Teen Angst

If there is such a thing I don't exactly know what it is. From my memories of my own teenage years I know that the biggest dramas occur in relationships: rows with parents, fall-outs with friends, break-ups with boyfriends and they don't even have to be one's own. A teenager can take all those emotions and transfer them on to the dramas of their friends, so they are able to wallow in it together. Somewhere down the list can be found 'trouble at school' and 'concern for family'. Obviously there are teenagers whose lives dictate that their priorities must be in a different order, but for the teenager whose home life isn't in turmoil (other than that which they cause themselves) and whose basic needs are met, this is the age of "Me and my Friends First".

My daughter mentioned in one of our less pleasant exchanges that her friends were all that were important to her and I remember saying exactly the same to my mother at her age. I wasn't inclined to give her the same answer I got, because I've told her before that "friends come and go but your family will always be there". At least we hope they will be. So-called teen angst is really more about the dramas that make up their lives as well as pressures both real and imagined from adults and peers. They absorb some of their friends' pressures as if by osmosis and pass them off as their own. It's empathathetic to the point where they practically live each other's lives - living in one another's pockets, as they used to say.

Psychologists have been telling us for years that the adolescent teenage years are the hardest and we must understand that there is a lot of anxiety and pressure involved as well as the teenagers having to cope with the psychological affect that body changes and emotions have on them. I even remember as a 14-year-old being told (perhaps in an "Educational Film") that "it's a difficult time" and thinking "is it?" and then (perhaps subconsciously) using that as an excuse for bad behaviour. When I heard it as a teenager in the early 1970s, I think the adults of the world were still trying to come to grips with their older children being hippies, taking drugs and rebelling as teenagers had never rebelled before. The parents of the hippies were often law-abiding and middle-class; having lived and possibly fought through the austere years of the Second World War they wanted their children to have luxuries and advantages that they did not. However, instead of receiving their children's eternal gratitude they were rewarded with drop-outs, riots, law-breaking, rebellion and quarrels. Society didn't understand them and tried to rationalise their behaviour, saying that it was "hard" for them. They didn't realise that giving them freedom to "be themselves" meant also giving them freedom to rebel. Like parents then, we also try to rationalize their behaviour. Surely we didn't make the mistakes our parents made? Surely we did. And worse. Our parents might not have been so good at boosting our self-esteem, but the kids now are so boosted they're deluded into thinking they can be anything they want to be. Ha ha. How will they cope with the real world? How will the real world cope with all those super-egos in a few decades' time? Who will care enough about the sick and elderly thirty or forty years from now?

Teen angst is a myth. What we have is kids who follow the rules and kids who do not. Most of them make their own rules. Hurrah! for those whose rules coincide with ours and bad luck to those whose don't.

To be continued...