One of the perennial questions of parenthood is, “Why are teenagers such a massive pain in the arse.” But there is no mystery about it: the only mystery is why parents are so vexed by the question. When my two eldest daughters were adolescents, they were sensitive about being classified as such. They felt that teenagers were stereotyped as rude, lazy, self-centred, withdrawn, rebellious and disrespectful of their parents – Kevin as portrayed by Harry Enfield at best, Joffrey from Game of Thrones at worst.
Stereotype or not, teenagers do suffer behavioural difficulties. However, my experience as a father – having helped to raise three teenage girls so far – is that the problem is not as bad as they say. I have witnessed little fundamental personality change in any of my daughters during their teenage years. So I need to look elsewhere for answers about the source of adolescent discontent. And I find that I have a handy case study – myself.
At 15, I was a whining, self-pitying, arrogant, selfish, slothful, priapic, surly little sod. I was a street vandal, who drank too much and took too many risks with drugs. And this, indeed, did represent a clear break with my childhood – for, until adolescence, I was a quiet, thoughtful, bookish child who was not much trouble to anyone.
So what happened to turn me into this monster? At pubescence, several great thresholds are reached. One is sexual desire and its ugly sister, sexual frustration. Another is simply the experience of bumping your head against brute reality.
The truths your parents brought you up with turn out to be lies. You realise that, just as there is no Santa Claus, there is little justice in the world, that grownups don’t know anything whereas once you thought they knew everything. Betrayed, I branded adults as liars and hypocrites.
There is a third threshold – the awareness of death. Teenagers are usually visited with a sudden, acute realisation of their own mortality. As we grow into adults, most of us manage to compartmentalise this knowledge so it doesn’t get in the way of the everyday running of affairs. But teenagers are stuck with the raw truth until they have developed the tools to bury it.
The simple response to this mixture of helplessness, disillusionment, fear and sexual frustration was drinking, drug-taking, and a free-floating, irrational anger that clouded everything, including my relations with adults. I had to blame someone because the human spirit cannot always bear too much very patiently. Striking out at the world was pointless and self-destructive. But at least it was doing something, however futile.
I was an extreme case, because my essential adolescent has never quite left me. Like an adolescent, I still think that, once you scratch the surface, you find that most people spend most of their lives in a state of denial. Just as I intuited as a teenager, they are largely driven by subconscious and cultural forces of which they are barely aware. As an adolescent I thought that made them liars and hypocrites. Now I understand that they live in the same trap of helplessness as teenagers do. As we all do. They’ve just stopped noticing.
I have grown up in some ways. I have learned how to be polite. I am old. I have found meaning in my life, through my work and my children. I have been unchained from the idiot of perpetual sexual desire.
As for death – now I’m closer to it, it doesn’t bother me half as much. But the fundamental teenage perception – that most people have their heads wilfully in the sand because they find the sensation comforting – has never left me. It just doesn’t make me angry any more. It simply makes me astonished.
