If you are a parent, an adult who works with teens or has teens in your life, or are a legal minor teenager yourself, ages 13 to 18 tend to be a lot of drama. This is intended to be a quick and dirty practical guide for teens and adults dealing with teens.
A child gains executive function -- the ability to think like an adult, make decisions and plan their future -- around age 12. It takes a few months of practice to be able to effectively use this new ability and most people do not have perfect lives, so teens often dream of just LEAVING but the reality is they usually cannot support themselves yet and are frequently less prepared in practical terms for independence than they think they are.
For very bright teens, especially twice exceptional teens, this can be an especially challenging time because their mind can see a lot of stuff but that doesn't mean they are really well situated to act on it effectively. If there is a history of abuse or other issues, they may come to a head during these years because a child younger than age twelve typically lacks the mental capacity to try to tell other adults something is very wrong with their life and they need serious help.
Teens have limited LEGAL rights to decide things for themselves but they generally have a growing de facto capacity to make their own decisions, start taking control of their lives and self-advocate in terms of doing the research and explaining their logic.
Assuming their parents are REASONABLE, this means a teen can go a long way towards taking control of their own life before they have the legal right to self-determination and this is, in fact, what ALL teens should be working on even if they have a wonderful family and rosy life situation.
It's also what you can generally help any teen try to do without legal drama and unless there is extreme abuse of the sort that merits intervention by the courts, that's what I suggest you focus on. It is both a good answer in practical terms for THEM and also a good answer in terms of looking to cover your own butt should things turn into unexpected drama.
Even in cases of serious abuse, if they are close to age 18 or have recently turned 18, it may still be the best thing you can do to help them.
It is both a practical answer AND will be one of the better things you can do for their mental health. Spending time focused on something they can take control of instead of on their sob story can be a psychologically and emotionally healthy form of "escape" which can help lay the groundwork for them having a better life if they choose to try to make that happen and don't use their past as an excuse to behave badly and remain miserable.
That's probably fairly common among teens who know the family dirty laundry and may not yet realize that what they see of most other people is a relatively superficial facade. So other people may be WORSE and they just don't know and don't yet have enough life experience in most cases to recognize that they are making an apples-to-oranges comparison, trying to judge other people on much less info than they have about immediate relatives.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but teens may not yet realize how this applies to social stuff in THEIR lives. They may not yet realize that what they don't know about other people can very much hurt them.
What I expected from people is fairly rare in the world. Even if you can find someone like that, most adults would be fools to try to intercede overly much on behalf of a teenager -- especially if they are a legal minor and not a blood relative -- no matter how smart they are nor how just the cause.
In fact, I helped a barely legal adult teen escape their abusive family and the troubled teen burned me after they no longer needed my help. I had done all I could to account for covering my butt legally and practically with everyone else and it never crossed my mind that the person I helped might be the person who made me pay for the mistake of helping them.
Late in life, I realized my parents were the cream of the crop and MOST people are scum compared to my parents. Even the best parents sometimes don't know how to handle certain things well and that's part of why I continue to TRY to blog on this particular site: I do it to try to put more resources into the hands of parents dealing with challenging situations.
If you are a teenager looking for help, you need to realize that most adults will be reluctant to intercede -- and for some very good reasons -- or will be LEGALLY barred from doing a lot of the things you wish they would do. If you are an adult who wants to help -- either professionally or personally -- you MAY be able to be helpful IF you are very keenly aware of the legal limits of what you can reasonably do without getting yourself into trouble.
Whether you are the teen wanting help or a well-meaning adult hoping to help, you need to understand that the adult in question will have limited information about the teen in question. So this is a veritable MINEFIELD they are stepping into and they should proceed with caution if they have ANY sense.
If you are a teen and some adult offers to help you too eagerly, you need to wonder WHY. In some cases, they will be child molesters or have some other reason for offering to help you that is not in your best interest.
For example: They may engage in human trafficking and a child who disappears is hard to trace and ill-equipped to escape.
At one apartment complex I hung out at when I was a teen because a "latchkey kid" friend of mine lived there, word went round that some apartment was where kids could go to do something -- make out, drink, I don't remember -- and it later came out the person living there was taking advantage of teens who took them up on the offer. Again, I no longer remember the exact details, but was glad I had been skeptical and didn't partake of whatever this too-good-to-be-true offer had been.
IF they are a genuinely idealistic, good-hearted, upstanding citizen who sincerely wants to help, they may still not be able to because the law favors parental rights and a legal minor has very limited legal right to self-advocate. An adult who tries to rescue you may find themselves in legal trouble for trying to "help."
If they are sincere good-hearted do-gooders who chose to make that their CAREER and they are a social worker at your high school, a lawyer in a legal aid office, a police officer or similar, they still will have constraints upon what they can legally do for you and under what circumstances they can do it.
I know because I TRIED to get help as a teen and ran into the following issues:
If a teen is not coming to you complaining of abuse but you suspect things aren't optimal, I suggest you try to offer practical answers, such as:
If they are seventeen and you do have an adversarial relationship to the parent, it may make sense to offer to drive them to therapy and pay for it or otherwise get them medical help of some sort starting the day they turn eighteen rather than fight with a possibly dysfunctional parent. IF possible, lay the groundwork for this so they feel they can actually count on it and it's not an empty promise.
