My teenage daughter is going through the “leave me alone phase” and I don’t know what to do about it.

I’m 41 and I have a 15 year old teenage daughter whom I love deeply and I’m very proud of her. Whatever she’s interested in I try to support as best as I can. Her mother and I always try our best to support all of our children in whatever they are interested in hobby wise.
For the past six months I’ve noticed a change in my daughter. She’s more shut out, she wouldn’t have dinner with us, she’d slam her door, she’d sneak out and when my wife and I try to talk to her she’d yell at us to leave her alone. This 360 switch up has us completely perplexed.
We tried to investigate on our own by talking to her teachers, counselor and her friends and to no avail. The closest piece of info we got was that she was hanging around a new crowd of people older than herself. As soon as she’s done with school she’d head on over to these people’s home and stay there.
We asked her about it and she got defensive. I don’t want her to do anything stupid that would ruin her life later on because I really don’t want her to have to live with regrets when she’s an adult, she is drinking because I saw vomit stained clothes in the laundry hamper that reeked of alcohol. We tried getting her into professional counseling but she’s not budging. What should we do?

Posted May 1, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

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