Teen spirit: What’s it really like to be a teenager?

Ash Moran says: 'The best thing about being a teenager is that life is easy. You've got no worries. The worst thing is not having freedom'

Paul Carter/UNP Saturday 14 July 2012

‘In my day exams were harder.’ ‘As long as you’re living under my roof.’ Parents, take note: these are the phrases every teenager dreads. Charlotte Philby discovers what really motivates this tricky species...

"The problem with being a teenager is that nothing is ever solid." For a 15-year-old, Ellie Wilson is unusually self-aware; she is also, in her own words "a pain in the arse". "The thing about me and my friends," Wilson shrugs, "is that one minute we're up and then we're down; one minute I want to shout the house down, the next I feel so happy that I just want to hug everyone in the room at once. You know?"

It is, she admits, all a little bit exhausting. On this point, she and her mum are in a rare state of agreement.

The turbulent process of coming of age is one that for generations has left scientists – and parents – quite baffled. Ever since the 1950s, when teenage-dom was finally widely recognised as a bona fide developmental stage, the fundamental point of adolescence has remained a riddle. Tantrums, paralysing inertia, terminal love sickness… Why, when almost every other species seems to manage the transition from infancy to adulthood with relative ease, do we seem to find it so hard?

First we blamed hormones. Then, in the late Nineties, while a generation of young things stumbled their way through their own wilderness years with Karl Kani jeans, The Prodigy and – if you were posh – electronic pagers, scientists at the National Institute of Health (NIH) were making a breakthrough.

Using new scanning systems to monitor brain activity in young people, they found that rather than being fully formed by the end of childhood as once thought, the human mind actually undergoes a massive restructuring during the 12th to 25th years, with the frontal cortex thickening just before puberty and slowly shrinking back to normal size.

Between childhood and adulthood, proved the NIH's study 'The Teen Brain: Still Under Construction', critical physical changes are taking place. These result in impulsiveness, excessive risk-taking, uncontrollable mood swings; all behaviours parents might have thought were designed solely to cause them maximum grief, but which are in fact vital processes in the brain's development.

This may go some way to explain why some of f the more irksome common teenage traits, such as self-doubt and anxiety, often last way beyond the allotted teen years into what psychologist Dr Terri Apter, author of The Myth of Maturity: What Teenagers Need from Parents to Become Adults, defines as the 'thresholder' period, from 18 to 24.

The truth remains, that while science might offer a rational explanation as to why so many teens make irrational decisions (and these are not without potentially hazardous consequences – as the study points out, mortality rates jump between early and late adolescence), it doesn't make everyday communication with teenagers any easier.

Which is where the Surrey-based Megan Lovegrove and Louise Bedwell step in. Earlier this year, the 17-year-old schoolfriends produced Teenagers Explained: A Manual for Parents by Teenagers, a book that was designed to help befuddled adults unpick the peculiar tapestry that is adolescence. Because, as Lovegrove points out, "there are things we talk about that adults just don't understand".

"Things have changed a lot," Lovegrove adds. "Sometimes I say, 'I'm not skinny enough' and my mum will say 'Don't be stupid', and she just doesn't seem to get the pressures we're under." In order to help adults re-enter the teenage psyche, Lovegrove and Bedwell contacted a selection of young people across the country. While the answers were all different, there were common threads – "For example, everyone said they hated being patronised". Among the most annoying parental expressions, they have identified the following repeat offenders: "In my day exams were harder", "It's not the end of the world", and that old favourite, "As long as you're living under my roof…".

"We're still worrying about bullying, about people thinking that we're weird or different, and about not fitting in," Lovegrove adds. But according to f 15-year-old Wilson, who attends a girls' state school in north London, the stakes are now higher: "On my first day at secondary school a helicopter landed in our playground because a sixth former had pushed one of the teachers out of a window. There are three cat-fights in the playground every day. Boys are all muscle, but girls fight with words and words hurt the most." Plus, she says, with Facebook and instant messaging, there are infinite more ways to express them.

"Try to let us make our own mistakes," pleads Lovegrove. "If we don't get to make our own mistakes when we're young then, at some point, as soon as you're not around, we're just going to explode." The key to being a good parent, she insists, is knowing when to butt in and when to back off: "It's OK to be concerned and to ask questions but please don't question us on everything. Do try to talk to us and make an effort to get to know us, but also understand that there are some things we don't want to talk to you about."

Source - http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/teen-spirit-whats-it-really-like-to-be-a-teenager-7939086.html Downloaded 7 February 2014.