Dear Jean, Thank you for being there for us parents! I have a lot to ask but I will try to narrow it down. I have two children--13 yr. old son and an 11 yr. old daughter. I have always had a close relationship to both, but my son and I have had a special relationship up until now. Ever since he was little it was me who would play ball with him whether it would be football, baseball or basketball. My husband and daughter had the TV thing in common, but my son and I always enjoyed being outside. We'd stay out until dark whether it was raining or not. Well, he has turned 13 in October and now we are so far apart. All we do is fight. In the beginning of the school year, he had a girlfriend which I found out through the grapevine. I was devasted especially when my daughter came home stating that my son and the girlfriend were kissing behind the school one Saturday. You see, there for about 8 weekends in a row, my son and his friends would meet at the school and ride bikes, skateboard, scooter, etc. It was a lot of fun for them and they were active the whole day. He was with a good bunch of boys and I was happy to run him in to the school. He was the one who lived the farthest from the school. The other boys practically live right by it. Anyway, I caught him in lies and sneaking around with the girlfriend. This is where it all started with our relationship. I was so upset that he lied to me about what he was doing and where he was at. The girlfriend thing is over now, and we have more arguing. My son was always very active in school and sports. He was involved in the band, baseball, football and basketball. Well, this year he played football, but at the end of the season he was with the girlfriend and he lost interest. Then it was basketball season, and he refused to go out for it even when all of his friends were doing it. I was so upset that he gave it up. The more I pressured him into doing it the more fighting we'd have. You see, my son is a big boy. He has a weight problem. I get letters from the school saying he is overweight. This is why I like him to be active in sports. Well, now it is baseball season, and he refuses to do this also. I have tried encouraging him to weightlift to help tone him up. His chest is flabby if you know what I mean and he is very self conscious of his chest. He will never take his shirt off in front of anyone. He wears a shirt to swim when he goes in the water. Last summer he went in twice the whole summer. All he wants to do is go on the computer and play World of Warcraft. The more I try to limit his time, the more we fight. The more I hear "What are you saying to A (his sister), I don't hear you telling her she can't watch tv!" He is always saying I don't treat her the same way. She is a cheerleader and is in the band. Her weight issue is not as bad as his. I don't know how to come out and say that without being a bad mother. I worry so much every day. He seems like he has given up his "circle of friends." He does nothing with them on weekends. He hates to go outside and do anything physical. I cry every night because the more I try the worse it gets. He has gained more weight by not doing anything. I just don't know what to do anymore. I try telling him to take care of his body but he just turns it around and tells me that I am not talking to his sister about anything, it is always just him. Neither of my children will have any friends over to our house. I always say about having someone come over and both say they do not like our house. Our house is not a mansion, just cozy. I really feel it is me that they are embarrassed about. I hope you can help me somehow or tell me where I can get help. I am tired of arguing. Both of my children get good grades in school and I get good reports from the teachers.  Jean responds: Thanks for writing to parentingadolescents.com. I can certainly hear your heartbreak, worry, confusion, and anger about the changes in your son and your weariness with regard to all the fighting. The good news, in my view, is that most of the issues you're worried about are common to this phase of adolescent development--they do not necessarily mark your son out as different from other teens nor your relationship with him as that much different from other parents' relationships with their teens. In trying to respond to your concerns, I'm going to focus on particular parts of your letter which I think point up these kinds of more typical issues in parenting during this phase of development. Overall, I want to say that your struggle is marked by two outstanding tendencies, as I read it--that you take personally what sound to me like normal adolescent behaviors/explorations, and that his father seems to be missing in the picture you paint. Now to the specifics: "I have always had a close relationship to both [children], but my son and I have had a special relationship up until now. . ." A fundamental part of what is happening between you and your son, as I see it from your letter, is that you are having a hard time accepting his normal push toward separating from you. You and he have been real 'pals,' in some ways, "and now we are so far apart," as you put it. It can be quite painful to feel as if you are losing your dear child as he/she grows into wanting to be separate from you, wanting to prove in fact that he is different from you (in order to assure himself that he is separate). They begin to reject parents in some ways, begin to want to spend more time alone or with peers. It's important to understand that this is normal and necessary, though painful to the parents sometimes, and to have faith that they will 'come back' to you, emotionally, in time, IF you don't try to hold onto them now. When you feel so strongly ("devastated") about finding out he has a little girl friend, you indicate how painful it is to have to recognize that he is reaching out to others, his peers, for part of the emotional gratification he used to find with you. Your concern about the lying comes from the same source, I think: to quote you, "I was so upset that he lied to me about what he was doing and where he was at." I don't deny that any parent is upset when he/she finds out that their teen has lied to them, but part of our upset, which tends to be greater during their adolescence than it was during their childhood (when we expect them to lie