We often overestimate the influence of a peer group on our teenager. While the peer group is most influential in matters of taste ...and preference, we parents are most influential in more abiding matters of standards, beliefs, and values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an... urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Suddenly we have a baby who poops and cries, and we are trying to calm, clean up, and pin things together all at once. Then as fas...t as we learn to cope--so soon--it is hard to recall why diapers ever seemed so important. The frontiers change, and now perhaps we have a teenager we can't reach.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Odors from decaying food wafting through the air when the door is opened, colorful mold growing between a wet gym uniform and the ...damp carpet underneath, and the complete supply of bath towels scattered throughout the bedroom can become wonderful opportunities to help your teenager learn once again that the art of living in a community requires compromise, negotiation, and consensus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[As teenager], the trauma of near-misses and almost- consequences usually brings us to our senses. We finally come down someplace ...between our parents' safety advice, which underestimates our ability, and our own unreasonable disregard for safety, which is our childlike wish for invulnerability. Our definition of acceptable risk becomes a product of our own experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by confl...ict between autonomy and security.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 »
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 »
What causes adolescents to rebel is not the assertion of authority but the arbitrary use of power, with little explanation of the ...rules and no involvement in decision-making. . . . Involving the adolescent in decisions doesn't mean that you are giving up your authority. It means acknowledging that the teenager is growing up and has the right to participate in decisions that affect his or her life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »