4.1 Giving advice  (Page 3/4)

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So you’re expecting a teenager? How wonderful. During the 13-year wait some of the excitement does wear off, but the fact remains that you are embarking on one of the most exhilarating rides human relations can provide. You are on the brink of a time when night will be turned into day and the house will be cluttered with the hardware of adolescence, a time of physical stress and emotional strain, awash in a sea of hormones. A time when your telephone bill will treble.

You can never be sure when a teenager is going to arrive. The gestation period varies widely and unpredictably. Some people are still pink and innocent at 16. Some go to bed one night with a Pony Club annual and a mug of cocoa, and emerge the next morning with 3 earrings and a bad attitude. No one heard a thing.

But your teenager may not arrive in this way. The phased entrance is a popular alternative. With this option, the physical manifestations and the stroppy mind-set arrive on different days, and not in any particular order. This makes it possible to accommodate rebellion before acne sets in, or vice versa. If this sounds like a more attractive proposition, don’t get excited. It is all beyond your control. The genetic template that makes each human unique will decide whether your teenager arrives on the first Thursday in January, or weekly throughout the following year.

What we can say with certainty is that time between the age of 12 and 20, a teenager is born.

It is not a modern aberration that you can escape by taking your family to live on a tiny island in the Pacific. It is not a stage of life that can be skipped, no matter how sensible or biddable or angelic the child. Even Mother Theresa was spotty and misunderstood for a year or two.

What is the shape of things to come? And what is its estimated time of arrival? There aren’t many certainties with teenagers. One of the few is that they do not make good roommates for younger siblings. Nor for older ones. In fact they make completely impossible roommates for any member of the human race, and should therefore be housed separately, preferably in soundproofed seclusion.

If the smallness of the house or the size of your family makes this impossible you had better get used to the idea that blood will be shed. One of the most precious things you can give your teenager is her own door to slam. Think of it as a gift to the family.

You can also issue a Turbulence Warning. “Sometime in the next 2 years your brother is going to be touchy, reclusive, noisy, silent, stunningly mature, bristly, and foolhardy.” Does it help? I don’t think so.

Teenagers need you to be silent and invisible, but very palpably there. Not so much for clean clothes and food.

They need you to be around because their crises can be very big ones. They may have to make decisions of live and death. Or they may have a brush with the law. Your role as slayer of dragons and fixer of messes should diminish as your children reach their late teens. But it is an invariable rule of parenthood that a child who is going to crash his moped will not do it until you’re away having a quiet weekend in the country.