teenager. Ginsburg suggests starting with what’s happening in your own child’s life instead: Are they starting a new school, dealing with a breakup, or facing another transition that calls for more of your attention right now?
If your job allows, that might mean asking for flexibility for a while or protecting a few hours you might otherwise give to work. At home, it may be as simple as putting your phone down when your teenager starts talking. The point, Ginsburg says, is to recognize when your teenager may need a little more access to you and make room where you realistically can.
Ginsburg says the ordinary errands can help, too. A trip to the grocery store gives you time together without requiring a heart-to-heart. And when you’re apart, a text about something your teen cares about can let them know you’re thinking of them without asking for an immediate conversation.
Alderson suggests replacing the question Can I afford to take teen-ternity? with a much more useful one: “What does my child need from me at this stage, what can I realistically offer, and what support do we both need around us?”
What your teenager needs at any given moment may be more time, but it could just as easily be more listening, more trust, or firmer boundaries around work. You don’t necessarily need to call it “teen-ternity”—you just need to notice when your kid is reaching for you, even when they seem determined to convince you they’re not.
