Understanding Teen Girls’ Hormonal Intelligence | A Game Changing Framework

This week we’re starting with a game changing truth: your daughter is literally a different person every single week. As women, we run on a 28 day cycle, not a 24hr one. 

In this episode I reveal why every strategy you’ve tried (the calm voice, the books) has felt hit-or-miss and show you how to read her hormonal signals as “information”, not problems to fix. 

Her phone use, mood swings and door slamming aren’t behaviour issues, they’re  signals from the body. Learn the physiology behind her shifts so you can parent with confidence, not guilt. 

If what you've heard today felt like something you needed to hear, I want to tell you about WTF - What's The Feeling. It's my membership for mums just like you. The physiology, the tools, the community of women who are in it too - all in one place.

The doors are open right now, but only until the end of June. Then they close until August. So if you've been thinking about it, now's the time. Check out the details here

Wish your daughter had her own podcast to help understand what’s going on? Send her to Girl You’ve Got This - available on all major platforms.

Don’t forget to subscribe so you’re the first to get new episodes, and leave a review - it helps other mums find the podcast too.

See you next time! 💛

Transcript

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You know that feeling when you've tried the calm voice. The nuts are calm voice. The bribery. The bedtime chat. I just want to understand what's going on for you, chat. And her door is still shut. The light's still on underneath it at half eleven. And you're standing in the hallway in your PJs, holding that drink before you go to bed. And you're thinking, what the frigity frig just happened? I've tried everything, genuinely everything, and I just don't get it. You know, you've listened to the you've listened to the podcast, you've read the books. Have you tried just something more? Advice from somebody who hasn't got a daughter. The deep breath before you knock. They're not knocking at all because someone online said that works better. But still, nothing works. If that's you right now, stop. Stop blaming yourself for a second because I'm about to tell you something that's possibly going to make you just a little bit wired, a little bit wound up, and then it's going to make you feel about a thousand times lighter. Both at once. So stick with me. So welcome. If you're a mum of a teen girl or a tween who's starting to feel like a stranger inside your own house, and yes, I'm saying your own house, this podcast may well stop you in your tracks a little. And I think that's a good thing. Because you know, as we said, you've tried the conversations, you've read the books, you've googled at two o'clock in the morning, you've maybe even spoken to school, college, uni, high school, whatever it is, maybe you've even pushed for a referral. Because everyone is telling you that there's something wrong here. Your daughter is still unreachable, she's still glued to her phone, she's still shutting you out, and she's still not the girl you know is in there somewhere. You've just got to find her. And you're starting to wonder: is it me? Is it her? Is something actually going wrong here? Here's what I want you to know before we go any further: nothing is wrong with her, and nothing is wrong with you, but something is seriously wrong with the story we've been told time and time again about our teenage girls. And today and every week on this podcast, we're gonna unpick it stitch by stitch by stitch. So, welcome to the Teen Whisperer Podcast. I'm Rach Friedley, I'm a health play specialist, a mum, and the person who finally connects all those dots that everyone else has been staring at separately. We make the big picture, the whole picture. We don't just stare at dots in isolation. So here's the truth: your daughter's behaviour is not a problem to fix. It is a message from an overwhelmed nervous system. It's a message from her body that she's not getting something that she needs. And when you understand that, and I mean really understand it, once you embody it into you, not in your head, everything changes. How you parent her, how you look at yourself as a mum, how you respond to her as a woman. Every week I'm going to give you the biology, the physiology behind it, and notice I said physiology, not psychology, the tools and the honest conversations that should have happened years ago. No jargon, no judgment, and definitely no acronyms because I just don't get them. No list of things you should in Inverticomas have done. Just the truth, the simple truth about our girls, their bodies, their cycles, their nervous system, and what actually is going on for them and what they actually need to come back to themselves. So let who's ready? Let's dive in. So let's go back to that doorway when you're standing behind that door, waiting for it to open. The feeling that you are somehow failing at the one job you thought you'd be good at. I want to say something here, very simply, because I don't think anyone's ever said it to you