Teenagers are Bad for Your Health

~ Laura

From New York Magazine’s article, “The Collateral Damage of a Teenager”:

In 1994, Steinberg publishedCrossing Paths, one of the few extensive accounts of how parents weather the transition of their firstborns into puberty, based on a longitudinal study he conducted of more than 200 families. Forty percent of his sample suffered a decline in mental health once their first child entered adolescence. Respondents reported feelings of rejection and low self-worth; a decline in their sex lives; increases in physical symptoms of distress. It may be tempting to dismiss these findings as by-products of midlife rather than the presence of teenagers in the house. But Steinberg’s results don’t seem to suggest it. “We were much better able to predict what an adult was going through psychologically,” he writes, “by looking at his or her child’s development than by knowing the adult’s age.”

Published by Laura

12 thoughts on “Teenagers are Bad for Your Health”

  2. Here’s my question. If I send this excerpt to my daughter and tell her she makes me sick, am I being an abusive parent?

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  3. OK, now I’ve read the article. It’s all our fault. We can’t disengage after twelve years of attentive parenting. Whatever they do wrong either is or isn’t our fault, but either way there’s nothing we can do about it.

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    1. That’s ridiculous. It’s not like the teen years have been traditionally regarded as easy sailing, even before the appearance of hyper-parenting.

      Also, do we really think that super-disengaged parents have a better time living with teenagers?

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  4. A line I’ve been using for years, when children of friends hit their teens, is: “So, thirteen. You an ass hole yet?”
    Works every time…

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    1. I don’t think my thirteen year old thinks I’m an ass hole (though I could be naive) but she most definitely thinks I am wrong. About everything. Even when I’ve just been proven right. The other night, she was having trouble with a complicated math problem. Two numbers made sense, but the third was a weird fraction. So I suggested she check her arithmetic. She refused because it would “take too long” and it is patronizing of me to assume she might have made a silly error. She spun her wheels a bit longer, and then I looked over her work and found the arithmetic error within a minute. But she still said I was wrong, because what if there hadn’t been an arithmetic error? Then it would have been a waste of time to check it. You can’t argue with that logic, so my New Year’s resolution is to stop arguing.

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      1. We had this same argument over curly a’s used as a variable in math homework, with tears and everything, even after we bit our tongues. Mind you, we are not faultless, but it’s interesting interacting with a teen (and mine gets especially especially offended when you suggested that there are any similarities whatsoever among interacting with different teens).

        The other day, as we were driving home, she told me that she didn’t want to talk to me and asked for the radio. After a song or so, she started talking, and talked the whole way home (I think that when she said she didn’t want to talk to me, she meant she didn’t want me to talk to her). So, I got a 30 minute monologue. It was probably good for me, to listen and not say anything. I was very proud of myself.

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  5. I suspect a child’s maturation–specifically their hormonal changes, as they reach puberty–may trigger changes in their parents’ hormone levels. Change those parents into grandparents, so the baby grandchildren don’t have to compete with baby aunts and uncles for adult attention.

    If it’s near-universal, it’s likely to be physical.

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  6. One of my Central European in-laws used to ask rhetorically when dealing with a difficult child, “For which of my sins am I being punished?”

    I used to think it was kind of emotionally abusive, but I’m starting to see the point.

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  7. My children are only 11, but one of my daughters has already gotten very suspicious about whether I can give her good advice on her English homework. Even though I teach English–in the upper grades–at her school!!

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