Teenagers

Dave Barry

What Was On Your Bedroom Wall?

The wall of any teenage bedroom can be approached as an archaeologist would, digging through the strata to discover the life cycle of a British youth. At the bottom is found the wallpaper of babyhood, laid over by a proudly displayed golden certificate for handwriting, crowded out, in turn, by torn-out magazine posters of fuzzy-haired creatures, footballers (for boys) or blow-dried guinea pigs (for girls). Then, with hormones, come wads of Blu-Tack, for the inhabitant of this bedroom has now put away childish things and is an adult, yeah, with human rights, foremost the universal right to humiliate him or herself by plastering the four walls with really, really bad posters.

This entire scene will be packed, with the care of a crime-scene investigator, in sticky rolls in the boot of a parental car, to be reattached at a hall of residence to cover institutional signs that say “no Blu-Tack PLEASE”. The faces on these posters look down in mute judgment on first loves, first broken hearts, first inhales, first hangovers and, for some (but not those men with the “monkey on the toilet” poster), first matings. Then they’re all dumped for the cycle to start again in all new generations, all across the country. But what do those posters of our formative years reveal about us now?

David Cameron has confessed that, as a teenager, he liked to have nudie shots on his wall to stare at before going to sleep. Specifically, Cheryl Tiegs, the American model in an iconic bikini shot, and the famous image of a girl scratching her bare undercarriage while playing tennis. (Weirdly, when Boris Johnson was asked this same question four years ago, he gave the same answer: “Um, Cheryl Tiegs! And the tennis girl. The Athena tennis girl.”) Cameron’s answer may bring to mind unwanted images of a pubescent Cameron, red-faced and exasperated from issues other than the local elections. But the lesson we should draw is that the teenage poster appears to tell us one thing, but shows us its opposite. They are the first design decisions anyone makes: but while the teenager believes them to be about expressing himself as an individual, they are signing up to a tribe. Poster fashions define generations. I know, as someone who remembers how ubiquitous the Betty Blue film poster was at my university (intended message: “I am a sophisticate.” Real message: “I hope mad French birds will be easier to get in the sack than this lot.”).

Likewise, the girlie pin-up is actually a sign of pinned-in repression. This week Cameron, with laddish swagger, said that his Tiegs poster was “very un-PC”. He believes that his choice shows that he is a red-blooded hetero. Yet any successful heterosexuals would quickly learn not to decorate their bedrooms thus. Instead, these pictures speak of lonely boys in a male boarding school (Boris Johnson and Cameron both went to Eton), entirely deprived of women, insecure and onanistic.

And what of that tennis girl? The model for that shot, Fiona Walker, was mocked when she said, “I think it’s the light that makes it so appealing”, but one of the reasons why a hint of her bare bum has sold an estimated two million copies is partly that. It’s a late-summer shot of a very English scene: a girl in whites, dappling of extensive, leafy grounds that would transport members of the upper-middle classes like Cameron and Johnson immediately into their mater’s back garden, and surround those less affluent with a patriotic cosiness. The image isn’t saucy, it’s comfort food.

Stephen Bayley, the author and design guru, suggests a party game where you speculate on the teenage posters of Ed Miliband. My guess is the one displayed by all boys who wore cord jackets in the 1980s, of Che Guevara in his beret. Che was the nerds’ rebel — in the same way that photos of dead drug addicts, such as Kurt Cobain, were about longing for dark experience, even though you were spotty and 14 and fixing the poster with your mum’s craft Sellotape. Teenagers are trying to work out who they are, through heroes. They try to pin themselves to the wall, like their colours to a mast, but with their formless identities it’s like nailing jelly. The posters will be changed next week. (Notable exceptions: Katie Holmes and Kate Middleton, who both went on to marry a man they first kept on their teenage bedroom walls.) Bayley thinks the 1970s and 1980s were the golden age of poster design: “We have this appetite to project our personalities through objects, but the generation growing up in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s would not have had access to this imagery. Colour printing was expensive and difficult. I’m guessing it was born around 1966, with Richard Avedon’s posters of the Beatles in psychedelic colours, sold by The Times. It was a notably English phenomenon. We live in a sophisticated visual culture, with very good magazines and very good television. Until everyone wanted to create a pop video, everyone wanted to create a poster. It was just as the visual media was reaching wider markets, but before it was diverted into electronica.”

This poster era was dominated by the now-defunct chain store Athena, where teenagers would spend Saturdays browsing through its poster racks. The “tennis girl” was popular, of course, along with monochrome shots of couples kissing, or dreamy depictions of unicorns. But the biggest seller was L’enfant, of 1986. It showed a pumped man cradling a baby, and was bought by nearly every girl who is now a thirtysomething mother. The theory goes that it imprinted them with the idea of inventing the new man. I don’t buy it. I think it’s just a cover for girls who didn’t want to grow up but were too embarrassed to keep playing with dolls. They liked the baby, not the bloke.

Charlie Chester is the CEO of GB Posters, the biggest-selling poster company in the UK. He has been selling posters for 30 years — his first customers were fellow students at Leicester — and online turnover is £11 million a year. If anything, now is the teenage poster’s golden age, he says. What will they be nostalgic about in 2042? “Biggest seller now? One Direction. By miles. And Call of Duty, or any gaming posters, for boys.”

Yet themes are perennial: he sees the footballers and faces of pop stars replaced each year. His customers start at about 8, peak at 16, fade away at 22, as they move on to the true maturity of the framed print. You know you are finally secure in your tastes when you commit to a frame. Then you’re boxed in for ever. Off the wall: Celebrity posters

“I’m really embarrassed to admit that I had Robert Redford, from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and David Cassidy. I also had Woman in a Chemise by Picasso and [Henry Wallis’s] Death of Chatterton.” Nigella Lawson “I can tell you exactly what I had: Edward Burne-Jones’s King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid [above], and Angela Davis, the black-power lady. I didn’t have a pin-up but, without being gay, she was my pin-up. I just thought she was beautiful.” Professor Mary Beard describing her undergraduate room at Newnham College, Cambridge “I had [posters of] Bertrand Russell and Einstein. I also had pictures of some attractive young ladies but those two were my main ones.” Professor A. C. Grayling

“I was always more into sport than pop music, though I did have a picture from a newspaper of Lyn Paul [below centre], who I still quite fancy, of the New Seekers. I usually put up the annual Burnley FC squad picture, and individual photos of my favourite players. I also wrote to David Hay [Celtic FC] after he’d been brilliant in a match for Scotland and he sent back a really nice, handwritten letter, so I had that up.” Alistair Campbell describing the room he shared with his brother

“Nope, no posters and no, I didn’t have a pin-up. Everybody’s not the same you know, not everyone wants one.” Anne Widdecombe

Why They Take Risks

There is a method to teenager madness, and learning to think like a teenager may be the secret to handling adolescents' risk-taking.

The misunderstanding is that people think kids are just seeking thrills. The real payoffs are acceptance into a group or a rep for toughness.

Teens play drinking games, smoke and act heedlessly largely because they desperately want to impress each other. Those who take more chances gain status among their peers, which helps them compete with rivals and win over potential mates.

Scare tactics that ignore the advantages of risk-taking to teens often backfire. In advertising the dangers of driving fast, you make reckless driving more of a status symbol.

Rather than trying to stamp out teen's status seeking impulses, interventions should appeal to them.

In one study, an antismoking campaign was more effective when it de-emphasised the health risks and promoted the social benefits of not smoking instead. And an anti-underage drinking campaign warned them not to get drunk and embarrass themselves.

Advice

Let them give up the piano, sulk and wear what they want – as long as they do the laundry, say the parenting experts.

They slam doors, they skulk in their bedrooms and eat all the food in the fridge. It can be difficult living with a teenager — but are they really so complicated? According to a new report from the Office for National Statistics, young people are “more likely than other age groups to be highly satisfied with their lives”, with 16 and 17 year olds the happiest of all. And it’s the simple things in life that make them happy. More research by the Institute for Social & Economic Research, at the University of Essex, has revealed that life satisfaction among 10 to 15 year olds depends on having friends over to their home, playing sport and having a stable home life. So how can parents maximise teen happiness?

They want boundaries even if they argue

Teenagers may say they want freedom but what they actually want is a “bit” of freedom. Like toddlers (whose brains are undergoing similarly seismic levels of change), they crave boundaries so they can feel safe while kicking against them. So with younger teens, be clear about whether they are expected to come straight home from school and whether they are allowed to have friends round when you’re not there. “Saying to a 16-year-old, ‘I expect you in by 11.30pm,’ will give them a sense of security — they know they are loved and that someone cares about them enough to look after them,” says education consultant Gill Hines, the co-author of Whatever! (Piatkus, £12.99). “When you speak to them years later, they always say, ‘I used to hate it, but I’m glad you had those rules’. It also lets them off the hook with their friends if they’re not allowed to go to all-night parties: they can blame Mum and Dad even though they weren’t really happy themselves to go.” Older teenagers are great ones for obeying the spirit, rather than the letter, of the law, so if they manage to scrape home at 11.45pm, it probably isn’t worth making a huge fuss, experts say.