straight before. You are not failing. You've just been handed instructions for a body that isn't hers, and then quietly blamed for when it didn't work. So let me say that again. You've been handed instructions for a body that isn't hers, and yet you've tried helping her to understand what is going on for her from a view that isn't a girl's view. I think I've just made that slightly more confusing. Anyway, you're exhausted, you're bone deep, second guessing every single decision you make. You start having conversations with her in the shower because it's the only time you get five minutes to yourself. You start having conversations in your head about what you're going to say with her in the shower. And even then, when you get out of the shower, you cannot get the words right. I need you to hear this clearly. That exhaustion is not evidence you're getting it wrong, it's evidence you've been trying to solve the right problem with the wrong tools for a very long time with nobody barmy telling you that the tools you've been given were the issue. You have not failed, as I've already said. The advice failed you both. There's a difference and it matters because one of them means you need to try harder, and the other means you need something, you need different information. Today you're getting that information. So here's the bit that changes absolutely everything. Her phone is not the problem. I know you've heard it before, you've rolled your eyes a bit. Fair enough, but stay with me because I don't mean it the way it's usually meant. I mean something way more specific. The phone is a symptom, it is a message from the body. It's what a nervous system reaches for when it's running on empty, and there's nothing better on offer. She's not addicted per se to the device, she's regulating badly, I admit, but understandably with the only tool that's available to her every day, each and every day, every hour, every minute, every single second of the day. That never says no, never gets tired of her. So think about what her nervous system is actually doing every time she picks it up. It's seeking safety, it's seeking connection, it's seeking belonging, it's seeking a break from the feeling of not being enough. So if she's at school or college or university and she feels like she doesn't fit in or she's getting bullied, she has that constant cycle of you're not good enough, you're worthless, you're stupid, you're thick going around in her head every single moment. But the apps on her screen were built genuinely, deliberately, by people who understand the nervous system way better than most parenting books do, to give her those tiny, reliable hits of exactly that. Not because she's weak, not because she's bloody-minded, because it works in the short term better than anything else currently on offer in her actual life. So when you take the phone away and offer nothing really, so as if you're in the UK, we've recently heard news that the social media ban for under 16s will come into play next year. But it's about understanding what's going on underneath that behaviour. So when you take the phone away and offer nothing, it doesn't work because you haven't removed the need within your daughter. You've just blocked the only tool that she's found that meets it. That's discovery number one. And here's discovery number two, and this is the one that tends to properly wind mums up, and it did when I first found out about her in the best way. Almost every piece of advice you've ever been handed about managing a teenager's moods, behaviour, stress, sleep, anything was built on research done on a 24-hour hormonal cycle. I hasten to add, it's not hers. Girls run on a 28-day cycle, not a 24-hour one. Her energy, her mood, her ability to cope, her procrastination, her faffing, her wanting to do things, her ability to manage the conversation you've had a hundred times before, all of it shifts week to week, month to month, in a way that male biology-based advice was never built to account for. That's why calm conversations can happen really well last week, but this week they blow up in your face. And you didn't do it wrong. You did the same thing twice and got completely different results because she, as are I, as are us, biologically a slightly different version of herself week on week. So put those two things together: a nervous system reaching for the only available regulation tool it's got, and a body running on a cycle that the entire advice industry totally forgot existed. And suddenly it all makes sense. It was never gonna work for either of you, no matter how hard you tried. That's the moment. That's the thing I want you to actually feel land. Not just here, I want you to feel it in your body. Nothing has been wrong with your effort, the information underneath it was wrong. So, this is where I tell you something about myself that I haven't admitted before on this podcast as yet. Before any of this, before WTF, before the podcast, I spent years on NHS Children's Wards. So, for those of you in America and Canada, NHS is the health service in the UK. I was doing something most people don't expect. I use play to