I am not going to butter you up. This column contains no magic recipe for neutralising an adolescent's harangues, nor any emotional vaccine against teenage conflict every Monday and Thursday. My modest aim is only to offer a further understanding of what is happening to you in front of your adolescent, any resemblance between whom and the sweet girl who was wandering about your living room only two years ago is entirely coincidental. I would also like to call for a little more compassion in the whole business, but let us not leap beyond the boundaries of the navel.
Adolescence is to a large extent a modern invention of the last hundred years.
Think about it. The two conspicuous functional differences between an adult and a child — without getting into psychology and the soul and suchlike — are that an adult has sex and an adult has work. One side of that equation, the arrival at sexual maturity, has come steadily earlier in recent generations. The other side, finding an occupational direction, has come steadily later. Nobody leaves home quickly any more to go and work with their parents in the fields or the coal mines.
So we have created a relatively wide window in a human life, roughly between the ages of twelve and twenty, in which one is no longer a child but is a long way from full adult functioning. We call that window adolescence.
The genuinely complicated point is not obtaining contraception or enrolling at a prestigious university. The complicated point is the processes the adolescent's psyche undergoes in trying to close the gap and arrive mentally prepared at the finishing line.
And since we mentioned harangues, this is the place to shatter an illusion for anybody still holding one: this upheaval will never be pleasant, because it cannot be. Here is why.
The first process is separation. In order to become a person who can run their own life, the adolescent has to establish that they are not you — and there is no gentle method of establishing that. It is done by opposition, because opposition is the only available evidence. A child who agrees with you about everything has not demonstrated that they exist separately. The rejection is not an assessment of your worth. It is the mechanism.
The second is that they are, for the first time, seeing you accurately. A small child holds an inflated picture of a parent. An adolescent gets the true one: your compromises, your fears, the things you did not do. That is a genuine loss for them and they grieve it, generally by being scathing.
Which produces the peculiar cruelty of this stage for parents. The two things making it painful — that they push you away, and that they see you clearly — are also the two pieces of evidence that it is going correctly.
You do not have to enjoy it. You only have to remain reachable while it happens, and to take remarkably little of it personally.