Allowing the Glitter Jar to Settle: Supporting Adolescents Through Times of Transition
- 1 April 2026
This is the first in a series of three blogs on navigating adolescent transitions.
There is a moment that clinical psychologist Lisa Damour describes — one that I find myself returning to often. She was visiting a school and met a counsellor who, whenever a student arrived in their room feeling dysregulated or distressed, would quietly reach for a glitter jar. Damour’s first response was sceptical: how is this useful? But she soon came to understand that the visual analogy was something quite remarkable. Because when you watch the glitter swirl and then — slowly, with stillness — begin to settle, you understand something about the teenage brain that no amount of explanation quite captures.
Transitions shake the jar. Moving schools, shifting friendship groups, navigating new social pressures, simply growing up — all of it stirs things up emotionally in ways that can feel enormous and bewildering, both for young people and for the adults who love and work alongside them. Our role is not to stop the glitter from moving. Our role is to be the steady hand that holds the jar.
The Teenage Brain: A Hive of Activity
To understand why transitions can feel so overwhelming for young people, we first need to understand something about what is actually happening inside the adolescent brain — because it is, quite literally, extraordinary.
Somewhere between the ages of twelve and fourteen, the teenage brain undertakes what can only be described as a spectacular renovation project. It begins to trim those neural connections that are no longer pulling their weight — a process called synaptic pruning — and gradually matures into a more nimble, sophisticated thinking machine. The result, eventually, is a brain that can poke new holes in old arguments, hold competing viewpoints simultaneously, and spin ideas around to examine them from multiple angles. The same teenager who can offer a devastatingly sharp cultural critique is also, simultaneously, engrossed in reality television. This is not inconsistency. This is a brain finding its range.
But here is the crucial thing that Damour describes so vividly: this neurological overhaul does not happen all at once, and it does not happen in a tidy order. It unfolds in the same sequence in which the brain originally developed — from the primal regions near the spinal cord outward to the sophisticated structures located just behind the forehead. In practical terms, this means that the brain’s emotional centres — housed in the primitive limbic system— are fully upgraded long before the brain’s reasoning and perspective-maintaining systems, located in the highly evolved prefrontal cortex, have caught up.
When a young person feels calm, their capacity for logical thinking can equal or even exceed that of an adult. But when they become overwhelmed — when the emotional centres fire — those supercharged feelings can hijack the entire neurological system, temporarily shutting down the very part of the brain that would otherwise help them think clearly and regain perspective. Hence the glitter jar, completely shaken. Hence the sobbing puddle on the kitchen floor that seems to come from nowhere, and the parent standing there, baffled, wondering what on earth just happened.
This is not drama. This is neuroscience.
Why We Need to Let the Glitter Settle
What Damour identified — and what I think is one of the most practically useful things any adult can take from this — is that our instinct in those moments is almost always wrong.
When a young person falls apart, every fibre of our adult being wants to jump in. We want to reassure, to fix, to ask what happened, to offer the solution we can already see clearly. But pressing advice on someone whose glitter is fully airborne, or asking them how they got themselves into such a situation in the first place, is — as Damour puts it — roughly the equivalent of shaking the jar again.
When we hold back instead, when we focus on making space for the turbulence to subside rather than rushing to resolve it, two important things happen. First, the young person sees that we are not frightened by their feelings. This matters more than it might seem. Their prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that could take an objective view and put things in proportion — is temporarily offline, flooded by emotion. They cannot, in that moment, reassure themselves. What they need is to borrow our calm. When adults respond steadily and without dismissiveness, it sends a powerful signal: this is survivable. I am not alarmed. You are going to be alright.
A frenetic, all-hands-on-deck reaction, by contrast, signals that their crisis frightens us as much as it frightens them. And that is rarely reassuring.
Second, once the glitter settles, the rational cortex comes back online. And when it does, young people are often remarkably capable. They think through the problem. They arrive at their own conclusions. They seek advice — or they reappear in perfectly good spirits, acting as though nothing happened at all, while their parents stand in the kitchen quietly wondering if they imagined the whole thing.
It is a good rule of thumb, in parenting and in practice, that making time and space for a young person’s neurological glitter to settle almost always either solves the problem, or at least makes solving the problem possible.
Know Where You Are Emotionally Before Trying to Fix Things
Of course, holding steady through a glitter storm is easier said than done. When your child or young person loses perspective, it is extremely easy to lose yours too. Their feelings, however overblown they may seem from the outside, are very real to them — and to anyone who loves them and is present in that moment.
So before we can be a steady hand for someone else, we have to check in with ourselves. Where are we, emotionally? Are we calm enough to respond rather than react?
The question worth sitting with is: what helps you in those moments? Tea. A walk. A few minutes alone. A cuddle. Something that brings your own nervous system back down before you re-engage. We cannot pour from an empty jar, and we cannot hold another person’s glitter steady if our own is swirling.
As parents and carers, the aim is to respond, not react. Sometimes that means allowing 24 hours before trying to resolve something. Sometimes it means sitting alongside without speaking. Sometimes it means asking open, curious questions — not as a technique, but as a genuine expression of interest in what is happening for that young person — and simply following where they lead.
