My middle son once asked me what it was like to be a parent. I gave him some cliché about it being beautiful and brutal and terrifying and thrilling. “No, but what’s it really like?” he asked. And I realised that actually, the hardest thing about parenting is knowing that your children will make mistakes and mess up and that you have to let them – because that’s part of them growing up.
As the parent of a newly minted teenager, this is both real and agonising: the certain knowledge that the next few years are going to be as hard for them as for you, what with all the working out who they are and fitting in and trying on friends for size and quite possibly choosing the wrong ones, with all the potential pitfalls involved. Thank goodness, then, for this timely (for me) and eminently sensible book from the psychologist Lucy Foulkes, who specialises in adolescence and has written about not only how it shapes us but why that should be, and why it’s so important that it does.
Our teenage years are the point at which we start writing our own stories, explains Foulkes – hence why, when you ask almost anyone about their most important memories, the most reported are from their adolescent years. Foulkes’s book is less about the chemical and biological processes going on in the teenage brain and more about how we go about constructing ourselves during this formative time – which is also why all those tricky adolescent behaviours, from risk-taking to sex, love to bullying – are all necessary things to navigate, no matter how difficult they might be (and why it’s also both impossible and undesirable as a parent to try to stop them).
Take popularity, for example. Everybody of a certain age remembers the 2004 film Mean Girls – and everyone knows who they identified most strongly with. Perhaps you were the wide-eyed innocent (but actually quite cool) Cady. Maybe you were the cynical outsider Janis. Perhaps you were a Gretchen who just wanted to fit in with The Plastics. Or were you queen bee Regina George herself? And what about your child? Are they “perceived popular” like Regina, or more like the “sociometrically popular” Cady (in other words, actually widely liked)? Maybe they’re neither; maybe they’re still trying to work themselves out.
Or look at risk-taking. Foulkes’s chapter on this topic is entitled “In defence of risk-taking”, and kicks off with the horrific cautionary tale that every person who was a teenager in the 1990s has seared in their brain: the death of Leah Betts after taking an ecstasy tablet, drinking too much water and suffering the irreparable swelling of her brain. Now, no one is saying that our teens should all do a Leah Betts. But they will take risks; and while the reasoning is varied, the lesson is crucial: that learning what is and isn’t safe “fundamentally involves taking some”.
Moreover, some risk-taking is reasoned, and “it’s critical for understanding the complexity of adolescent behaviour that, on the face of it, can seem so stupid.” Nor is it all about peer pressure. As parents, meanwhile, we need to let our children take some risks – because overprotective parenting is its own form of abuse.
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