Give a 6:1 ratio of praise to criticism

They will be suspicious of hyperbole and hypersensitive to any hint of sarcasm, but teenagers need praise just as much as toddlers, according to Charlie Taylor, Michael Gove’s former behaviour tsar and author of Divas & Door Slammers (Vermilion, £10.99). He says parents should aim for six pieces of praise to every one criticism — a difficult ratio to maintain, he admits, in the face of a 14-year-old who seems bent on annoying you. “It’s not like whooping up a three year old, it has to be much more subtle,” he says. “It’s just noticing when they do something right and saying a quiet thanks or well done, but certainly not in front of their friends. Texts are good because they can’t throw it back in your face. They may appear to ignore praise, but they are absorbing it.” Research suggests that parents who continue to hug older children will have fewer behavioural difficulties to contend with: so continue to offer hugs without forcing it, he advises.

Let them be grumpy

Teenagers can’t help it: it’s all the fault of their brain, which is undergoing rewiring: pruning back connections to make a more efficient brain capable of complex adult thought, forward planning and reasoning by age 17 or 18 (although the process doesn’t finish until the early twenties). In the meantime they have trouble linking cause and effect, they can’t plan ahead, they’re overly emotional and self-conscious, and crave time alone. Their bedroom becomes the place where they’ve marked out their territory, where they can explore these new emotions and sense of identity on their own — which is why the teens in the Essex study valued having their own room. But parents should maintain a balance. “Teenagers are always going to want to squirrel themselves away and write their diary or listen to their music, but it’s important that they are not allowed to completely remove themselves from the family,” says Crissy Duff, a psychotherapeutic counsellor who works with teens. How much time is too much? “There’s no prescription; each family will have its own balance. But ask yourself, do you feel uncomfortable about it? Do you feel out of contact with your child? Are they withdrawing? You have to give them reasons to come downstairs, so at least if they haven’t got a computer or phone upstairs, it’s quite boring and they will emerge downstairs at some point.” If it’s not possible for a teenager to have their own room, Duff suggests having a rota where each room-sharer has their own time alone in it while the other one spends time downstairs watching TV or is out.

Let them go on Facebook

An hour’s social networking emerged from the Essex report as the ideal maximum amount, though parents of older teenagers may choke at the notion of restricting Facebook to a mere daily hour. However, it’s worth setting some limits early on as too much social networking (classified as three and a half hours a day in one Australian study of 12 to 16-year-old girls), increases depression and lowers self-esteem — because it feeds anxiety and stops them doing healthier social and sporting activities. Facebook is the number one worry for girls aged 12 to 14 at Gill Hines’s seminars. “The average 14-year-old’s life is pretty limited so there is this constant desperation to find things to write about, so if one girl is feeling down, she tells her friend and suddenly 30 people are gossiping about her; it’s life as a soap opera, which can be brutal.” That doesn’t mean we should ban it, though, as a 13 year old without access will feel excluded by her peers from today’s virtual version of the playground. Instead, teach them some rules of engagement: think before you post, respect friends’ confidences, be wary of sharing every emotion and don’t allow it to displace real friendships. If they have a Facebook account before the legal age of 13 (as do 55 per cent of 12 year olds and one third of 11 year olds), make it a condition that you’re listed as a friend. “Once they are over 13, you can’t really expect to be their friend on Facebook — although some girls are happy for their mums to be there,” Hines says. “If you insist, the danger is they may set up another account elsewhere that you have no chance of hearing about.”

Duff advises making sure that their phone deal doesn’t offer too generous an internet package so they are forced to self-limit timewise; she doesn’t allow her daughters aged 12 and 14 to do social networking in their bedrooms at all.

15-year-olds should cook for the family

Doing chores and chipping in to help raises self-esteem in teens just as it does with younger children, although you might need to be clever about how you approach it. Nagging doesn’t work with teenagers. “It’s no good barking ‘empty the dishwasher’ at them. Instead, leave little notes asking nicely, use humour and be motivating rather than bossy,” says Janey Downshire, who runs parenting courses called Teenagers Translated. “They need intrinsic rewards to feel appreciated and thanked by you, but in a low-key way. Giving them responsibilities beyond their age is important because they feel grown- up. They think ‘I can be trusted with this’.” By 13, children should be able to cook a basic meal, such as spaghetti bolognaise, for several people — and by 15 cook for the family once a week, says Clare Paterson, author of Grow Up!, which lists 101 things a teen should be able to do before leaving home. A 14 year old should be helping with the laundry, she believes, and a 16-year-old doing their own.

Don’t force scheduled quality time

Setting aside “quality time” to mull over the important questions in life might be fine for a 10-year-old, but it’s not going to work with teens. Yet we’re supposed to be “keeping lines of communication open”, as psychologists are fond of saying — but how? “It’s about being available but being more intuitive about when they need you, especially with boys,” Downshire says. “If they slide into the kitchen and you’re busy answering work e-mails while cooking dinner, it’s worth downing tools, pottering about with them and just waiting to see what comes out.”

Remember that boys don’t like eye contact

Teenage boys don’t like face-to-face communication or eye contact, Downshire says. “They much prefer side-by-side talking where you are both doing something absorbing such as cooking or repairing something, and can chat in a low- key way.” That’s where activities with Dad can be useful, she says. “Give them lots of small gestures of support like a wink or a small smile: communication with a teenager is a lot like a dance.”

Let them feel part of a tribe

It pays to keep your house as welcoming as possible to encourage your teenager to bring friends round: it will help to nurture friendships (which is the number one predictor of teenage happiness) and also provide useful intelligence. Some mothers choose to give up work when their children are teenagers for this reason. “You don’t have to throw a party every time they come round — in fact they won’t want you hanging around constantly offering cups of tea. A 14-year-old just wants to hang out and feel part of their tribe,” Duff says. “If you make your house the nicest place to be, the more likely it is that your teenager and their friends will choose it. In return, you’ll get to know what’s happening and who’s who.” A teenager doesn’t necessarily need more of your time than a 10-year-old, Hines says , but they do need more of your thought. “You need to be more invisible yet just as ‘there’, which is remarkably difficult to achieve.”

Let them drop musical intruments if they want — but not sport

It becomes harder to strong-arm them into practising the clarinet or turning out for Sunday rugby the way you could when they were 11. Let them give up the activities they don’t like because spare time is precious. “When my daughter wanted to give up piano I was worried about sending her the message that it was OK to chuck stuff in and not stick with it, but ask yourself: who’s it for, me or them?” Duff says. “In the end she gave it up and tried singing, then guitar — which she still does.” Don’t let them give up all activities: they should do at least one (it will keep them away from the screen and encourage friendships), plus a sport preferably. Fitness falls as children reach 13, particularly in girls who are half as active as boys, yet studies show sport can reduce stress, promote friendships and teamwork, and even improve academic work (one study discovered that those who could run the fastest and jump the furthest achieved the highest scores in tests). It’s a matter of trying everything until they find something they like and are physically suited to. Try to find something before 14 when enthusiasm falls away, says Sue Tibballs, of the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation.

Don’t criticise their clothes

Teenagers go to great lengths to look different to shock us, even if they end up looking exactly the same as all of their friends. It’s all part of the essential process of separating themselves from parents, so it’s best to avoid criticism. “Take a deep breath whenever you feel the need to comment on your daughter’s make-up, or your son’s hair or clothes,” says Lynn Huggins-Cooper, author of Raising Teenagers (Infinite Ideas, £12.99). “Does it really matter? Every generation has tried to shock their elders with extreme styles. Save the big guns for more important matters.” If your daughter’s skirt is really too short, find something to praise about her appearance first, then add “I’m worried about the message you might be giving out”, she advises.

Family time together

Recent US research among 200 families over seven years found that teenagers who spent more time with their parents had higher self-esteem — especially if it included time with dad. Parents need to find excuses to spend weekly time together as a family, preferably when kids are still receptive to the idea, aged 9-11. Meal times together are absolutely the best, but not all working parents can manage it. Instead, set up a family night where there is no television or social networking allowed. “Friday nights are good: get a takeaway, play something — perhaps on the Wii — and discuss films or what’s on TV,” Hines says. They may moan, but persevere. “You’re building in structures that prevent them being able to spend solitary hours in their room, so don’t be put off by them saying, ‘That’s so lame’. They will enjoy it in the end; part and parcel of happiness is having a strong sense of family identity.”

Height of Teen

 It has long been known, for instance, that male earning potential correlates rather bluntly with height. But it was only in 2004 that a trio of economists thought to burrow a little deeper and discovered, based on a sample of thousands of white men in the U.S. and Britain, that it wasn’t adult height that seemed to affect their subjects’ wages; it was their height at 16. (In other words, two white men measuring five-foot-eleven can have very different earning potential in the same profession, all other demographic markers being equal, just because one of them was shorter at 16.)

