Yeah they literally stop listening to you and usually do the opposite. I was no different. I heard my mom complaining about her friends kid getting his ear pierced and she looked at me and said ‘never while you are living under my roof!’. My dad immediately realized the error but it was too late. I had never given it a thought before and maybe even thought it was stupid. After dinner I literally drove to the mall and got my ear pierced and went straight home and paraded around our house.
I honestly don't think I had a choice, my brain insisted on doing it.
I'm always so stunned by this. Young kids are so hard, but they say teens are the hardest! 11 years old is so nice. You can still cuddle, they like to be read to and mostly listen the 3rd time you say it.
I've only got young kids, so I have only experienced tired and frustrated. But even our bad days only last a day, tops. What I haven't experienced, but do observe in colleagues with teenagers, is utter despondency and emotional collapse due to a cloud of rancor that's been hanging over the family for weeks on end.
It mostly depends on the parents, not on children. Teens are finally independent and strong enough to be able to revolt - if they do or not is in many cases just a reflection if their parents treat them as equals or not.
Before you answer "but they are not equal...", please think.
Yeah. My early years (up to age 12) were ok. After that though was very... not good.
One memory really stands out though, from about a week (rough guess) before I turned 13. It was my mother saying she was dreading my 13th birthday, as that's when things go bad.
It completely surprised me, as I hadn't thought anything special about it.
However from (literally) my 13th birthday onwards, life became hell. On the day.
My mother turned into an absolute control freak, full on, with no-let up. For years. If I didn't do something she wanted, in exactly the way she wanted (generally with no explanation), it was name calling, taking away of <whatever she knew I felt was important>, and doing whatever she could to belittle and degrade me try try and "teach me a lesson". There are no words to describe the mental abuse from that day onwards. It never stopped, and there was no way of getting it to stop.
I eventually dropped out of school (age ~15), lived on the streets for a while, then went to live with my grandmother.
All because some idiot bitch thought teenagers were the problem. :( :( :(
This is so scary! I mean both being a teenager in your shoes and thinking about whether I will manage to be a good enough parent and not ruin a miracle.
Yeah. If she'd spent even a fraction of the time to try and understand me as a person, rather than on figuring out ways to "make me comply" (via abuse and punishment) things could have been so much different.
But, she never did. And she never got better. Probably worse if anything. There were signs years later (after her mother - my grandmother - died) that she might have reflected on things and matured.
But no. Given an opportunity, she reverted back to form and went with the abuse approach.
That time, by (literally) forging my signature on paperwork to ASIC signing me out of being the director of my own company. Which she took over.
I wish I was joking. I'm really not.
One really sick thing about it is from her point of view she justified everything as doing it "for my benefit".
Like, you cannot make this crap up. :( :( :(
Anyway, if someone's in my situation then I truly feel sorry for them. I don't know of any way to fix it other than "get out and don't look back".
Came to post. Teenagers aren't the totally irrational monsters television/media makes them out to me, necessarily. As one could guess, they're very much a reflection of their parents' investment in their emotional health and growth.
Purely anecdotally, none of the children I've been around that had thoughtful/respectful/logical parents have gone through the mindless rebellion phase - they've all been very level headed reasonable people in their teens. On the flipside, all of the children of mindless authoritarian parents have gone kinda wild pretty much as soon as they developed the agency to do so. It's kind of sad that (at least in the US) we've painted teenagers as some kind of psychotic monster that needs tamed.
Yep. People like to think we are more sophisticated, but we have built-in animal behaviors. Teens revolting and making their own way is a big one. Hard for parents but important for the kids. I still find it weird how hard wired some things are.
I’ve heard (can’t remember the source now) that the rebellious teen phase is a cultural phenomenon. I find it believable. In general, ascribing human behaviors to biology is shaky science.
Ah, here we go:
> Although Westerners may expect from adolescents a certain level of delinquency, antisocial behavior and sometimes violence, cross-cultural research demonstrates adolescent behavior and experience is actually quite variable across the world. Adolescent misbehavior does not appear to be a cultural universal.
I agree that ascribing human behaviours to (particularly animal) biology is shaky. But the changes going on in teenage years (ie puberty) lead me to think teenage rebellion isn’t just cultural.
Teenage rebellion is often “rational but dumb”, in the sense of being an understandable but unskillfully directed protest against actual injustices.
If you take off the “teenager” lens and imagine that you’re witnessing the behavior of an adult who is being denied every variety of personal choice, while being pushed and browbeaten into spending their time in activities that don’t earn them money or status, the behaviors seem almost reasonable.
Just to take one example, if you were forced to wake up at 5:30 AM to get on a bus to sit in chairs for 7 hours listening to mediocre lectures, got in serious trouble if you took more than 5 minutes to move between rooms, had to ask permission to use the rest room, and that’s just what happens before you get home and have a new sequence of orders and chores issued to you ... then you would rebel.
> if you were forced to wake up at 5:30 AM to get on a bus
I know this is an American thing, in the UK high school for me started at 0845, which meant leaving home about 0820, so getting up about 0800. Still way to early, but at least it's not in the middle of the night.
I don't understand how a school day would even work with a 6:30 start. When's lunch?
I haven't seen a single American kid who could get ready for school (eat breakfast, get dressed, etc) in 20 minutes. I believe you that it's different in the UK, but in the US you need to budget at least an hour for this.
Then, when I was a child I'd spend about 45 minutes to an hour on the bus, which would normally arrive at the school about 30 minutes before start time as a buffer in case things were slow. This was decades ago, but my understanding is it hasn't changed that much.
School actually started at around 8:00, but we still had to wake up before 6:00 in order to get there on time.
I haven’t been to school in decades but basically, the bus arrives when it arrives, maybe 30-45 minutes before school starts, and you want to be at the stop early for obvious reasons. It gets a little less stupid once you’re old enough to drive yourself, if you have a car or can carpool. But no way would a 20 minute commute be assumed.
UK average commute for high school is 25 minutes, and 3.4 miles [0], but a 30-40 minute doesn't sound awful on a bus, means leaving home 0800 so getting up 0740.
I've posted this before, but first bell was at 7:18, bus was at 6:30. I had it luckier in that I lived ~1 mile from school, but lived in an area where you couldn't safely walk. There were students that lived ~15 miles from school whose buses arrived ~5:45 to be able to make the 7:18 bell.
20 minutes from alarm clock to getting on the bus is unrealistic by an extremely wide margin. High school students typically shower, eat breakfast and get dressed at the very least.
I never had breakfast as a high school kid (still don't). 5 minutes for a shower, 5 more to get dressed and pick up bag, that leaves 10 minutes to get to bus stop.
The hormonal changes are hard wired, but certain behaviors aren’t.
As an interesting corollary, did you know that the symptoms experienced by schizophrenics is extremely culturally dependent? Here in America the voices heard by someone with schizophrenia often urge violence, but in other countries (India is the one I’ve heard) they say nice, positive things. Same condition, culturally dependent outcomes.
> What predicts more trouble-making? Adolescent behavior (and misbehavior) is related to key social relationships and socialization styles. More specifically, cross-cultural research finds adolescents are more likely to misbehave in societies that have more severe punishment, more restrictiveness, and more distant mother-child relationships (summarized in Ember, Pitek, and Ringen 2017).
It depends. My wife did not rebel at all. From the way her parents, siblings, etc. describe her, she was a model person from childhood to adulthood. But, our children have taken more after me - wild, rebellious, etc. This has been really hard on my wife since it has been so antithetical to how she was growing up.
