Chapter 1 Good News About Adolescence Relax! The horror stories you have heard about adolescence are false. Adolescence has long been a synonym for trouble in our society. "Everyone knows" that the road from childhood to adulthood is stormy. Extreme moodiness in adolescence is normal. Rebellion is an inevitable and necessary part of growing up. If your teenager doesn''t get involved in drugs, crime, and risky sex, consider yourself lucky. The idea that adolescence equals trouble has been part of our folklore, handed down from generation to generation, and accepted by psychologists, educators, and parents alike. Psychologists attempted to explain the storm and stress of adolescence through theory.

Sociologists concentrated on delinquents, dropouts, drug users, and other problem teenagers. Few questioned the conventional wisdom-until scientists began to study adolescence systematically, in the late 1970s. Over the past 30 years, a new wave of research has swept through the field. Psychologists began to study adolescents themselves-how they think, what they think about, how they feel about their lives, why they behave as they do, and how they respond to different types of parents. They looked not only at troubled young people, but also at ordinary, everyday kids. As a result of this research, many common assumptions about adolescence have been exposed as myths. Adolescence is not an inherently difficult period. Psychological problems, problem behavior, and family conflict are no more common in adolescence than at any other stage of the life cycle.

To be sure, some adolescents are troubled and some get into trouble. But the great majority (almost nine out of ten) do not. The problems we have come to see as a "normal" part of adolescent development-drugs, delinquency, irresponsible sex, opposition to any and all authority-are not normal at all. They are both preventable and treatable. Good kids don''t suddenly go bad in adolescence. The evils of peer pressure have been overrated. To be sure, adolescent are concerned about what their friends think; they do want to fit in; and they are susceptible to peer pressure. But peer pressure is not a monolithic force that presses all adolescents into the same mold.

Adolescents are as varied as adults are. In some adolescent crowds, earning academic honors is the "in" thing; in others, it''s dressing to the nines or excelling in sports. In some, it''s doing drugs. Peer pressure can be a force for good or evil, positive or negative attitudes toward family and school, depending on the source. Which crowd a teenager associates with is not random. Adolescents generally choose friends whose values, attitudes, tastes, and families are similar to their own. In short, good kids rarely go bad because of their friends. The decline of the family has also been overstated.

In today''s world, the story goes, parents have little or no control over their teenagers. The decline of neighborhoods, high divorce rates, women working, the youth culture, the media, and now the Internet all combine to undermine parental authority. This is nonsense. Parents remain the major influence on their child''s attitudes and behavior through adolescence and into young adulthood. Adolescents care what you think and listen to what you say, even if they don''t always admit it or agree with every point. The majority of teenagers like their parents, respect them, agree with them on the big issues (though they might disagree over matters of taste and style), and want to please them. Good parent-child relationships do not deteriorate because of adolescence. (And this is true whether parents are married, single, divorced, or remarried: Good parent-adolescent relationships do not depend on household arrangements.

) By and large, the good news about adolescence has not reached the public. One reason is that good news isn''t news. Adolescents appear in the news only when a study finds a dramatic increase in teenage pregnancy, police discover that youth gangs are involved with drug rings, or a teenager kills her stepfather or commits suicide. The many, many adolescents who have good relationships with their parents, are doing well in school, do not use drugs, and do not get pregnant aren''t news. A second reason adolescence continues to equal trouble in the public mind is that cultural stereotypes die hard. An apron declares, "Mother Nature, in all her wisdom, gave me 13 years to love my son before he became a teenager"; a mug asserts, "Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children"; the "terrible teens" is as much a part of our language as the "terrible twos." When parents of adolescents get together, they often play "Can you top this?" The parents who have survived the worst battles with their teenager get the most medals. Parents who haven''t run into serious problems, who actually enjoy their teenagers, end up being apologetic: "I guess we are just lucky.

" It is not luck. Parents Can Make a Difference Your relationship with your child will not change for the worse in adolescence, but it will change. How you view this change can lay the groundwork for healthy or unhealthy development, good or bad times in your family. When your child was small, you were responsible for directing and controlling an immature creature who saw you as all-knowing and all-powerful. In the near future, your young adult will take responsibility for his or her own life, and you will be more like friends. The adolescent still needs you, but in a different way. 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. Parents who see the adolescent partnership as a losing proposition, or resist the adolescent''s desire for self-determination, are asking for trouble.

When parents expect the worst from their adolescent, they often get it. The most common adolescent response to suspicion and surveillance is rebellion: If the adolescent''s parents don''t trust her, why should she try to prove that she is trustworthy? Parents who assume that all teenagers are troubled also run the risk of overlooking the warning signs of serious problems that require immediate, professional attention. When parents take the attitude that teenagers are teenagers and there''s nothing a parent can do, their child concludes that they don''t care. He may turn to his peers for guidance, or take unnecessary risks in the effort to discover for himself what his limits are, thus confirming his parents'' worst nightmares. Parents who refuse to accept the fact that their child is maturing and attempt to keep everything as it was run into similar problems. Like it or not, your child is going to try to grow up. The adolescent doesn''t want you to solve every problem anymore. If you don''t make room for her friends, grant her privacy, and let her make her own decisions about clothes and music, when to do her schoolwork, and participation in extracurricular activities, she will find other, less benign ways to assert her independence.

In contrast, when parents welcome signs that their child is growing up and expect the best from their child, they often find adolescence the most rewarding time in their parental career. It''s interesting to have a child with whom you can have an adult conversation (the kind of open-ended all-nighters you haven''t had since you were their age); exciting to be in touch with the latest fashions in clothes and music; fun to be able to share activities with a teenager (if you don''t mind the fact that your daughter can beat you in tennis or knows more about computers than you do); and liberating to know that your child can take care of herself most of the time. Knowing What to Expect Is Half the Battle Many parent-adolescent conflicts are the result not of holding on too long or giving up too soon but of misinformation. For example, parents tend to think of adolescence as beginning at age 13 or 14. When their son begins playing the stereo full blast and otherwise acting like a stereotypical teenager at age 11, they assume things can only get worse. In fact, things get better: Most families find the teenage years easier than the preteens. Parents often misread interest in friends as lack of interest in family. In reality, friends don''t subtract from the adolescent''s affection for his family but add to his circle of significant others.

When the adolescent begins questioning their rules and their wisdom, many parents think, "Oh, no; my son is the one in ten who is going to be trouble." In fact, challenging the old order is a sign of intellectual growth: You''ve raised a thinker! Adolescence is a complicated time, but it is no more mysterious than infancy or toddlerhood. Like these earlier stages in development, it is a period of rapid growth and change. Some of the changes are biological, some intellectual, some emotional and social. Each adolescent develops according to an individual timetable. But the sequence of changes is more or less predictable. Preadolescents and young teens (roughly age 10 to 13) have different needs and concerns than middle adolescents (about age 14 to 18), and late adolescents and young adults (age 19 to 25) have needs and concerns of their own. If you know what to expect at each of these stages, you are in a much better position to understand why the adolescent behaves as he does and what he needs from you.

Parents who have a better and more realistic understanding.