Eight years later, Deborah Carr, a sociologist at Rutgers, observed something similar about adults of a normal weight: They are far more likely to have higher self-esteem if they were a normal weight, rather than overweight or obese, in late adolescence (Carr was using sample data that tracked weight at age 21, but she notes that heavy 21-year-olds were also likely to be heavy in high school). Robert Crosnoe, a University of Texas sociologist, will be publishing a monograph with a colleague this year that shows attractiveness in high school has lingering effects, too, even fifteen years later. “It predicted a greater likelihood of marrying,” says Crosnoe, “better earning potential, better mental health.” This finding reminds me of something a friend was told years ago by Frances Lear, head of the eponymous, now defunct magazine for women: “The difference between you and me is that I knew in high school I was beautiful.”

Our self-image from those years, in other words, is especially adhesive. So, too, are our preferences. “There’s no reason why, at the age of 60, I should still be listening to the Allman Brothers,” Steinberg says. “Yet no matter how old you are, the music you listen to for the rest of your life is probably what you listened to when you were an adolescent.”

Isolated Teen Culture

Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults. They were not sequestered as they matured. Now teens live in a biosphere of their own. In their recent book Escaping the Endless Adolescence, psychologists Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen note that teenagers today spend just 16 hours per week interacting with adults and 60 with their cohort. One century ago, it was almost exactly the reverse.

Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult company. They start to generate a culture with independent values and priorities. James Coleman, a renowned mid-century sociologist, was among the first to analyze that culture in his seminal 1961 work, The Adolescent Society, and he wasn’t very impressed. “Our society has within its midst a set of small teen-age societies,” he wrote, “which focus teen-age interests and attitudes on things far removed from adult responsibilities.” Yes, his words were prudish, but many parents have had some version of these misgivings ever since, especially those who’ve consciously opted not to send their kids into the Roman amphi­theater. (From the website of the National Home Education Network: “Ironically, one of the reasons many of us have chosen to educate our own is precisely this very issue of socialization! Children spending time with individuals of all ages more closely resembles real life than does a same-age school setting.”)

In fact, one of the reasons that high schools may produce such peculiar value systems is precisely because the people there have little in common, except their ages. “These are people in a large box without any clear, predetermined way of sorting out status,” says Robert Faris, a sociologist at UC Davis who’s spent a lot of time studying high-school aggression. “There’s no natural connection between them.” Such a situation, in his view, is likely to reward aggression. Absent established hierarchies and power structures (apart from the privileges that naturally accrue from being an upperclassman), kids create them on their own, and what determines those hierarchies is often the crudest common-­denominator stuff—looks, nice clothes, prowess in sports—­rather than the subtleties of personality. “Remember,” says Crosnoe, who spent a year doing research in a 2,200-student high school in Austin, “high schools are big. There has to be some way of sorting people socially. It’d be nice if kids could be captured by all their characteristics. But that’s not realistic.”

Why is it that in most public high schools across America, a girl who plays the cello or a boy who plays in the marching band is a loser? And even more fundamentally: Why was it such a liability to be smart?

The explanations tended to vary. But among the most striking was the one offered by Steinberg, who conjectured that high-school values aren’t all that different from adult values. Most adults don’t like cello or marching bands, either. Most Americans are suspicious of intellectuals. Cellists, trumpet players, and geeks may find their homes somewhere in the adult world, and even status and esteem. But only in places that draw their own kind.

“If you put adults in a similar situation”—meaning airlifted into a giant building full of strangers with few common bonds—“you’d find similar behaviors.” Like reality television, for instance, in which people literally divide into tribes, form alliances, and vote one another off the island. “And I think you see it in nursing homes,” says Faris. “In small villages. And sometimes in book clubs.” And then I realized, having covered politics for many years: Congress, too. “It’s not adolescence that’s the problem,” insists Faris. “It’s the giant box of strangers.”

As adults, we spend a lot of time in boxes of strangers. “I have always referred to life as ‘perpetual high school,’ ” Paul Feig wrote me in our first e-mail exchange, later adding, when we spoke, that his wife’s first order when she landed her Hollywood dream job was to go fire her predecessor. Brown tells me she frequently hears similar things from men in finance—as a reward for outstanding quarterly earnings, they get to pick their new office, which means displacing someone else. (The corresponding shame led one to consider quitting: “I didn’t sign up to terrorize people,” he tells her in her latest book, Daring Greatly.) Today, we also live in an age when our reputation is at the mercy of people we barely know, just as it was back in high school, for the simple reason that we lead much more public, interconnected lives. The prospect of sudden humiliation once again trails us, now in the form of unflattering photographs of ourselves or unwanted gossip, virally reproduced. The whole world has become a box of interacting strangers.

Maybe, perversely, we should be grateful that high school prepares us for this life. The isolation, the shame, the aggression from those years—all of it readies us to cope. But one also has to wonder whether high school is to blame; whether the worst of adult America looks like high school because it’s populated by people who went to high school in America. We’re recapitulating the ugly folkways of this institution, and reacting with the same reflexes, because that’s where we were trapped, and shaped, and misshaped, during some of our most vulnerable years.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Grandpa: Are you gettin' any?
Richard: Dad!
Grandpa: You can tell me, Dwayne. Are you gettin' any?
Richard: Come on, please.
Grandpa: [Dwayne shakes his head] No? Jesus. You're what? Fifteen? My God, man!
Richard: Dad!
Grandpa: You should be gettin' that young stuff.
Richard: Dad!
Grandpa: That young stuff is the best stuff in the whole world.
Richard: Hey! Hey! Dad! That's enough! Stop it!
Grandpa: Will you kindly not interrupt me, Richard! See, right now you're jailbait, they're jailbait. It's perfect. I mean, you hit 18, man! You're talkin' about three to five.

Brain Plasticity

Adolescence. It’s long been considered a storm to be weathered. A time when sensible parents batten down the hatches, grit their teeth and endure. Primary objective: survival.

But now, one of the world’s most highly regarded experts on the adolescent brain is calling for a radical rethink. In his new book Age of Opportunity, developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg highlights an emerging wave of brain science that is revealing adolescence to be what he calls a second “window of opportunity”.

It has long been known that between the ages of zero and three, our brains are exquisitely sensitive to experience: that what happens to us during that time has a profound and lifelong effect. That is why it is crucial parents talk to their infants. It’s also the rationale behind the plethora of brain-training toys aimed at toddlers, and it’s how the Government justifies its emphasis on early-childhood education.

But according to Steinberg, what is only now becoming clear is that adolescence is a second make-or-break period of neuroplasticity. This, he writes, is “an incredibly exciting discovery that hasn’t drawn the kind of attention it deserves”.

This discovery, he argues, should force an urgent and significant overhaul of our approach to parenting and educating adolescents, and the legislation we put in place around them.

STUDENT OF ADOLESCENCE

Steinberg, 62, is at home in Philadelphia, shoehorning this interview in on a Saturday afternoon. He’s busy – just back from delivering a keynote speech at a European conference on the science of adolescence in Turkey, and part-way through an Ivy League book tour. He’s ticked off the University of Pennsylvania and is now preparing to lecture at the universities of Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley. Steinberg is a distinguished professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. And as he puts it in Age of Opportunity, “I have been steeped in the study of adolescence for nearly 40 years”.

Steinberg has conducted and directed studies on tens of thousands of adolescents, funded by grants from public and private organisations. He has more than 350 academic articles and 12 books to his name; his textbook Adolescence, in its 10th edition, is still considered the definitive university-level take on the subject.

But it’s seeing his findings play out in policy that matters most to Steinberg. So far his influence is most clearly evident in the criminal justice arena.

In 2005, his research on the differences between adolescent and adult brains – and what that meant for criminal culpability – contributed to the Supreme Court’s decision to ban the juvenile death penalty.

It happened like this: Steinberg co-wrote a paper setting out the brain science and pushing for the “insanely uncivilised” practice to be abolished. When a test case called Roper vs Simmons made it to the Supreme Court, the American Psychological Association asked Steinberg to head a team of scientists to compile a Friend of the Court brief on the topic. He was in court to hear that brief cited in the final ruling – a ruling that not only saved the life of Christopher Simmons, who at 17 had murdered a young woman, but saw the cancellation of death sentences for 72 other offenders in prisons across America.

PLASTIC BRAINS

So what is neuroplasticity – and what makes the prospect of a second “window” of it so exciting? Steinberg thinks of plasticity as “the process through which the outside world gets inside us and changes us”. To him, the plasticity peak in adolescence presents a second chance to influence how the brain – that is, the person – turns out as an adult.

“The new concept is that adolescence is a time during which the brain is significantly shaped by experience, and that makes it a time of both vulnerability and opportunity.” Surround adolescents with the right conditions and they will flourish. “But if the environments are toxic, they will suffer in powerful and enduring ways.”