Nearly Everything Happens on the Inside
There is a line I find myself coming back to repeatedly: “Isn’t it odd, we can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside.”
This is at the heart of everything when it comes to supporting young people through change. The slammed door, the withdrawal, the refusal, the tears that seem disproportionate — these are the outside. The inside is a different and far more complex story.
One of the most powerful things we can offer young people during periods of transition is help developing an emotional vocabulary — a language for what is happening within them. Feelings are not good or bad. They simply are. And the full human range, from joy and curiosity to fury and despair, is entirely valid. The difficulty is not that young people feel things intensely. The difficulty arises when feelings become too big to name, and therefore too big to hold.
Supporting emotional expression means communicating clearly and consistently that all feelings are acceptable, however large or small. It means helping young people to identify and name what they are actually experiencing — moving beyond “fine” and “bad” into the richer, more specific territory of the emotional landscape. It means helping them understand how feelings grow and escalate, how a small worry can swell into a wave of panic if left unacknowledged. And where possible, it means externalising the problem — making the feeling something that can be looked at together, rather than something a young person has to carry entirely alone.
Anxiety: The Condition We Keep Missing
Any honest conversation about adolescents and transitions has to include anxiety. Research from the Child Mind Institute (2018) tells us that anxiety disorders are the most common mental health difficulties in childhood and adolescence, affecting around 30% of young people at some point before the age of 18. And yet anxiety is frequently described as the “invisible condition” — because its symptoms are so often missed, misread, or attributed to something else entirely.
In the context of transitions, this is particularly significant. A young person refusing to go to school is not necessarily being defiant. A child who withdraws from friends when they move year groups is not necessarily being difficult. The teenager who becomes tearful and irritable in the final weeks of the summer holidays may be doing something far more complex than acting out.
Unrecognised and untreated, anxiety increases the risk of depression, school difficulties, and lasting challenges with the transitions that continue well into adulthood. The good news is that anxiety is also one of the most treatable of all mental health difficulties. Recognition — genuine, early, non-judgemental recognition — is the first and most important step.
Friendship: The Thing That Matters Most
If there is one consistent finding across the research on wellbeing, it is this: friendship is not a peripheral concern. It is not a luxury or a secondary issue that can be addressed once the academic and behavioural boxes are ticked. Friendship is, as Professor Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford puts it, the single most important factor in our psychological and physical health and wellbeing.
The things we do with friends — laughing, sharing stories, being witnessed, moving together— all activate the brain’s endorphin system, creating the felt sense of safety and trust that underpins everything else: learning, resilience, recovery, and the capacity to face change. When young people feel genuinely connected, they are better equipped to weather transitions. When they feel isolated, even small changes can become insurmountable.
This is why the social dimension of every transition deserves to be taken seriously. The fear of losing a close friend when moving to a new class, or of not belonging in a new school, is not trivial. For a young person whose social world is structured around a small number of deeply significant relationships, the threat of losing those connections can feel existential. We need to meet that fear with the gravity it deserves, not with reassurance that it will all be fine.
Screens, Teens and the Complexity of Connection
It is impossible to talk about adolescent friendship and transitions without talking about screens — and this conversation requires more nuance than it usually receives.
The first thing to understand is that screens are, by design, compelling. The dopamine response triggered by a “like” or a notification mirrors the neurological reward associated with other powerfully reinforcing experiences. For adults, this pull is difficult to manage. For teenagers, whose capacity for impulse regulation is genuinely still developing, it is significantly harder.
And yet — for many young people, screens are not a distraction from connection. They are the medium through which connection happens. WhatsApp groups, Snapchat streaks, shared playlists, online gaming — these are the social infrastructure of adolescent life. To dismiss them entirely, or treat them as inherently harmful, risks fundamentally misunderstanding what they represent for young people, particularly during periods of transition when maintaining existing friendships across distance matters enormously.
What young people need from us here is not condemnation, but modelling. They need us to help them think about how to communicate online with care, how to recognise when screen use is nurturing their wellbeing and when it is depleting it. They need us to take sleep hygiene seriously — the relationship between late-night screen use and mental health is well evidenced. And they need us to be genuinely curious about their digital worlds, not dismissive of them.
We also need to educate ourselves. We cannot support young people in navigating spaces we have never taken the time to understand.
Holding the Jar Steady
Drawing all of this together, what young people need from the adults around them during times of transition is, at its core, something quite simple — even if it is not always easy to offer.
They need to feel that their emotional experience is valid. That it will not be minimised, dismissed, or fixed too quickly. They need adults who stay curious rather than reactive, who look beneath behaviour to the need that is driving it. They need their friendships to be taken seriously as central to everything else we care about — attendance, learning, mental health and long-term flourishing.
And they need us to hold the jar steady. Not to stop the glitter from moving — it will move, as it should, because growing up is not a quiet process, and nor should it be. But to offer the kind of calm, consistent, attuned presence that says, without words: I see you. I am not frightened by what is happening inside you. And I am not going anywhere.
That, perhaps, is the most important transition support of all.
Hannah Abrahams
Educational and Child Psychologist
Further reading
