In retrospect, the findings didn't surprise her at all.

After all, professor Suniya Luthar remembers when her children were middle-schoolers.

"Just horrible, those years," said Luthar, professor of psychology at Arizona State University. "And I say this as a mother and a scientist."

She's referring to the results of her recently co-authored study, which found that mothers of middle-schoolers reported the highest levels of stress and loneliness and lowest levels of life satisfaction and fulfillment. Other research has also shown marital satisfaction to be lower, and strife higher, when children are in their teenage years.

"Middle school is just chaos," Luthar said -- both for the children in that period of rapid growth, and for their parents. There's no other time that brings such dramatic changes in a child's cognitive, physical and social development all at once, affecting school, friends and family life.

Luthar and postdoctoral scholar Lucia Ciocolla studied more than 2,200 mothers, most of them well-educated, with children ranging from infants to adults. They looked at several aspects of the mothers' personal well-being, parenting and perceptions of their children. Moms of middle school children, between 12 and 14 years old, were far more stressed and depressed than those rearing toddlers.

Many adults can remember the ways middle school was challenging for them.

Bodies are changing. Emotions are turbulent. You encounter rejection and being left out. Old friends might leave you. You feel awkward, and people around you are also awkward, or acting more confident than they feel. Everyone is trying to fit in. Insecurity is high. Peers compete on so many levels, academic and social.

It can be difficult for parents to accept that these same struggles may be hard for their child.

It's not a time for parents to disengage, even when children start to push away and pull back. But parenting at this age requires a new diplomacy. Caring for infants and toddlers is physically exhausting, but the complexities of child-rearing during adolescence can be emotionally and mentally exhausting. Parents are trying to figure out new ways to relate to, guide and discipline a child, and the stakes feel much greater than they did in elementary school.

So, what's the best way for parents to cope during their kids' turbulent years? Luthar says mothers, in particular, need to seek out other women who will nurture them: Mothers need to be given what they routinely give out, she said. Lean on your relationships with other women you respect and trust, and who care about you and your children.

"Go to other moms who share your values, who are kind people," she said. "Be able to share your hurts and vulnerabilities."

These relationships need to go beyond the occasional girls' night out.

During the middle school years, more than ever, moms need "tenderness and gentleness and support."

She remembers her own wise council of women, an ad hoc advisory committee she could turn to when she felt heartbroken, angry or bewildered. These were women who could tell her how they navigated similar challenges, or say, "Yeah, me too."

Don't wait until your child is in sixth grade to nurture these relationships, she said. "You need to have systems in place."

Michelle Icard, author of "Middle School Makeover: Improving the Way You and Your Child Experience the Middle School Years," writes that it's important to keep in mind that children need to form their own identities so they can have healthy relationships throughout their lives. It's also vital for parents to nurture their own interests, hobbies and passions outside of child-rearing during this time.

For me, just reading this study -- the validation that yes, this is an especially trying period -- was reassuring.

While we may know intellectually that our social supports and personal pursuits are important, we may not realize how much we need to prioritize them given the demands of other people in our lives.

It's how we build our shelter to weather a storm.

More than 100 teens in Canon City, Colorado, were saved from a sexting scarlet letter last month.

Prosecutors decided not to press child pornography or other charges, which would have forced the middle and high school students to register as sex offenders for swapping and collecting hundreds of nude pictures. Some teens had evaded parental oversight by using the private Photo Vault app, which allows naked pictures to be hidden on smartphones.

The early data on the rate of adolescents exchanging sexually explicit pictures or messages, known as sexting, has been all over the map, ranging from the low single digits to upwards of a third of teens. According to recent research by Jeff Temple, associate professor and psychologist at University of Texas Medical Branch, anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of teens will send or receive an explicit text. By college, that number is around 50 percent. And 70 percent of teen girls have been asked to send a naked picture of themselves, he said.

Teens engaged in sexting minimize or dismiss the legal and emotional risks involved. But in 30 states, sexting could carry felony charges under child pornography laws and put participants on a sex offender registry. There are 20 states with laws that specifically address sexting; of those, 11 treat it as a misdemeanor, allowing informal sanctions such as counseling, according to the Cyberbullying Research Center.

When Temple has the opportunity to discuss these risks with students, he begins by asking them if they wear a seat belt in the car. Every hand in the crowd goes up. Then he asks, "Why?"

The students say they want to be protected in case there is an accident.

"But the chances are slim," he says.

"But just in case," a student typically responds.