Steinberg is careful to note that compared with research on infant brain development and the way the brain declines in old age, the science of the adolescent brain is itself “a very young field”. Further, he tells the Listener, direct studies of plasticity in the human brain are generally prohibitively invasive, “so most of our understanding comes from animal studies. That’s fine, because mammals go through puberty and therefore they go through something that is at least analogous to human adolescence.”

It’s only in the past three or four years, Steinberg says, that researchers have started to reach a consensus on the idea of adolescence as a second plasticity “window”.

In Age of Opportunity, he covers the basic mechanics of how that plasticity plays out.

The brain functions, he explains, by sending electrical signals between its billions of neurons. As neurons are not actually connected to one another, these signals have to jump across the “synapse”, or gap between neurons. They’re aided in this by neurotransmitters – chemicals, including dopamine and serotonin, that are sent out by one neuron and slot themselves into receptors on the other. Over time, the brain strengthens the pathways these neurotransmitters travel most frequently and prunes others away. Voilà: the brain changes according to experience.

As those pathways bed in, the brain also starts to insulate certain sections of them in a fatty substance called myelin, commonly known as “white matter”. Once wrapped in myelin, a pathway is much more efficient and able to carry impulses about 100 times faster than before. But as myelination progresses, the brain stabilises and becomes much less plastic.

Steinberg believes it’s fairly well known that the brain does not fully mature until about the age of 25. But he says it’s important to understand that it retains a certain degree of plasticity at all ages. This is what allows adults to recover from brain injury, to learn new skills and to adapt to new environments.

He has little patience for the question of which major peak of plasticity deserves more attention. You might as well ask whether breathing or eating is more important to survival, he writes: of course it’s crucial to invest in the early years, but if we leave those brains to languish when they hit adolescence, all that good work will be wasted.

FOREVER YOUNG

Making the prospect of an adolescent “window” of neuroplasticity all the more significant, says Steinberg, is the fact that it now tends to stay open for longer than ever before.

It’s well known that the average age at which children in developed countries hit puberty is steadily dropping and that the other book-end of adolescence – adult milestones such as marriage, moving out of home and working full-time – is simultaneously shuffling back. Since about 1950, Steinberg writes, the average age of menarche has been dropping by about three or four months per decade, while the average age at marriage has been rising by about a year. That means the concept of adolescence as stretching from ages 10-25 is now not too far off the mark – he sees no sign of a slowdown and predicts that by 2020 “adolescence will take almost 20 years from start to finish”.

The earlier onset of puberty, he says, “is much more worrisome than most people realise”. This is partly because parents and educators are simply not equipped to deal with the implications of puberty hitting very young.

“In the US now, paediatricians are reporting seeing a lot of girls who have breast development when they’re seven years old. And I think that’s really a shock and a surprise, and a concern … If there’s hormonal development that’s making the body change, then that also means there are changes taking place in the brain, and that to me is almost more concerning than the fact that kids’ bodies are changing at an earlier age.”

Sex hormones released when puberty starts have a rev-up effect on the limbic system, which Steinberg calls “the brain’s sentry”. The chief task of the limbic system, he says, is to detect rewards and threats and create emotions – or “reports” – that are then sent to the prefrontal cortex.

Steinberg thinks of the prefrontal cortex as the chief executive, responsible for assessing all incoming reports and deciding on the most rational action. The glitch in the adolescent brain is that the prefrontal cortex is not spurred towards adult development at the same time as the limbic system, and the earlier puberty hits, the longer the lag.

That’s an issue because the developing limbic system is strongly geared towards reward, but not well tuned in to risk. “As a result, compared with children and adults, adolescents are more likely to approach situations in which they think a reward may be likely, but they are less likely to avoid situations in which they think they may have something to lose.”

Further, Steinberg cites extensive research suggesting that children – particularly girls – who go through puberty early are at “significantly higher” risk of a host of mental health and behavioural problems, and even of developing some cancers.

Although genes do play a role in determining the age of onset of puberty, Steinberg says emerging research suggests there may be steps parents can take to help delay it, including embedding healthy dietary and lifestyle habits.

In Steinberg’s opinion we are fretting too much about the trends at the other end of adolescence.

Putting off marriage, studying for longer, delaying childbearing and waiting before settling into a career all help to keep the brain plastic for longer, Steinberg says. Novel learning and new experiences help maintain plasticity. Routine is a sure-fire way to shut it down.

Because of this, he writes: “Rather than lamenting how long it takes young people to become adults and encouraging them to speed things up, we should focus our attention on how to help all young people in their twenties … benefit from the delayed transition into adulthood.”

Parents, says Steinberg, should try not to worry if their child is still at home and financially dependent in their early or mid-twenties – so long as they’re not just watching cat videos on YouTube.

“I don’t buy the argument that this phenomenon is a reflection of the fact that the current generation of people in their twenties is lazy or spoilt. I think it’s a rational response to the economy and to the changing demands of the labour force

“If I had a child living at home and she was in a career-related job but not making enough money to have her own apartment, no, I wouldn’t worry about it at all. I would try to do what I could to support her.”

All the more opportunity, he says, for shaping that plastic adolescent brain.

MASTERING SELF-CONTROL

So how should we make the most of this new, extended period of brain plasticity? Simple, says Steinberg: focus on building adolescents’ self-control.

“The capacity for self-regulation is probably the single most important contributor to achievement, mental health and social success,” he writes. “In study after study of adolescents, in samples of young people ranging from privileged suburban youth to destitute inner-city teenagers, those who score high on measures of self-regulation invariably fare best ... This makes developing self-regulation the central task of adolescence and the goal that we should be pursuing ”

Sound familiar? Steinberg refers to the famous Dunedin longitudinal study, which has been a chief contributor to the international data on self-control’s importance.

The Dunedin study has followed more than 1000 New Zealanders since before they were born. With the cohort now hitting their forties, the study’s central conclusion so far is that the degree of self-control a person has as a three-year-old strongly predicts how happy, healthy and wealthy they will be as adults.

University of Otago professor Richie Poulton, who directs the study, has called self-control “an incredibly important human trait … you could even think of it as an essential raw ingredient for life success”.

He and Steinberg both talk about self-control as a neural balancing act – the art of perceiving reward and risk and deciding on an action that is sensible long-term.

Steinberg says parents who want to gauge a young child’s self-control could try the classic “marshmallow test”: offer one small treat now, or two if she can hold off scoffing it for 10 minutes.

Parents with older children could imagine their child has just been given cash for his birthday, suggests Steinberg. “He wants to go and buy a new smartphone but knows that in a month and a half a new model is going to come out that is going to be better. Is yours the kind of kid who just can’t stop himself from going and buying it now?”

Such inability or unwillingness to delay gratification is “a huge, life-long liability”, warns Steinberg – particularly now that basic graduate degrees are losing their currency, unpaid or lowly paid internships are becoming more common and housing costs are rising. “In the 21st century, if you aren’t a ‘delayer’, you’re in for a very tough time.”

Like intelligence, the degree to which a person is a “delayer” is partly determined by genes. But as Steinberg points out, the neurological systems that regulate self-control are much more malleable than those that govern intelligence – particularly during adolescence. “And the most important environmental contributor to self-regulation is the family.”

NO PUSHOVER

No pressure then, parents. At least Steinberg has a crystal-clear prescription: “Practise authoritative parenting,” he urges. “Be warm. Be firm. And be supportive.”

Being an authoritative parent doesn’t mean bossing kids around. It’s a social science term for a particular style of parenting that, due to increasingly sturdy data, is now widely accepted as superior to the other two broad styles: “permissive” and “autocratic”. Permissive parents are warm and supportive of their children but tend to indulge them; they are no good at setting rules or boundaries and see their primary responsibility as making sure the child is happy.

Autocratic parents are at the other extreme – think “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua, with her cold, dictatorial “do it because I say so” approach. The overarching goal of autocratic parents is obedience.

“There’s no evidence that it’s good for kids,” Steinberg says. “In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that it’s not good for kids.” It seems we don’t have solid data showing the proportion of New Zealand parents who practise each style of parenting. But in large US surveys, a quarter to a third of parents are classed as authoritative. (It is a less common parenting style among lower socio-economic families and certain ethnicities.)

Authoritative parents have found a happy middle ground. As Steinberg puts it, they are “firm without being harsh, strict without being stifling”. They are warm and loving, fair and consistent and they set rules that make sense, rather than just make their own lives easier. (For more on authoritative parenting tactics, see box at end of story.)

Steinberg notes that authoritative parents also tend to be experts at scaffolding: that is, they naturally give their children just a little bit of extra wriggle-room at a time. They might nudge a curfew out in half-hour increments rather than dropping it altogether, for example, or set their own graduated restrictions on a newly licensed teen driver. “You don’t want to give your child complete freedom all at once – you want to phase it in over time.”

Scaffolding like this means the adolescent brain learns to self-regulate in small steps, says Steinberg, rather than being expected to make tricky, risky leaps.

