Someone once came up with this hypothesis that adolescence is so stressful because society is so stressful and you would need to design a culture that lacked those stresses to solve this issue. So they supposedly found some idyllic isolated tribal culture to study to prove their hypothesis and found that adolescents there were also all kinds of drama.
Different hormones have different psychological and emotional impacts. It's common knowledge teens are either "too sexy" to the discomfort of their parents or angry and it is frequently boys who are very angry.
I don't have any daughters, just sons. One of them wasn't a lot of drama when he hit adolescence. He's generally low affect and never went throught that rebel without a cause stage.
My second child is more emotional and more social and he hit puberty and began accusing everyone around him of nefarious behavior. When he got to be too much of a pain in the butt, I sat him down one day (with -- coincidentally -- his brother and best friend present) and explained to him that he had hormones coursing through his body at higher levels than ever before and talked about how that impacts emotional stuff and spent a few minutes educating him about how all that worked.
Then I told him that high levels of hormones were why he felt angrier than he had ever felt in his life, not extremes of injustice never before seen by him. I told him I understood why he was misinterpreting his feelings to suggest people around him were doing terrible things to him, but it wasn't true. He just had really strong feelings for biological reasons, didn't understand what was going on with his body and was looking around him for a cause for these Big Feels and blaming some annoying minor thing someone nearby was doing and overreacting to it.
The punchline to that discussion was "Your problem is called TESTOSTERONE, NOT my bitch mother." which got a laugh out of all three boys. After that, all three of them were easier to deal with.
He continued to sometimes be a pill. When he would go on some rant about how stupid the entire world was and how he had better answers for everything, I would roll my eyes and say "You sound like some icky, hormone-soaked teenager" and he would reply "I AM an icky, hormone-soaked teenager."
Then he would try to tone it down a hair and I would try to be somewhat understanding of the fact that it had biological roots, so there were limits to how much he could control it.
The other thing that is going on is that around age twelve, the brain becomes capable of executive function. It becomes capable of thinking in ways it had not been capable of previously and this is roughly "adult thinking" about things like cause and effect and it facilitates the ability to plan things out, behave responsibly and run your life.
It also facilitates something adults tend to NOT like: The ability to analyze the ways in which their parents and other adults around them have failed them and to start calling the adults in their lives on their bullshit.
This usually goes badly for a few reasons.
First of all, most parents routinely LIE to their children from the get go. Some of those lies are things they feel are "harmless, good clean fun" like tales of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny but those are usually NOT the only lies being told to children for the convenience of the parents.
People who have been lying the entire time are usually not people willing to straighten up and fly right the minute you point out "That's a lie." This goes double if they are in charge or have greater social status or similar and this will be true for pretty much all adults in relation to the adolescent in question.
And if you have someone who has been lying for the sake of convenience and isn't willing to walk it back the minute you point that out, the odds are extremely high there are worse injustices in their track record than a few little white lies about how the stork brought you because they weren't ready yet to discuss "the birds and the bees" with their child -- and, unlike me, didn't feel it was perfectly okay to say "Yeah, I'm not ready to discuss sex with a seven year old. We can talk about that when you are OLDER." because he bluntly asked about SEX and I was like yeah, no, not happening tonight.
The other reason this is problematic is because the brain becomes capable of executive function at about age twelve but it then requires some practice to figure out how to use that new function and get it right. So just like toddlers are prone to crazy conclusions, so are kids in early adolescence.
So you have a child hitting puberty coming up with whacky conclusions -- like my son acting like every minor annoyance was some giant outsized CONSPIRACY to do him serious harm -- and you have adults who have been screwing this child over in small ways and maybe larger ways as well and the adult's initial reaction to these whackadoodle assertions is "Yeah, no, you are just wrong" and then as the kid starts hitting a nerve, it's convenient for the adult to continue dismissing the child's concerns rather than own up to "Yeah, that was a bad thing. I shouldn't have done that. I will not do that anymore."
At some point, as the adult doubles down on being an ass about the whole thing and the lies get bigger and covering up their bad behavior, no matter how minor previously, clearly becomes their highest goal, the adolescent eventually realizes they can't trust this person, this person is doing them wrong, they will never get a fair shake, etc. Now they have a real reason to be mad as hell, not just hormone-driven Big Feels.