get children through the unbearable. Surgery prep, ITU, tests, blood tests, investigations, the things that will flatten most adults. I mean, you cannot talk a five-year-old out of terror about a needle for diabetes. You cannot reason a seven-year-old into feeling safe before scans, but you can play them there, and you can play all the way up to 16 and beyond. Every single time. The body found its way to come faster through play than it ever did through talking, and this is what I talk about a lot in my work. This is now the foundation of everything I do. Play isn't a parenting technique I picked up somewhere, it's the actual qualification that I have, and it's the mechanism behind every single tool I'm about to give you. So here's what I mean by play, specifically because I think the world's gone a bit soft over the years and they just don't get it. A lot of people are told, especially girls, are told that play is babyish. You need to stop doing it about the age of four. That's a load of crap. We all need play in our lives to regulate our nervous systems. It is the simplest and easiest way to access a calm nervous system. I'm talking about physical, sensory, often loud, often messy, with absolutely no agenda, except being properly in a body for a while. Building something pointless just for the hell of it, not having an outcome, not having a goal, just enjoying yourself and having fun, getting muddy, being a bit silly, having a laugh, laughing out loud till it hurts in your body, moving because the body asked for it, not because there's a class to get to it. And here's the thing: nobody told you. That is precisely, as I just said, what a nervous system was actually hungry for. The whole time the phone was trying and failing to give it to her. A dysregulated nervous system cannot be talked down, as I've told time and time again. Logic does not land when she's dysregulated, it has to move through her. That dysregulation has to move out of her body, has to process out of her body. It's not that is physiology. The stress chemicals that build up over a school day, a hard conversation, a bad night's sleep, they don't just evaporate because you've explained things calmly. They need to discharge, they need to physically move through the body. Play is one of the fastest ways that happens. Faster, way faster than most of those talk talking based strategies you've tried. Faster often than we give it credit for. Bounce up and down, bouncing a ball as I do a lot of the time. The only rule is no fixing, no teaching, no this is good for your nervous system, because that's likely gonna turn her off. Even though obviously here is, she doesn't need to know it. Just 10 minutes of two bodies being a bit silly together. That's all I'm saying. Ten minutes a day to do it together. Do it yourself loudly, somewhere she can see or hear you. Nervous systems are contagious, even if she says no, you can still do it around her, she will still feel that calmness coming to her. It's all courtesy of the electromagnetic rhythms that surround each and every one of us, our bodies for up to three feet. That's a meter. You will regulate, hers will regulate with you. It's doing way more than you think, even if she rolls her eyes at you from the sofa. But it means you've connected with her, and then she can laugh. She's seen something in you, you're having fun, you're having a laugh, she connects with you. So here's what I want you to carry out of this episode, not in your head, in your chest somewhere. You were never the problem. She was never broken. You were both handed a set of instructions built for somebody else's body entirely. Someone else's cycle, someone else's nervous system, and then quietly blamed when following them perfectly did not fix a dicky bird. It was never gonna work. Not because you didn't try hard enough, but because trying harder at the wrong instructions was never gonna work. So what actually works is smaller than you've been told and a great deal more available than you think. A hug, if you hug her, she regulates to your heart rate. You go outside, you put your bare feet on the grass, ten daff minutes in the kitchen, real life given a fair chance to compete with a scroll. You've got this, you always did. I believe in you, you just needed the right map. So, this is exactly why I built WTF, What's the Feeling? And doors are open right now. They close on the 30th of June. So if this landed for you, don't sit on it for long. It's the membership for mums who are done being told to try harder and ready to finally understand what's going on. The biology of what tech is doing to your daughter's nervous system, the play-based sensory tools, the proper kind, the kind we talked about today, not a worksheet pretending, that give her something better to reach for. The community of mums doing the real work alongside you, walking the reset roadmap together. If you're ready for that conversation, that should have happened first. Come find us. Link is in the show notes. Doors shut on the 30th, and then it's a wait until the next one opens. So, yeah, have a wonderful week and speak to you soon. Take care. Bye bye.