It’s similar to the approach encouraged in education by researchers such as Professor John Hattie. His central message is that parents and teachers should always try to stretch children just beyond their current capabilities and give rich feedback as they progress. The neurobiological payoff of such strategies is that the brain at once reinforces healthy pathways and pushes itself to develop new ones.

OF MEN AND MICE

Beware the peer effect in adolescence. It’s so strong, says Steinberg, that it’s even apparent in other mammals.

He points to mice studies that consistently find adolescent rodents are more social and more responsive to social rewards, and that if they learn something with their peers around they are more likely to retain that learning.

He remembers fondly an experiment he and his colleagues carried out in which they raised mice in groups of three, then tested whether having their “friends” around had any effect on how much alcohol the mice drank. Some mice were tested just after puberty and others as adults.

“Amazingly, adolescent mice drank more alcohol when they were tested with their ‘friends’ in the cage than when they were tested alone, but adult mice drank the same amount regardless,” the researchers found.

It’s clear that teenage mice aren’t sitting around egging each other on to drink more. So what’s going on? It’s a myth that peer pressure is necessarily so overt, says Steinberg. He and his colleagues have been studying the peer effect for 10 years and have been surprised by how powerfully it plays out in adolescents. Adolescents, they have found, respond to the presence of peers even if they are strangers, and even if they can’t communicate with one another. For adolescents, just knowing peers are there acts as a reward in itself. Further, it has an amplifying effect.

“Being around friends when you are a teenager makes everything feel so good that you become even more sensitive to rewards than you ordinarily are, which leads you to take chances you wouldn’t ordinarily take.”

Steinberg urges parents to limit the unsupervised time their adolescent spends with others, because in these situations even good kids will be more inclined to play up. And he rubbishes the popular notion that teens only get into trouble on Friday or Saturday nights. Partly because more mothers are in the workforce, Steinberg says, “the prime time for experimentation with drugs and sex and delinquency is now the after-school hours. We know that unsupervised, unstructured time [with peers] is a recipe for this kind of behaviour. So I’m not saying that I think kids should never have time like that – but I think parents should be on the lookout.”

Parents should also keep the peer effect top-of-mind when setting or enforcing rules about driving with passengers. In one classic study, Steinberg’s team uses a driving simulation game to test how likely adolescents are to run an orange light when they are alone, compared with when there are adults or other adolescents in the car. They’re put under time pressure, so there’s an incentive to run the light, but that’s balanced by the fact that crashing loses much more time than waiting for a green.

“Adolescents take more chances when they play this game in front of their friends than when they play it alone,” the team finds when they run this study. “Adults, on the other hand, play the game exactly the same way when they are being observed by their friends as when they are alone.” One finding will confirm the suspicions of every parent who has taught a teen to drive: “When adolescents drive with their parents in the car, they drive even more cautiously than they do when they’re by themselves.”

What about social media? Steinberg does not know of good data bearing out his conviction that social media is likely to exacerbate or amplify the peer effect. But he believes it warrants further study.

He points to the “fire challenge” that has sprung up in the US in recent months and that in July killed a 15-year-old boy from Buffalo, New York. Spread as a sort of online chain letter, teens are dared to douse themselves in petrol or alcohol and set themselves alight. “There’s no way somebody in his right mind would do that unless he had an audience,” says Steinberg. “I think it’s a perfect example of the kind of risky behaviour that is being exacerbated by the peer influences inherent in social media.”

The Ministry of Education warned New Zealand principals by email this month about the spread of the fire challenge.

A better appreciation of the power of the peer effect could help educators in positive ways too, Steinberg believes. For example, he thinks schools should be encouraging more group projects, as learning gained in this way seems to “stick” better.

And employers might want to think about rostering on an adult in any team of adolescent staff. Steinberg’s team is part-way through a project funded by the US military in which it is testing the decision-making of small groups of adolescents with or without an adult in the mix. The aim is to work out “how best to compose teams of soldiers to optimise their judgment in combat and better protect them from harm”.

The team is using three tests: the driving game, a gambling scenario and a shooting task. The last test calls for a snap assessment of whether an enemy combatant is pulling a cellphone or a gun and deciding how to react: shoot or not? It’s highly relevant, says Steinberg, given the weeks of protest in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police shooting of teenager Michael Brown.

The researchers are yet to start testing what happens when adults join the groups. But as expected, on the gambling and driving games, a clear peer effect is showing through: groups of adolescents are making riskier decisions than they do by themselves.

Strangely, says Steinberg, early indications are that the shooting task does not follow the pattern. He would be surprised if that finding holds through further analysis “because it wouldn’t be consistent with our other tests. But we’ll see. It still leaves open the possibility that groups of adolescents with an adult might shoot even less than groups of adolescents by themselves.”

YOUNG KILLERS

Steinberg has a serious philosophical problem with the fact that Americans can be sent to the frontline at the age of 18 but can’t legally buy a six-pack of beer until 21. At the same time, he bemoans the way legislation around age limits is so often shaped by such comparisons.

Based on what we know of the adolescent brain, he argues that legal age limits should instead be set according to the type of decision-making they involve. By the age of about 16, he says, our brains are as capable of making rational decisions as those of adults – under certain “cold cognition” conditions.

Cold cognition means the adolescent has time to gather and process information and ask for advice if necessary, with no pressure from peers. Voting, granting informed consent for medical procedures (including abortion) or signing up to take part in a scientific study are examples of such situations.

So drop the New Zealand voting age, then? “You would probably be fine to let people vote when they were 16,” says Steinberg.

He worries about our driving age, though, and is incredulous to learn that until recently it was 15. “I just don’t think 16-year-olds should be driving. That’s what it is here, and it’s very young by international standards. The leading cause of death in the US, by far, among teenagers, is automobile crashes. By far. Nothing even comes remotely close to it.”

According to a 2012 analysis published in the Lancet, among 27 developed countries, New Zealand’s overall adolescent death rate is second only to that in the US, and as in the US, car crashes are the biggest killer.

And it’s not just the adolescents who suffer. Ministry of Transport figures show that in 2012, drivers aged between 15 and 24 caused 55 fatal crashes in which 68 people died.

Drivers in this age range also caused 567 serious injuries and 2830 minor injuries. Together, adolescent drivers account for a quarter of the annual social cost of accidents. Their bill: $755 million.

Steinberg concedes that it helps that our licence system, like that in the US, is graduated: novice drivers have to meet curfews and are restricted in carrying passengers.

“But nothing would be as effective as just raising the driving age to 18, which is what it is just about everywhere else.” Driving, he says, is a prime example of “hot cognition”.

“Here, the circumstances are usually those that bring out the worst in adolescents’ judgment – they frequently pit the temptation of immediate rewards against the prudent consideration of long-term costs, occur against a backdrop of emotional arousal and include other adolescents.”

But Steinberg’s greatest scorn is reserved for the way developed countries persist with education programmes as a way to steer adolescents away from risky behaviour such as drug-taking, unprotected sex and dangerous driving. “It’s as if the people who design health education programmes are not only clueless about adolescents, but amnesiac about their own teen years.”

Such programmes cost the US more than $1 billion a year, he says, but “either do not work or are at best unproven”.

The problem is not that teens don’t understand the risks of skipping a condom or slugging back booze, but that thanks to their out-of-whack limbic systems, the reward side of their brains tend to overpower the side that registers risk.

So there’s little to be gained from force-feeding teens more information. Instead, Steinberg is out to change the world around them. His wish list: raise the price of cigarettes; raise the driving age; be more vigilant about the ways alcohol gets to minors and maybe push the drinking age up to 19 to help cut off the supply to high school students; give adolescents easier access to contraceptives and mental health services; and offer them better after-school programmes.

And he circles back, as ever, to the power of parenting. “Some things just take time to develop, and mature judgment is one of them. While our kids are maturing, we must protect them from themselves, both by limiting their access to dangerous activities and by helping them foster their powers of self-regulation ... In the short term, we might save their lives, and in the long term, we can help ensure that they live better lives for decades to come.”

Putting off puberty

Parents should do what they can to delay the onset of puberty in their children, advises Laurence Steinberg. Studies are showing that early puberty has links with obesity, artificial light and endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

Steinberg’s advice? Reduce sugar and fat in your child’s diet and aim for her or him to get at least an hour of aerobic exercise every day. Limit the time children spend on computers and smartphones and watching television. Stick to a regular bedtime – aim for 11-12 hours of sleep a night for preschoolers, and at least 10 hours for school-age children.

Endocrine disrupters are ubiquitous in modern society. But parents should try to minimise children’s exposure to phthalates, found in many soft plastics and cosmetics, and parabens, widely used as preservatives in cosmetics and toiletries. Try also to avoid plastics that contain bisphenol A (BPA).

The art of authoritative parenting

“The single most important thing parents can do to raise healthy, happy and successful kids is to practise authoritative parenting,” writes developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg in his latest book, Age of Opportunity.

