Adolescents sometimes say..."My friends listen to me, but my parents only hear me talk." Often they are right. Familiarity breeds ...inattention.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescents have the right to be themselves. The fact that you were the belle of the ball, the captain of the lacrosse team, the p...resident of your senior class, Phi Beta Kappa, or a political activist doesn't mean that your teenager will be or should be the same....Likewise, the fact that you were a wallflower, uncoordinated, and a C student shouldn't mean that you push your child to be everything you were not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescents need to be reassured that nothing--neither their growing maturity, their moods, their misbehavior, nor your anger at s...omething they have done--can shake your basic commitment to them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parents sometimes feel that if they don't criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn't make people want ...to change; it makes them defensive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most adults would not dream of belittling, humiliating, or bullying (verbally or physically) another adult. But many of the same a...dults think nothing of treating their adolescent child like a nonperson. . . . Adolescents deserve the same civility their parents routinely extend to total strangers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From the adolescent's perspective, it's like discovering that another layer of management (the stepparent) is being thrust between... you and the boss (parent) you've reported to for twelve, fourteen, or even sixteen years. Or worse, that the business (the home) has been bought out from under you. From the teenager's perspective, remarriage can feel like a hostile takeover.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Peer pressure is not a monolithic force that presses adolescents into the same mold. . . . Adolescents generally choose friend who...se values, attitudes, tastes, and families are similar to their own. In short, good kids rarely go bad because of their friends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On an abstract level, young adolescents understand that playing with drugs can lead to addiction or an overdose, sex without contr...aception, to pregnancy; . . . But they do not have the intellectual wherewithal to integrate this abstract knowledge into everyday life. [One mother said her teenager] "actually believes that he won't break out into acne because he is philosophically opposed to pimples."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The parent-adolescent relationship is like a partnership in which the senior partner (the parent) has more expertise in many areas... but looks forward to the day when the junior partner (the adolescent) will take over the business of running his or her own life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At a stage when young people want more than anything to be like everyone else, they find themselves the least alike. Everyone thei...r age is growing and changing, but each at his or her own pace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »