smoking marijuana, which you may have smoked too, but not until you were at least eighteen. Your adolescent is undoubtedly having completely inappropriate and meaningless sex, which you didn’t have until you were in your twenties, if then. Your adolescent is embarrassed by you and walks ten steps ahead of you so that no one thinks you are remotely acquainted with each other. Your adolescent is ungrateful. You have a vague memory of having been accused by your parents of being ungrateful, but what did you have to be grateful for? Almost nothing. Your parents weren’t into parenting. They were merely parents. At least one of them drank like a fish. Whereas you are exemplary. You’ve devoted years to making your children feel that you care about every single emotion they’ve ever felt. You’ve filled every waking second of their lives with cultural activities. The words “I’m bored” have never crossed their lips, because they haven’t had time to be bored. Your children have had everything you could give—everything and more, if you count the sneakers. You love them wildly, way more than your parents loved you. And yet they seem to have turned out exactly the way adolescents have always turned out. Only worse. How did this happen? What did you do wrong?
Furthermore, thanks to modern nutritional advances, your adolescent is large, probably larger than you. Your adolescent’s weekly allowance is the size of the gross national product of Burkina Faso, a small, poverty-stricken African country neither you nor your adolescent had ever heard of until recently, when you both spent several days working on a social studies report about it.
Your adolescent has changed, but not in any of the ways you’d hoped for when you set about to mold your child. And you have changed too. You have changed from a moderately neurotic, fairly cheerful human being to an irritable, crabby, abused wreck.
But not to worry. There’s somewhere you can go for help. You can go to all the therapists and counselors you consulted in the years before your children became adolescents, the therapists and counselors who’ve put their own children through college and probably law school thanks to your ongoing reliance on them.
Here’s what they will say:
• Adolescence is for adolescents, not for parents.
• It was invented to help attached—or overattached—children to separate, in preparation for the inevitable moment when they leave the nest.
• There are things you can do to make life easier for yourself.
This advice will cost you hundreds—or thousands—of dollars, depending on whether you live in a major metropolitan area or a minor one. And it’s completely untrue:
• Adolescence is for parents, not adolescents.
• It was invented to help attached—or overattached— parents to separate, in preparation for the inevitable moment when their children leave the nest.
• There is almost nothing you can do to make life easier for yourself except wait until it’s over.
Incidentally, there’s an old joke that was probably invented by someone with adolescent children. Not that I’m good at telling jokes. And if I were, you still wouldn’t know how good this joke is, because it takes quite a long time to tell it and requires one of those Yiddish accents people use when telling jokes about old rabbis. But anyway, this married couple goes to see a rabbi. What can I do for you, the rabbi says. We’re having a terrible problem, Rabbi, the couple says. We have five children and we all live in a one-room house and we’re driving each other crazy. The rabbi says, Move in a sheep. So they move a sheep into the house. A week later they go see the rabbi and tell him that things are worse than ever, plus there’s a sheep. Move in a cow, the rabbi says. The next week they go to complain once again, because things are so much worse now that there’s a cow. Move in a horse, the rabbi says. The next week the couple goes to see the rabbi to tell
Furthermore, thanks to modern nutritional advances, your adolescent is large, probably larger than you. Your adolescent’s weekly allowance is the size of the gross national product of Burkina Faso, a small, poverty-stricken African country neither you nor your adolescent had ever heard of until recently, when you both spent several days working on a social studies report about it.
Your adolescent has changed, but not in any of the ways you’d hoped for when you set about to mold your child. And you have changed too. You have changed from a moderately neurotic, fairly cheerful human being to an irritable, crabby, abused wreck.
But not to worry. There’s somewhere you can go for help. You can go to all the therapists and counselors you consulted in the years before your children became adolescents, the therapists and counselors who’ve put their own children through college and probably law school thanks to your ongoing reliance on them.
Here’s what they will say:
• Adolescence is for adolescents, not for parents.
• It was invented to help attached—or overattached—children to separate, in preparation for the inevitable moment when they leave the nest.
• There are things you can do to make life easier for yourself.
This advice will cost you hundreds—or thousands—of dollars, depending on whether you live in a major metropolitan area or a minor one. And it’s completely untrue:
• Adolescence is for parents, not adolescents.
• It was invented to help attached—or overattached— parents to separate, in preparation for the inevitable moment when their children leave the nest.
• There is almost nothing you can do to make life easier for yourself except wait until it’s over.
Incidentally, there’s an old joke that was probably invented by someone with adolescent children. Not that I’m good at telling jokes. And if I were, you still wouldn’t know how good this joke is, because it takes quite a long time to tell it and requires one of those Yiddish accents people use when telling jokes about old rabbis. But anyway, this married couple goes to see a rabbi. What can I do for you, the rabbi says. We’re having a terrible problem, Rabbi, the couple says. We have five children and we all live in a one-room house and we’re driving each other crazy. The rabbi says, Move in a sheep. So they move a sheep into the house. A week later they go see the rabbi and tell him that things are worse than ever, plus there’s a sheep. Move in a cow, the rabbi says. The next week they go to complain once again, because things are so much worse now that there’s a cow. Move in a horse, the rabbi says. The next week the couple goes to see the rabbi to tell
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