This parenting style can be broken down into three basic elements: warmth, firmness and support. Steinberg emphasises that it’s crucial parents excel in all three.

BE WARM

You can’t spoil a child with love. So don’t hold back: say that you love them often and show plenty of physical affection. Older children might start to shy away but that doesn’t mean you should – just get more subtle, perhaps patting them on the shoulder or ruffling their hair rather than always going for the full-on cuddle. Try to make your home a haven and limit your child’s exposure to stress and arguments. Above all, you want to build your child’s sense of feeling loved, valued and protected.

BE FIRM

Set rules that are grounded in logic and purpose – not just a desire to assert your authority – and be consistent in enforcing them. Be clear in your own mind about why you’ve set a rule and explain your reasoning to your child. If your child is old enough, ask for and listen to his or her opinion. Make adjustments as circumstances change or as your child demonstrates responsibility.

When explaining expectations to your child, be as specific as you can. For example, if you’re asking a teen to clean her room once a week, detail what that means. Do you want her to vacuum, put away her clean clothes and put dirty clothes in the laundry? Tell her so. Even better if you can use a specific number in spelling out your expectations: the number of minutes you want her to practise piano, the time you expect her home from a concert.

“Structure makes children feel safe,” writes Steinberg. “We learn how to regulate ourselves by being regulated.”

Don’t ever physically punish your child for breaking a rule and don’t be nasty or demeaning. When doling out a punishment, explain what the child did wrong and the repercussions. Set out some alternative paths that could have been followed, clearly state the punishment and say that you expect better next time.

Routine is important too – try to stick to regular meal times and establish routines for everyday tasks such as getting dressed and going to bed.

BE SUPPORTIVE

It’s all about balance. Children need to know that you are there for them – but also that there are plenty of situations they can handle alone. Aim to tolerate and encourage your child’s growing sense of mastery and self-sufficiency.

“Scaffolding” is an excellent technique for this. Force yourself to step back. Don’t actually write your teen’s essay – instead, check the first draft and make suggestions. Don’t get on the phone to the sports coach to demand more game time. Instead, rehearse with your teen how he or she can have that conversation.

When your child has a decision to make, suggest factors that could be considered. But the decision should be your child’s. Gradually relinquish control and try to permit – rather than protect – when you can.

“Ask yourself whether the activity is dangerous, unhealthy, illegal, unethical or likely to close some doors that are better left open,” advises Steinberg. If you decide to say “no”, explain why.

A Mother Laments

My daughter complains that she can’t sleep. Sometimes I pass her room at 11 o’clock, at midnight, and see the light still on under the door. Inevitably, if I go in, I find her propped up in bed with her laptop, the blue haze from the screen on her face.

You should read a book, I say.

She rolls her eyes.

I’ve read loads of books, she says, as though this history has some bearing on her current situation. She has indeed read loads of books: It’s what I taught her to do.

Reading helps you sleep, I say. That thing — the laptop — keeps you awake.

My relationship with that thing is ambivalent at best. Sometimes I feel it has displaced me as the navigator of our lives; it has become her compass. Yet increasingly I recognize that I will be — that I ought to be — displaced.

A nice long German novel, I say. That’ll send you straight off.

She makes a noise of exasperation, and her temper instantly rises, like mercury shooting up in a thermometer. At 16, my older daughter is in the fever of adolescence: Her temperature is nearly always high. And in fact, if I could stuff the words back into my mouth, I would. Lately I’ve become aware of a dissonance, a dislocation, as though a familiar text had suddenly become illegible to me. What she needs is different from what I think she needs. Perhaps it always was, but she’s had to grow up to be able to tell me. Sometimes — when I’m brushing my teeth or chopping vegetables, when I’m not thinking about her at all — she’ll come and stand next to me and say, Give me attention. At other times, like now, I feel I’m forcing myself on her, like an insistent hostess forcing food on her guests. I don’t want to force, to insist, even at the risk that what I cherish will be wasted. Parenthood suddenly seems like one long litany of force, of insistence, of exposition and declamation; it seems, suddenly, to have contained too much of the sound of myself. When you declaim, you can’t listen. When you insist, you miss the opportunity to learn something new.

Mum, she says irritably, twitching so dramatically that the thing nearly falls off her lap, I’ve read enough books.

When my two daughters became teenagers, something began to happen that was unique in my experience of parenting so far: Other people began to warn me how awful it would be. Until then, the story of family life that I heard from my contemporaries had been one of relentless — almost frantic — positivism, a bright picture from which shadows were meticulously absent, as though they had been carefully excised. I had struggled to believe in that story, which often seemed to invoke a version of childhood composed of adult fantasies, fantasies so powerful that they threatened to undermine reality itself — a Walt Disney world where wish fulfillment had become a moral good yet whose ultimate wish was to obscure the truth. In my own experience, truth had stubbornly continued to insist on itself: the difficulties of continuing to create while bringing up two small children, the conflict between artistic and familial identity, the attempt to pursue your own truth while still honoring the truth of others, the practical and emotional complexities of motherhood and recently of divorce and single parenthood — all these tensions were real, so real that sometimes their causes were difficult to locate. At such times I learned to recognize the good by its proximity to the bad and vice versa; light and shadow couldn’t be separated, for the reason that they defined each other. Yet the public narrative of parenthood denied the light and shadow of reality; it veered insistently, sometimes crazily, toward joy. Sometimes it simply sounded like people trying to bridge the gap — for themselves, as much as for others — between the image and the truth, a gap that is nowhere deeper or more mysterious than in the experience of having a child. But at other times it sounded more like something nobler, something I lacked the knowledge of, a kind of courage or self-restraint that was interwoven with the responsibility of parenthood; a form of election, like knighthood, that brought with it a distinct code of conduct.

Except that suddenly it didn’t anymore. When people asked me how old my daughters were, they would grimace at my reply. Poor you, they’d say, or, Good luck, or, at best, Don’t worry, it’ll pass, you’ll get them back eventually. Stories began to emerge in my circle of acquaintances of shouting and slammed doors and verbal abuse, of academic failure, of secrecy and dishonesty; and of darker things, of eating disorders, self-harm, sexual precocity and depression. They used to be so sweet, a friend of mine said of his daughter and son, shaking his head. I don’t know what happened. It’s like a nightmare. Another friend says, It’s as if they hate me. I walk into a room and they wince; I speak and they ball up with irritation. I’m being bullied, she says, reminding me of Raymond Carver’s disturbing poem, “On an Old Photograph of My Son,” an outpouring of the author’s feelings of victimization at the hands of his adolescent son, his anger at the waste of his own youth and energy the nurture of this “petty tyrant” represents. Carver was an artist, and no cheerleader for family life, but perhaps all parents feel an element of artistry in their creation of a child. To be an artist is to have your creation obey you, but as Carver points out, parenthood is the opposite of art: The created object — the child — can become instead an uncontrollable source of destructiveness.

Adolescence, it strikes me, shares some of the generic qualities of divorce. The central shock of divorce lies in its bifurcation of the agreed-upon version of life: There are now two versions, mutually hostile, each of whose narrative aim is to discredit the other. Until adolescence, parents by and large control the family story. The children are the subject of this story, sure enough, the generators of its interest or charm, but they remain, as it were, characters, creatures derived from life who nonetheless have their being in the author’s head. A large part of parental authority is invested in the maintenance and upkeep of this story, its repetition, its continued iterations and adaptations. And it feels right to tell it, for what we are offering our children is a story of life in which they have been given a role. How true is it? It’s hard to tell. In a story there’s always someone who owns the truth: What matters is that character’s ability to serve it. But it is perhaps unwise to treasure this story too closely or believe in it too much, for at some point the growing child will pick it up and turn it over in his hands like some dispassionate reviewer composing a coldhearted analysis of an overhyped novel. The shock of critique is the first, faint sign of the coming conflict, though I wonder how much of what we call conflict is in fact our own deserved punishment for telling the story wrong, for twisting it with our own vanity or wishful thinking, for failing to honor the truth.

My daughters tell me stories of how this conflict is playing out on the other side, in their world. One friend’s mother is so fearful for and overprotective of her daughter — an only child — that she won’t let her go by train with a group of her friends for a day out; the daughter must remain at home while the others enjoy themselves. Another friend’s parents have no idea that their son is a regular and increasingly chronic drug user; they adhere to the happy, sunlit story of family life, while his friends grow more and more anxious on his behalf. Another is subjected to severe and often bizarre penalties and punishments for the minutest failure to achieve excellence in her moral, academic and personal life. Her parents are Catholics, my daughter adds, as though that explained everything.