a certain amount of the time), is that the lying indicates that they are keeping secrets from us. And they are! They have to! They are beginning to live in a world that does not include us at the center the way it used to. And that hurts. But if you can understand this and not take it personally, but survive the personal pain it causes you, you can in the end see that they do turn into their own people, able to stand on their own two feet. Please read the article on lying in adolescence at this web site. The thing is, as a grandparent, I can assure you that your children need you throughout their lives. They never outgrow their need of you. But during their adolescence, they must stretch their muscles and try to grow and spread their wings a bit, or we could make no progress as a society. If they all turned out to be carbon copies of us, the world would be a much poorer place indeed. Your job is to be able to stand back a bit and see his normal struggle towards growing wings and taking flight and admiring it and helping him have confidence that he can do it. His weight is no doubt an issue for him now in a way that it didn't used to be. He is acutely attuned, now, as he has to be, to the opinions of his peers, and being overweight has never been an asset in any child's peer group that I know of. You must not try to control him in this area, nor make suggestions, etc. As you see, it doesn't work and only feeds his perception that you are unjustly critical of him and not of his sister. In this regard, there are a limited number of options, as I see the situation--you can be sure that you do not buy products with high fructose corn sugar and/or trans fat, no carbonated drinks, no sweet and fatty snacks (cookies, chips), for the health of the entire family. His father would need to be up for this regimen, as much as the rest of the family, and you would need to propose it as a general health measure for everyone, not just for him. You may also tell him, once, that if he is concerned about his weight, you would be glad to pay for him to consult with a nutritionist (get the name of someone from the school nurse), and that you have told your daughter the same thing (and do tell your daughter the same thing, before you tell him). By the way, are you or his father overweight? If so, then the consult with the nutritionist would be a family consult. My point is to try to take the focus off of him. He feels unequal to being seen critically right now--even to being seen, much, at all. They are so insecure at this age, normally; you have to remember how scary it is to be their age, when you have no control over how your body is going to turn out, yet everything seems to depend on it. Let him know that YOU know that, when he's ready, he can handle the weight thing if it bothers him (NOT because it bothers YOU!). He is sensitive to what gets directed at him vs. what gets directed at his younger sister partly because adolescents are jealous of younger siblings because the younger siblings don't quite yet have to face all of the challenges that the adolescents have to face--peer pressure, the struggle for independence, dealing with one's sexuality, etc. They unconsciously wish they could be dependent, the way they see the younger one being--although on a conscious level, they would deny this. And it wouldn't be good for them to be more dependent as a resting place. It's normal for them to switch between wanting complete independence and then insisting on being completely dependent, but the big threat that they defend against with their sometimes obnoxious oppositionality is the threat that they WON'T be able to separate from you, but remain dependent for life. "The more I try to limit his time, the more we fight." Yep! They no longer want you to 'lay down the law,' tell them what to do. It interferes with their struggle to be more independent. You need to be telling them less and less what to do and helping them to trust their own judgment more and more. This is how they develop confidence.  I'm not saying that they don't need limits--they do--but only in problematic areas of behavior. When and how you set limits is an entire subject in itself, and I would refer you to the Q&As in our Archives, which you can search out by typing in  limits, consequences, screen time  in the search box there. Finally, it sounds as if you and his father need to be working more closely together in parenting this boy. As he goes through his adolescence, he will need his father to identify with, to help him learn how to be a man. If you were in my office, I think I'd be advising his father to spend more time with this boy. To me it sounds as if this child's main problem is not his lying to you, being angry when you try to set limits, giving up sports, or even his embarassment related to his weight. Rather, I would worry about his increased loss of self-confidence and tendency to isolate himself which, while both normal at this stage, need to have a benign and encouraging environment in order to be modified. Try hard to worry less about who he is becoming and how he is different from your pictures, and offer more affirmation of who he IS--right now--and more confidence in his ability to make a good life for himself, in his own good time. He has so little of that confidence--if he can feel it in you, maybe he can 'borrow' it now and then. As a parent, it sounds to me as if one main difficulty is that you are feeling too personally vulnerable in relation to your children: "Our house is not a mansion, just cozy. I really feel it is me that they are embarrassed about." I have no idea why you would suppose the children are embarrassed about you; you sound like a very intelligent, sensitive, caring parent. But whatever the reason, that could be a difficult feeling to carry around and one which, if it's not resolved in you, could negatively impact both of the children. You might want to talk with a mental health professional about that if the feeling doesn't ease a bit. (Consult our Directory of Clinicians, write me for a referral, or ask the school for a referral to a local mental health counselor.) Hope this is a bit helpful. It's hard to raise kids, as anyone who has done it would agree. It brings up our deepest fears and hopes for them--and about ourselves. Good for you for reaching out for help in this task. Jean