Sweet Sixteen Poems Are Therapy For Emotional Teens

But don't expect to have access to them!

Hormones have a way of heightening emotions in teens. Puberty can be a confusing time and it can also be a time of awakening. You might remember writing sweet sixteen poems yourself and pouring out your feelings onto sheets of lined white paper, crumpled napkins and the pages of your diary with the gold embossing on the front. Poetry can be hugely therapeutic at special times in a teen's life, especially when school may be challenging and indulging in romance feels like a great escape. If your teen shuts herself away in her room each day with the music turned up loud and the door locked, you can guess she may be expressing herself in dozens of sweet sixteen poems that you may never even get to read.

If you've ever listened to the lyrics of the songs your children enjoy, you'll notice that even though the music is different from what you heard in your youth, the themes are the same. Love, personal pain, the end of an affair; each song expresses in around three minutes, what your teen is experiencing in her own life. Identifying with people is what makes these songs so compelling, and whether happy or sad, they are able to influence your child. Sweet sixteen poems often evolve out of paying attention to popular music and teens will fancy themselves as modern poets with their own message to convey.

Not all sweet sixteen poems are melancholy, however. After all, what's written is usually a reflection of how a person is feeling at the time. Your happy-go-lucky teen who is finally dating the cute boy she's had her eye on for a year will be brimming with excitement. Being accepted into a group of her peers is also cause for celebration, and her poetry will be full of enthusiasm. Again, don't expect to be invited to read it … unless your daughter sees you as her best friend. Some things just aren't meant for parents' eyes.

Generally, there is no cause for concern if you discover your child is writing sweet sixteen poems and isn't willing to share them with you. They are a way of working through feelings and understanding the world and how they fit into it. Always keep the lines of communication open so that she will know she can trust you if and when she needs to seek your advice.

At age sixteen, your daughter may be preparing to farewell her childhood and embark on adulthood. This can be somewhat frightening for a person who has enjoyed the comfort of youth for so long and is now increasingly faced with grownup responsibilities. By writing sweet sixteen poems, she is creating a record of a period of her life spent developing and learning more than at any other time she has known. This record will be fascinating to look back on in later years when the things that seemed catastrophic as a teen now seem trivial by comparison to adult matters and the words of the poems will be like quotations from another person entirely.