Because they’re told by my daughters, these stories have the teenagers as their protagonists. The stories told by my peers work the other way around. One woman’s son texts her abusive messages from his bedroom while she stands cooking in the kitchen below; another’s children have defected to live with their father, despite their mother’s tireless generosity and care, because he allows them unrestricted access to their phones and laptops; the son of a friend has a party at the family home that results in hundreds of dollars’ worth of damage; another’s daughter won’t invite friends home or allow her parents to pick her up from school because she is ashamed of the family’s modest house and car. I find that I naturally side with the protagonists in my daughters’ stories and against the narrators of my friends’. My own memories of adolescence remain the most potent I have. That self is still more real to me than any other I have inhabited. As a 13-year-old, I felt both powerless within, and outraged by, the adult world. I was characterized as the family firebrand, the difficult one — but increasingly I find myself recollecting the powerlessness. It is possible, I have discovered, to attribute an inordinate power to your children. But in fact the only power they have is that which lies in the mere fact of existence. They exist: It is from what their existence means for us that the chimera of their power is generated.

A writer friend comes round. She brings her son, who is the same age as my older daughter. Once we carried these children in our arms; at other times we pushed them in strollers, or led them by the hand. Now he follows his mother in like a pet lion on a leash, a proud, taciturn beast who has consented, temporarily, to be tamed. My daughter has this same aura of the wild about her, as though beneath a veneer of sophistication she is constantly hearing the summons of her native land, somewhere formless and free that still lies inside her and to which at any moment she might return. The manners of adulthood have been recently acquired. There’s no knowing how quickly they could be discarded. She and my friend’s son greet each other in territorial monosyllables. It is as though they are two people from the same distant country who have met here in my sitting room. They’ve met before, often, but you’d never know: Those were old– versions of themselves, like drafts of a novel the author no longer stands by. All the same, I expect them to take themselves off elsewhere, to another room; I expect them to flee the middle-aged climate of the sitting room, but they don’t. They arrange themselves close to us, two lions resting close to the shade of their respective trees, and they watch.

My friend and I have a few years of conversation behind us. We’ve talked about motherhood — we’ve both spent a large part of our time as a single parent — and its relationship to writing. We’ve talked about the problems and pleasures of honoring reality, in life and in art. She has never upheld the shadowless account of parenthood; and perhaps consequently, nor does she now allude to her teenage son as a kind of vandal who has ruined the lovely picture. We talk about our own teenage years, and the hostility of our parents’ generation to any form of disagreement with their children. Any system of authority based on control fears dissidence more than anything else, she says. You two don’t realize how lucky you are, and the lions roll their eyes. What is being controlled, she says, is the story. By disagreeing with it, you create the illusion of victimhood in those who have the capacity to be oppressors. From outside, the dissident is the victim, but the people inside the story can’t attain that distance, for they are defending something whose relationship to truth has somewhere along the line been compromised. I don’t doubt that my parents saw themselves as my hapless victims, as many parents of adolescents do (“You have this lovely child,” a friend of mine said, “and then one day God replaces it with a monster”), but to me at the time such an idea would have been unthinkable. In disagreeing with them, I was merely trying to re-establish a relationship with truth that I thought was lost. I may even have believed that my assertions were helpful, as though we were on a journey somewhere and I was trying to point out that we had taken a wrong turn. And this, I realize, is where the feelings of powerlessness came from: Disagreement only and ever drew reprisal, not for what was said but for the fact alone of saying it, as if I were telling the residents of a Carmelite convent that the building was on fire and was merely criticized for breaking the vow of silence.

In my class at school there was a girl, a sophisticated creature, clever and sharp-tongued, well dressed, worldly, mature for her age in body and mind. She spoke of her mother, with whom she lived, with extraordinary contempt. Her mother was pathetic, a housewife, a drudge. She nagged her daughter to do this or that; on occasion she overstepped the mark so far as to obstruct her in the fulfillment of her own plans and desires. Stupid cow, she would say, arriving at school. Guess what the bitch has done now? She made these remarks so often that a kind of story took root in them, with its concomitant sense of tension that would grow toward some dark climax. She would come to class with the latest installment of the drama, and would relay the details with scathing laughter. Increasingly her own role was becoming more active, as though to show us that she was no victim, that she was about deeds as well as words. Her mother had berated her for the untidiness of her room, so she had opened her closet and, in front of her mother, carefully taken everything out and thrown it on the floor before walking out of the house to school. Her mother had made some unacceptable remark over dinner, so she got up from the table with her plate and emptied the entirety of her meal into the trash. Her open hatred of this woman mesmerized me. I was frightened of my own mother, a tense, interior fear that expressed itself in extreme self-criticism and doubt, as though she lived inside me and could see everything that went on there. I could barely see my schoolmate’s mother as a mother at all. Instead I saw her as something I could not see my own mother as: A woman, a woman in a kitchen having abuse hurled at her by this formidable child. And what I remember most clearly is that this difference — the ability to see her as a woman — enabled me to pity her.

One day the girl came to school with a slightly wild and breathless look about her and a glint of triumph in her eye. On her way out of the house that morning, her mother had confronted her about something — I don’t remember what — and had blocked her passage down the hall to the front door, wanting an answer. She had asked her to get out of the way. The mother had refused, so her daughter had punched her in the stomach, stepped over her body where it now lay in agony on the floor and made her way out of the house.

This, in any case, is what the girl said. An adolescent suddenly finds herself capable of breaking down the twin fortresses — verbal and physical superiority — of adult control. She can no longer be physically commandeered, be picked up or constrained; and with that defense she succeeds in wresting the story of life away from its authors, or at least in violating the principles of that story and turning them on their head. Adults can no longer touch her; she can say what she likes. When my children were small, I realize now, I routinely used my greater physical strength as a form of authority. If they wouldn’t come when I asked them to, I could simply go and pick them up. If they wouldn’t sit still, I could hold them still. It all seemed normal and innocent enough, but these days I look back on it with growing amazement. If I had never had access to that brute form of authority, I ask myself, what better authority might I have learned? If I had lacked the arms to pick them up and set them down against their will, to coerce them, would some more platonic parent-child relationship have emerged?

I grew up in a large family where children were treated with all the sensitivity and respect of a herd of animals being corralled by a testy farmer. Respect is something I have had to learn, like French. It feels good to talk in French; the more I speak it the more I improve. But I am also more prone to make mistakes, and to criticize myself for them. When my children reached the first wild shores of adolescence, I felt distinctly the loss of old forms of control: Suddenly we had moved into the subjunctive, the past historic, the conditional future. One day, having lunch with my brother, my daughter reached out to take a piece of bread before the meal. I told her to put it back — I wanted her to eat proper food, not bread — and she did, but shortly afterward she got angry about something else and stormed away from the table. You shouldn’t have done that, he said to me. Done what? I asked. You can’t tell her not to eat bread, he said. But I have to. It’s my responsibility. No, it’s not, he said. Would you tell a stranger sitting at the table not to eat bread? He was right: He speaks better French than I. If she’d been smaller, I realized, I’d simply have taken the bread out of her hands. But because of her age — that invisible wall that gradually rises around a person, forbidding trespass — I could no longer do so. However wrong or right it was, all that remained of me from that outdated version of authority were words.

Once, visiting a friend of mine, I watched as he, too, reached the impasse of that physical authority before my eyes: Sitting down to lunch, he asked his 11-year-old daughter to remove her coat and she refused. I’m cold, she said. Take it off, he said. You can’t sit at the table in your coat. No, she said. I’m cold, I want to keep it on. He asked her again, and then again, with increasing anger. She wouldn’t budge. What was he going to do — strip the coat from her body with his own hands?

Where once we mesmerized our children with our talk — soothing, correcting, steering, but also commanding, naming, judging, apportioning values, calling some things good and others bad, until the whole world had our language on it, a kind of graffiti — now they endeavor to shock us with theirs. We wanted to put them to sleep; they want to wake us up. Inadvertently, often well meaningly, we fused language with action and thereby created a fundamental confusion, a confusion that is being returned to us in the form of teenagers who have realized they can exist in the space between words and deeds, a space we once denied was there.

My younger daughter attends an all-girls school. She is 14 and has countless friends, most of them white-skinned and fair, with declarative middle-class voices and abundant shining waterfalls of hair. They move in shoals, around the streets and shops, around the park, talking and shrieking and giggling ceaselessly; their only silences are the dramatic kinds of pauses that occur in the television series they watch, silences that signify the presence somewhere nearby of a narrative event. This event, more often than not, is interpersonal, a plot twist in the politics of their friendship group, a falling out or change of allegiance, but sometimes it takes the form of a misfortune afflicting one of their number, to whom the rest offer support with hours of murmuring discussion.

Occasionally the shoal drifts in my direction and settles for an afternoon in my house. When my daughter was smaller and invited friends home, I knew I had to provide a narrative explanation of what the afternoon would hold. I made the world known to them by description; almost as if by describing it I created it, or at least maintained control of the narrative: I am mother, you are children, this is home, teatime, play. Sometimes I couldn’t bear the conscription of language to this phrase book of false cheer and uniformity; at other times it was soothing to be able to communicate in bland sentences that left my thoughts undisturbed. What was clear, in either case, was that these social rites were a fulcrum of storytelling, a place where a common version of things could be reiterated and agreement reached. The smallest child would know instantly if an adult said something not in the script. They themselves were learning to become scripted, saying please and thank you, answering the questions they were asked. I saw all of us, to a degree, as indoctrinated. In this sphere of universal values, I tried to keep hold of the thread of individuality, yet despite the irritants of this mass religion, the alternatives were unclear.

