“Teenager: ready for the zombie apocalypse; not ready for tomorrow’s math test.” - Anonymous

 From “Me Too, 365,” by Arnold Kunst 

7 November 

You have a child. The compensation for taking care of dirty diapers and walking him endlessly at 3AM when little Johnny is sick is that he comes to look up to you in a most flattering way. When you are about to cross a street with your pre-teen and say, “Take my hand, Johnny,” he’ll look up to you with wide-eyed innocence and –dare I say? – abundant wonder, then put his hand in yours, saying, “Yes, daddy!” as you both cross the street. And there will be a time, from roughly his 20’s on, when you and he will be best of friends. That seems to be the way the thing is designed.  

But in between comes the teen years when the respect thing goes into a kind of semi-permanent eclipse. Having found the chinks in your armor during his first 10 or 12 years, he’ll be into exploiting them big time. You’ll drive him to school and he’ll tell you, “drop me off three blocks away because I don’t want my friends to see me in this heap of junk you drive.”  And that’s not all - one day, out of the blue, he’s going to say something like this: “I don’t care whatever else you do, just don’t play any of that dorky music of yours when my friends are around.” Only the adjective will probably be more colorful than “dorky.” Oh, and he’ll do it as naturally as water goes downhill.  Also, somewhere along the line you’ll be sorely tempted to say, as some parents do say, “My house, my rules. You don’t like it, get out!” Hopefully he won’t take you up on your “offer” because you won’t say anything that fraught with yawning danger.  

When that day comes hopefully you’ll remember all of the following: you’re the adult here. You need to keep constantly in mind the very thing your teenage Johnny can’t put his finger on: he desperately needs your unconditional love at the very time he consistently does whatever it takes to forfeit his right to it. He will want to be treated like an adult even when he doesn’t deserve it. He will crave your approval even as he drives you nuts rejecting you.  

Oh, and one final thing: the emotional eclipse thing will last pretty much for the entirety of the teen years. [That’s a lot of years.] If you remember correctly, that’s pretty much the way you treated your parents when you were a teen, right? In fact, it’s just the way humans are wired.  

Be ready for it.