Terrible Teens or the Best Years of Our Lives?

Do you have really strong memories of your teenage years? How was it for you?

Was there a fight to be accepted as an adult within your family? Maybe the constant worry of how your peers felt about you, the excitement of realising that the world really could be yours for the taking and that it maybe wasn't so scary as your parents would have you believe in their efforts to keep you safe?

Sometimes when I look back on those years I have the fondest memories of starting to explore and assert my own personality, making new friends and seeing new places. But other times I see only the trauma of constantly worrying about what other people thought, especially my friends and of the particular pressures caused by trying to keep everybody happy.

Why is it that as teenagers the things that we and our friends think and want to do are so diametrically opposite the things that our parents think and want us to do?

Is that Gods or the Universe' little private joke? What turns the majority of teenagers into self absorbed, defiant, secretive beings the minute that they enter those dreaded teenage years? Do you have teenage kids and sometimes look at them and despair over where your darling little Sarah or Johnny went and how you ever got this monstrous brat in their place? Do you ever think back to our own teenage years and make a correlation between the behaviour that you hate to see in your kids and the behaviour that your parents hated to see in you?

Weird isn't it how those teenage years can cause so much of a problem for some families whilst others grit their teeth and breathe the biggest sigh of relief when they are finally over, because the damage wasn't as bad as it could have been and everyone survived more or less in tact.

Why is it that some families end up in family therapy or falling apart behind the scenes and others manage to take this stuff in their stride (at least outwardly). As a psychiatric nurse this stuff has always fascinated me. My youngest sister is 11 years younger than me, so even by the time that she was in her teens, although I could clearly remember mine, the stuff that she had to contend with at an earlier age seemed so different.

I wonder if that's one of the key issues - for me they've always been:

Peer pressure
Family expectations
Pressure of education, having to choose the subjects for your career path when most kids don't really have a clue what they want to be / do, &
Family tensions (these may be underlying prior to the terrible teens or they may be tensions that occur during that time).

I personally think kids are at their most vulnerable as they are entering their teens because they are subject to raging hormones, burgeoning desires (physical and metophorical) and so many different and conflicting expectations.

One of the most difficult things for any parent is to maintain a stable relationship with their kids at this time. It is also one of the most important. So how can we achieve this?

Come back for some more discussion on this with my next post over the weekend.

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