Rediscovering My Daughter Through Instagram

Never let anyone tell you that our current standard of "normal" is normal. It's only the pressures of the world that make teenagers retract from their parents.

Every emotion you've ever felt has been developed, whether by God or by hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection. Conscious thought may deliver us to emotion, but the emotion that you arrive at is something that has always been inside of you. When feel something isn't right, it's a good indicator that something isn't the way it's supposed to be. There's no reason that the world would be made in a way where mothers of teenage daughters are supposed to be miserable and shut out. There's no reason that the transition of growing from a baby to becoming an adult should not be smooth and untraumatic for all involved parties. What is the evolutionary advantage of making mothers miserable as a necessary part of producing offspring?

The idea that the family has become such a secondary consideration in modern society, to the point that this mother is advocating to others mothers about the opportunity to vicariously know your own child via the Internet... It's nothing short of heartbreaking.

Nothing is more certain in my mind than the idea that it doesn't have to be this way, and historically has not been this way. Kids have been sexualized and have to grow up too quickly. Kids have been made into tiny workers that do busy work for most of their childhood, away from their parents, because both parents have to work.

It's dystopian, disgusting and perverted

Well said.

One theory exists that teenagers sleep cycle is offset from parents so that they can more easily socialise with each other without parental interference.

There could be plenty of reasons our hormones have evolved to make us act in ways that parents do not like.

I love taking photos whenever I go somewhere unusual or I do some new or special. Every few months or years I sit down and look through photos from different stages of my life, and I reminisce about those experiences. Sometimes it's by myself, but other times it's fun to revisit old photos of shared experiences with friends, which I think can help deepen bonds of friendship.

Edit: I thought this extra point would be interesting. Some of us also extend this behavior to certain online communications. Sometimes in group chats with friends different people will take screenshots of funny or amusing moments and share them with each other a few months later. Other times people will save a particularly humorous meme and re-share it to revisit any past discussion surrounding it.

I think your sentiment is well-meaning but maybe a bit dangerous. It's setting up an unrealistic expectation of how adolescence "should" be, which risks leading parents to blame themselves or their kids when it doesn't turn out that way. Because it's extremely unlikely to turn out that way.

Adolescents are frequently at odds with their parents for the same reason 3 year olds are famous for temper tantrums: because it is part of the normal development of the human mind. Infants make no distinction between themselves and their parents; adults understand the difference completely. It takes about 18-20 years for that to develop, and there are well-known milestones along the way.

Teenage/parent conflict is certainly not a new phenomenon. You can find examples in stories almost as far back as there are records of stories.

> Conscious thought may deliver us to emotion, but the emotion that you arrive at is something that has always been inside of you.

Emotion precedes conscious thought; a big part of growing up is learning how to use conscious thought to identify, understand, and manage emotions. For very young children, emotion can be terrifying; it's great to feel happy but suddenly they might feel bad, angry, have scary thoughts, etc.--and it's all unexpected and unexplained. Teenage years are difficult because an entirely new set of powerful emotions, related to love and sex, emerge and the teenage conscious mind has to learn how to deal with them.

> What is the evolutionary advantage of making mothers miserable as a necessary part of producing offspring?

The answer to this obvious: to improve the fitness of the offspring. Conflict with parents happens during adolescence because adolescents are learning to how to be independent adults, and that means challenging authority.

Much respect to moms, but evolution does not give a shit about the mom once the offspring develops reproductive ability. Evolution does not give a shit about anything, really; I would not look to evolution to explain why people should be good to their moms.