Ah, just in case. This is where he wants them.

He tells them to think about how slim the chances of getting caught sexting seem.

It's unlikely. But what if?

Then, the consequences can be enormous -- life-altering. It's a crash in which reputations and futures get burned.

Yet anytime there is a big bust of a school sexting ring, which happens regularly in big cities and small towns all across the country, parents express shock.

Temple says parents do their children a real disservice if they don't pay attention to their online lives. They have to know how popular apps like Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr work so they can help their children become responsible digital citizens.

Sexting creates a perfect storm of parental avoidance: unfamiliar technology combined with the uncomfortable topic of their child's emerging sexuality. But staying in a state of denial does nothing to protect your kids.

Temple says his research finds that sexting typically precedes real-life sex. And teen girls who sexted were more like to be associated with other risky behavior, he said.

"Risky behaviors tend to cluster together," he said, not that one necessarily causes another.

His advice to parents who catch their teens with compromising or inappropriate texts on their phones is not to panic or freak out. It's a chance to talk about consequences and boundaries. It signals a need for closer monitoring, but it is also an opportunity to talk about healthy relationships, digital citizenship and safe sex, he said.

"What does it mean to be online, and how does it reflect their offline behavior?" he asked.

Until our laws catch up to the ways in which technology has impacted teen interactions, parents have to continue to use stories like Canon City's to talk to their children about sexting.

Otherwise, kids risk being branded for life by a teenage mistake.

Perhaps you've heard the war stories from mothers who have raised teen daughters, told in the spirit of camaraderie, sympathy and encouragement.

The drama subsides, they say. The quiet resentment or open rebellion is replaced by mutual respect and affection. It's normal for these years to be fraught with tension and conflict, they reassure.

Conventional wisdom says the mother-daughter relationship nearly fractures in adolescence before it becomes whole again in adulthood.

But it doesn't always work that way, does it? Sometimes the distance breached in those years of struggling to create one's own identity is too great. The adult relationship fails to recover the way we imagine it will; it falls short of what we hoped it might become.

There's a mother-daughter team challenging this narrative with a radical notion: The teen years can be the time when mothers and daughters thrive in their relationship. It's when daughters need to keep their mothers close, argue Sil and Eliza Reynolds, in their book "Mothering and Daughtering: Keeping Your Bond Strong Through the Teen Years."

It sounded a little pie-in-the-sky to me. I'm sure there are some mothers and daughters who are naturally gifted communicators, or emotionally intelligent savants, who breeze through the years so many of us struggle with.

But how might one spot such unicorns, let alone join their ranks?

Girls in the Know, a St. Louis-based nonprofit, recently hosted a two-day retreat led by the Reynolds mother-daughter duo to teach how this radical idea could be put into practice. I was curious to see what kind of practical tools they could teach that would deepen and calm the bond I have with my 13-year-old girl.

When I told her we were going to spend eight hours over a weekend learning how to "empower" our relationship, she rolled her eyes at me.

"Oh God. That sounds so cheesy," she said.

I hope the Reynolds are prepared for our enthusiastic participation, I thought. When we arrived and waited outside in the hallway with about 20 other mom-daughter pairs, my girl whispered to me: "There are so many other things I could be doing right now."

Well, this was going to be fun.

To my great surprise, it was fun. And moving. And enlightening.

The Reynolds kept our group together to explain some basics about emotional intelligence and effective communication skills, especially when talking about difficult topics. They used games to introduce concepts such as finding and trusting your intuition. Then, they separated the daughters and moms to give each group a chance to practice these skills among their peer group. When they reunited us, we had a chance to listen and respond to our daughters in a new way.

One of their main points was about finding creative ways to stay connected during a time when the culture encourages us to push each other away. For example, a nightly check-in that might only take a minute: Ask your daughter to share three words to describe how she's feeling, maybe when she gets home from school or before she goes to bed. Figure out one thing you enjoy doing together, whether it's watching a TV show or cooking, and make it a scheduled priority every week. Create a journal that is shared back and forth on a weekly basis.

There's never a silver bullet to making a relationship work. It takes energy and patience -- even more than many of us imagined, during the tumultuous years of rapid physical and emotional change.

But the story that Sil and Eliza told, in which teen daughters see mothers as their allies on the path toward independence, was so much more compelling than that in which daughters view their mothers with disdain or disinterest as adversaries.

Even my skeptical teen hugged me afterwards and said, "I guess it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be."

There's a payoff worth the eyerolls.