But now my daughter’s friends encounter me in the kitchen, in the hall, with barely a word of greeting. They are silent; they look shiftily to the side. They move on fast, up to my daughter’s room, where the sound of talking and shrieking and giggling resumes the instant the door is closed. Quickly they forget I am there; when occasionally they emerge for reinforcements and supplies, they talk in front of me as though I am invisible. Invisibility has at least the advantage of enabling eavesdropping: I listen to them talk, gleaning knowledge of their world. They talk with striking frequency about adults, about the people they now encounter in shops and on buses, the people who serve them in cafes or sell them things. They talk, less mystified, about their teachers. They talk about their grandparents and aunts and uncles. They talk about their fathers, usually with an experimental air of equality, as if they were trying on a pair of shoes that were slightly too big for them. But most of all they talk about their mothers. Their mothers are known as “she.” When I first heard about “she,” I was slightly puzzled by her status, which was somewhere between servant and family pet. “She” came in for a lot of contempt, most of it for acts of servitude and attention that she didn’t appear to realize were unwanted, like a spurned lover continuing to send flowers when the recipient’s affections have moved elsewhere. She’s such a doormat, one of them says. When I forget something I need for school, I just text her and she comes all the way across town with it. She’s so — pathetic. I don’t know what Dad even sees in her. Why doesn’t she get a job or something?

The talk of these girls brings on a distinct queasiness. I think of the many women I know who agonized over work when their children were small, who curtailed and compromised and very often gave up their careers, sometimes in the belief that it was morally correct and sometimes out of sheer exhaustion. Dad, meanwhile, is revered for his importance in the world. I hear them discuss, with what I am guessing is a degree of exaggeration, their fathers’ careers and contacts and the global impact of the work they do; unlike “she,” their fathers are hardworking, clever, successful, cool. They describe them as if they’d only just met them; they describe them as if they’d discovered them, despite the conspiracy to keep these amazing creatures hidden.

When the girls go home, they leave a scene of devastation behind them. The kitchen is strewn with dirty plates and half-eaten food and empty wrappers; the bathroom is a swamp of wet towels, capsized bottles, crumpled tissues smeared with makeup. The smell of nail varnish upstairs is so strong it could knock out a horse. I tidy up, slowly. I open the windows.

Six months later, my younger daughter, I notice, has changed. She has refined her group of friends. There are fewer of them, and the ones that remain are more serious, more distinct. They go to art galleries and lectures together; on Saturdays they take long walks across London, visiting new areas. My daughter has become politicized: At dinner, she talks about feminism, politics, ethics. My older daughter has already made this transition, and so the two of them join forces, setting the world to rights. When they argue now, it is about the French head-scarf ban in schools or the morality of communism. Sometimes it’s like having dinner on the set of “Crossfire.” I become aware of their verbal dexterity, their information, the speed of their thought processes. Sometimes I interject, and more often than not am shot down. This, in my own teenage years, would not have been tolerated, yet I find it easy to tolerate. They’re like a pair of terriers with a stick: they’ve got their teeth into the world and its ways. Their energy, their passion, their ferocity — I regard these as the proper attributes of youth. Yet inevitably the argument overheats; one of them storms away from the table in tears, and I have to go and talk her into coming back.

Strange as it may seem, they are still children, still having to operate bodies and minds that are like new, complex pieces of machinery. And indeed, at meal’s end, it is I who rises and clears the plates, just as I always have. It would be far too easy to gibe at the skin-depth of their feminism. Besides, I don’t see that anything has fundamentally changed in the contract between me and them. For the first time, I am glad of the flaws in our family life, though at times I have suffered bitterly over them, seeing in other people’s impeccable domestic lives a vision of stability and happiness I have absolutely failed to attain. But in this new territory, we perhaps have less to lose: no image is being defiled, no standard of perfection compromised. The traditional complaint about teenagers — that they treat the place like a hotel — has no purchase on me. In fact, I quite like the idea. A hotel is a place where you can come and go autonomously and with dignity; a place where you will not be subjected to criticism, blame or guilt; a place where you can drop your towel on the floor without fear of reprisal, but where, hopefully, over time, you become aware of the person whose job it is to pick it up and instead leave it folded neatly on a chair.

One day I go and meet my younger daughter near her school. She left an important book at home. I suggested we meet for lunch so that I could give it to her. I arrive at the agreed-upon place and see that several of her friends are there. Let’s go somewhere else, she says, appraising the situation.

The sun is shining. We find a cafe around the corner, a delightful, old-fashioned sort of place, nothing like the fashionable, crowded chain we originally decided on. The chef, a dapper man with a brown creased head like a walnut, works in full view behind the counter, singing pleasantly to himself in a light tenor. My daughter is happy, happy in the sunshine, happy to see me. I am happy to see her, too. It is as though we have absconded together from that mild prison, home; as though we have gotten away from what binds us and found each other again on the other side of it, both of us free.

She scrutinizes the menu professorially and chooses a chicken salad. I say I’ll have the same thing. We talk about her schoolwork, her friends. Lately she has become so independent that watching her live is a kind of spectacle, as though she were walking a high wire with a skill I didn’t know she possessed: I watch her from below, proudly, my heart in my mouth.

The chef is making our salads: I see him grilling the slivers of chicken, arranging the leaves, beating a dressing with a tiny silver whisk. He is so quick, so delicate. He bends absorbedly, lovingly over his creation, assembling it, tweaking it with his rapid slender fingers. Carefully, swiftly, he adds the dressing and then with a flourish rings the bell that stands on the counter beside him. My daughter asks me what I’ve been doing, what I’m working on, how it’s going. At home she rarely asks these questions. At home she is the subject, not I.

I tell her about “Medea” and the problem of the child-killing. I tell her about the Lars von Trier film, in which the older of Medea’s children is so helpful that he arranges the noose his mother intends to hang him by around his own neck. In Euripides’ version, the children are more palpably her victims, yet they lack distinct personalities of their own. I say, A child might be sacrificed — might even sacrifice himself — to his parents’ version of things, just as he might choose to murder his parents’ image. But might not all these players be somehow liberated through this violence — cast off their familial identities and be reborn as individuals, as their true selves?

She thinks about this. Among her friends, there are some in serious conflict with parents who continue to insist on the family story. She admits now that her greatest anger at her parents has come from their failure to correspond to the image she has in her head of what a parent should be.

So will she do it? she asks at the end of the lunch. Will she actually kill them?

She’s talking about Medea. For an instant I see something in her eyes, a spark of childlike, innocent fear; and she is still, after all, a child. In some respects she always will be.

You’ll have to wait and see, I say

Dealing With a Messy Teen

A mum's no-nonsense solution to the mess left behind by her teenagers has attracted a huge response from parents.

Alice Velásquez created a post on Facebook, showing a photo of her daughters' clothes and beauty products bundled up in rubbish bags.

"What do you do when you are DONE telling your teenage daughters to stop letting their room look like homeless people live there?" she wrote.

"You put everything (YES EVERYTHING) into plastic bags and you sell it back to them for $25 a bag (and they have to earn the money doing chores)." "The best part?" her post continues, "The bags were collected as they were found in the room - random! So their $25 could buy a bag of dirty clothes, it could buy a bag of trash or it could buy their soccer gear.

The post has since gone viral, drawing supporters, as well comments from those who thought she had gone too far with her novel approach to cleaning.

In a further post she addressed all the negativity, saying she stood by her parenting style. "None of you nasty people know me or my children or a single thing about our situation. I guess the downside of posting my parenting choices and having it go 'viral' is all the haters... I do not know when I last received such hateful messages!!"

She went on to explain the reason for her actions, and explained how she had asked her daughter repeatedly to clean up her messy room. When her requests fell on deaf ears, she wanted her teenagers to know she was serious. "If her teacher or boss asks her to complete a task and she refuses, there will be consequences," she wrote. "That is life, and that is how we all contribute to society."

Despite the haters, she has also received a wave of support, with some parents saying they wished they had thought of that with their teens. "Is it wrong of me to laugh this hard at your solution??? Genius!!" said one commenter.

With an eager audience wanting to know whether the daughter had earned any of the bags back, Velásquez posted an update. "YES! She has, and her super siblings all volunteered for extra chores to help her earn faster too. SO not only was this a lesson for my oldest daughter, but a great family building exercise too."

Although she was surprised to see her post go viral, Velásquez said most parents struggle to find ways to get through to their teenagers.

"There are a lot of parents out there just like me who do not think that corporal punishment is the correct solution - there is a difference between fear and respect; so we look for solutions that do not provoke a fight or breed animosity."

Other Resources

• Books About Teenagers
• Anecdotes About Teenagers
• Quotations About Teenagers