I never went through that stage with my sons because, first of all, I do not lie to my children. Not even cutesy little white lies about fairy tale creatures like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
Second, I'm very big on doing right by my kids and keeping an eye on the big picture, the long view, etc -- thus the title of this blog Raising Future Adults. I didn't do things that I felt were convenient right now with my three year old and ..oh, later? I will worry about later ...LATER.
I worried about later all the time. I wondered all the time "What will be the long-term consequences of how I handle this issue? What's a good answer from the perspective of when they get taller, smarter, more knowledgeable, whatever?"
The Hand Licking Incident is the ONLY time my oldest son felt betrayed by me and I eventually made things right. I didn't simply STOP doing something that I had come to see as abusive treatment of my child that other adults were pushing me into. I made things right, so he was eventually able to let it go and trust me again.
And not because he's the forgiving type. He's not.
Like his father, he's very grudging. He's low affect, so it takes a LOT to get Big Feels out of him which means that by the time he has strong feelings about something, it's been simmering a long time and he doesn't let stuff go easily.
If it's gone on long enough for him to be mad, he has very good reason to be mad.
So I have a good relationship to my sons because I did right by them. That was very important to me and I did right by them to the best of my ability in both big things and small.
No, that doesn't mean I'm perfect. It means when I screwed up, I owned it and fixed it.
So when they hit adolescence and developed executive function, they didn't have any "Hey, wait a minute..." (that means YOU have been LYING to me or that means YOU have been doing X without my knowledge, etc) moments. Because there was no track record of injustice done to them by their mother.
(Good luck with that. I am going to run my mouth. It's what I do, fool.)
Anyway, the piece in question is about how the internet is an EVIL INFLUENCE and our children's lives are being RUINED by it, wah. They spend TOO MUCH TIME ONLINE and this is a crisis and SOMETHING must be done to stop it.
My kids spend a lot of time online and have since early childhood. I have no such issues with it.
Methinks there are OTHER explanations for the phenomenon, but that is outside the scope of THIS post and I will have to address it some other time.
Little sister, hits the stage
She can't help it, she's comin' of age
Little junior, he's all in a rage
Did you notice he was comin' of age?
Different hormones have different psychological and emotional impacts. It's common knowledge teens are either "too sexy" to the discomfort of their parents or angry and it is frequently boys who are very angry.
I don't have any daughters, just sons. One of them wasn't a lot of drama when he hit adolescence. He's generally low affect and never went throught that rebel without a cause stage.
My second child is more emotional and more social and he hit puberty and began accusing everyone around him of nefarious behavior. When he got to be too much of a pain in the butt, I sat him down one day (with -- coincidentally -- his brother and best friend present) and explained to him that he had hormones coursing through his body at higher levels than ever before and talked about how that impacts emotional stuff and spent a few minutes educating him about how all that worked.
Then I told him that high levels of hormones were why he felt angrier than he had ever felt in his life, not extremes of injustice never before seen by him. I told him I understood why he was misinterpreting his feelings to suggest people around him were doing terrible things to him, but it wasn't true. He just had really strong feelings for biological reasons, didn't understand what was going on with his body and was looking around him for a cause for these Big Feels and blaming some annoying minor thing someone nearby was doing and overreacting to it.
The punchline to that discussion was "Your problem is called TESTOSTERONE, NOT my bitch mother." which got a laugh out of all three boys. After that, all three of them were easier to deal with.
He continued to sometimes be a pill. When he would go on some rant about how stupid the entire world was and how he had better answers for everything, I would roll my eyes and say "You sound like some icky, hormone-soaked teenager" and he would reply "I AM an icky, hormone-soaked teenager."
Then he would try to tone it down a hair and I would try to be somewhat understanding of the fact that it had biological roots, so there were limits to how much he could control it.
The other thing that is going on is that around age twelve, the brain becomes capable of executive function. It becomes capable of thinking in ways it had not been capable of previously and this is roughly "adult thinking" about things like cause and effect and it facilitates the ability to plan things out, behave responsibly and run your life.
It also facilitates something adults tend to NOT like: The ability to analyze the ways in which their parents and other adults around them have failed them and to start calling the adults in their lives on their bullshit.
This usually goes badly for a few reasons.
