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.
Before you answer "but they are not equal...", please think.