First of all, most parents routinely LIE to their children from the get go. Some of those lies are things they feel are "harmless, good clean fun" like tales of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny but those are usually NOT the only lies being told to children for the convenience of the parents.
People who have been lying the entire time are usually not people willing to straighten up and fly right the minute you point out "That's a lie." This goes double if they are in charge or have greater social status or similar and this will be true for pretty much all adults in relation to the adolescent in question.
And if you have someone who has been lying for the sake of convenience and isn't willing to walk it back the minute you point that out, the odds are extremely high there are worse injustices in their track record than a few little white lies about how the stork brought you because they weren't ready yet to discuss "the birds and the bees" with their child -- and, unlike me, didn't feel it was perfectly okay to say "Yeah, I'm not ready to discuss sex with a seven year old. We can talk about that when you are OLDER." because he bluntly asked about SEX and I was like yeah, no, not happening tonight.
The other reason this is problematic is because the brain becomes capable of executive function at about age twelve but it then requires some practice to figure out how to use that new function and get it right. So just like toddlers are prone to crazy conclusions, so are kids in early adolescence.
So you have a child hitting puberty coming up with whacky conclusions -- like my son acting like every minor annoyance was some giant outsized CONSPIRACY to do him serious harm -- and you have adults who have been screwing this child over in small ways and maybe larger ways as well and the adult's initial reaction to these whackadoodle assertions is "Yeah, no, you are just wrong" and then as the kid starts hitting a nerve, it's convenient for the adult to continue dismissing the child's concerns rather than own up to "Yeah, that was a bad thing. I shouldn't have done that. I will not do that anymore."
At some point, as the adult doubles down on being an ass about the whole thing and the lies get bigger and covering up their bad behavior, no matter how minor previously, clearly becomes their highest goal, the adolescent eventually realizes they can't trust this person, this person is doing them wrong, they will never get a fair shake, etc. Now they have a real reason to be mad as hell, not just hormone-driven Big Feels.
I never went through that stage with my sons because, first of all, I do not lie to my children. Not even cutesy little white lies about fairy tale creatures like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
Second, I'm very big on doing right by my kids and keeping an eye on the big picture, the long view, etc -- thus the title of this blog Raising Future Adults. I didn't do things that I felt were convenient right now with my three year old and ..oh, later? I will worry about later ...LATER.
I worried about later all the time. I wondered all the time "What will be the long-term consequences of how I handle this issue? What's a good answer from the perspective of when they get taller, smarter, more knowledgeable, whatever?"
The Hand Licking Incident is the ONLY time my oldest son felt betrayed by me and I eventually made things right. I didn't simply STOP doing something that I had come to see as abusive treatment of my child that other adults were pushing me into. I made things right, so he was eventually able to let it go and trust me again.
And not because he's the forgiving type. He's not.
Like his father, he's very grudging. He's low affect, so it takes a LOT to get Big Feels out of him which means that by the time he has strong feelings about something, it's been simmering a long time and he doesn't let stuff go easily.
If it's gone on long enough for him to be mad, he has very good reason to be mad.
So I have a good relationship to my sons because I did right by them. That was very important to me and I did right by them to the best of my ability in both big things and small.
No, that doesn't mean I'm perfect. It means when I screwed up, I owned it and fixed it.
So when they hit adolescence and developed executive function, they didn't have any "Hey, wait a minute..." (that means YOU have been LYING to me or that means YOU have been doing X without my knowledge, etc) moments. Because there was no track record of injustice done to them by their mother.
Footnote
This blog post brought to by my bad habit of participating on Hacker News. I stupidly left a comment that is getting a ridiculous amount of push back from people who have zero respect for me and also simultaneously can't just roll their eyes and move on. God forbid a woman have an opinion and share it on the internet. WE MUST SHUT HER UP SOMEHOW.(Good luck with that. I am going to run my mouth. It's what I do, fool.)
Anyway, the piece in question is about how the internet is an EVIL INFLUENCE and our children's lives are being RUINED by it, wah. They spend TOO MUCH TIME ONLINE and this is a crisis and SOMETHING must be done to stop it.
My kids spend a lot of time online and have since early childhood. I have no such issues with it.
Methinks there are OTHER explanations for the phenomenon, but that is outside the scope of THIS post and I will have to address it some other time.