This might include making a list of potential doctors or therapists and discussing the pros and cons of each with them. ("This one is covered by x insurance but is farther to drive to...")
These are things one CAN do without parental permission and without help from another adult and there are no legal barriers. In fact, they should be doing this ANYWAY, whether they have family problems or NOT.
IF they do have family problems, this is something they can do OPENLY and not have to hide it from an abusive parent. There is NOTHING nefarious about a teenager learning to care for themselves. It's what they SHOULD be doing.
If they manage to get out somehow before age eighteen, these will be essential skills. If they don't manage to get out before age eighteen, they will STILL need to know all this whenever they do leave, regardless of age.
I write another blog called Nutrient Dense. This is a potential resource for a teen trying to learn to feed themselves adequately without getting overwhelmed by the process.
Depending on circumstances, it MAY also empower a teen to take over at least SOME of the cooking for the family. Especially if they are in a single-parent household (and possibly doubly so if that parent is the father, not the mother), better nutrition for all and less burden on the parent may help bring down stress levels for all parties.
If you are a teen and your single parent wants to impose on you to cry on your shoulder about, say, their dating problems, you should try to extricate yourself from conversations of that sort. It is not reasonable to impose on your own child in that manner and it frequently is a form of boundary violation where they overshare and tell you things about their love life that YOU should NOT be hearing.
A useful phrase is "TMI" -- "Too much information" -- and also "I don't need to know that about my mom/dad, thanks. You are oversharing and should get FRIENDS of your own. I'm the WRONG person to tell this to."
Learning to cook can be empowering. Do not let it be a means to slippery-slope you into being treated like YOU are the parent and they are YOUR child and YOU are supposed to take care of THEM.
As part of preparing for adulthood myself, I also effectively arranged a kind of "dowry" for myself.
Dowries are property or money brought by a bride to a marriage and are intended to help a young couple get a good start in life. I was looking to establish enough household goods that moving out would be as easy as possible.
So I began collecting silverware from cereal box offers and things like that as early as age twelve. I also habitually requested things like furniture for Christmas and birthdays and had an understanding with my parents that my furniture in my room was MINE and would go with me when I left home.
When I moved out, all I needed to finish furnishing a one bedroom apartment was a dining room table and chairs plus a couch for the living room. One relative gave me a hand-me-down couch and another bought me an inexpensive dining room set and I was good to go.
I didn't have EVERYTHING -- for example, I had no coffee table -- but I had enough to make life work without running up a bunch of credit card debt right out the door to make that happen. And it was in line with the middle-class expectations I grew up with, not cheap garbage because that's all I could afford.
"Idle hands are the devil's workshop." Having too little to do can leave a person depressed, give them time to sit and stew and feel sorry for themselves and feel they are wasting their life. It can also be opportunity for friction with relatives to turn into drama. Having someplace to be can reduce the amount of arguing and have many other benefits.
I knew someone who got very involved with the school paper and it kept them very busy, both during school hours and after school. They got out of a lot of classes because "They were doing a thing for the paper" and they pulled this off in part because they had very good grades and an excellent attendance record.
The were awarded a college scholarship, so this proved to be a path to a future for this person. It led to a college degree which was a stepping stone to a career.
College can be a halfway measure for figuring out how to live as an adult. You may be able to move out of your parental home and live in a dorm room or apartment of your own while still getting some parental support, financially and in other ways.
When I was seventeen, I became a girl gamer. It was a hobby, which meant I had no obligation to attend like I would with something like a school program (and that was important for me because of my undiagnosed health issues), but I was involved with a very intense group and the core members met Friday night, all day Saturday, part of Sunday and sometimes on Wednesay evening.
This meant I could just be GONE most of the time I wasn't in school. Four days out of seven, I had someplace I could be for several HOURS and the rest of the time I was studying, often in bed and falling asleep on my school books.
I looked into dropping out my senior year and pursuing some maybe job training program or something. Something school-like but that promised to help you get well-paid empployment quickly. I didn't pursue it but did look into it.
I applied for The Governor's Honors Program, which was a six-week long summer residential enrichment program for good students. I was the "alternate" meaning if one of the two people who got awarded it failed to show up, I would have replaced them. So I didn't actually go but this could have been a means to give me someplace else to be for six weeks one summer.
One spring break, I basically spent all nine days at a cousin's house. I only went home to drop off my laundry and get new clothes every few days.
So it wasn't planned or anything. I was going to stay a couple of nights and then got clothes for a couple more nights, etc. But it did mean I was away from home for nine days straight without any legal intervention, getting into foster care or whatever.
If you are a teen, you may have more power than you think you do to arrange to have some place to be and avoid relatives you don't much care for without it ending up in the court system. If your parents are divorcing, you may also be able have some say which parent you prefer to stay with most of the time, among other things.
Custody arrangements are a NORMAL part of divorce proceedings so this may serve as a natural means to choose the parent you like better and get along with better without having to necessarily prove abuse. If there is abuse, you may have some ability to tell the courts you would like to see one parent a lot less without a whole lot of "extra" or out-of-the-ordinary drama.
I spent time in a mental institution where staff initially assumed I was "a bad kid" and then learned my backstory and one of them apologized to me. As a consequence of my undiagnosed medical condition, I missed the maximum number of days per year I could without having to repeat that grade.
In my teens, I fantasized about growing up and changing the laws or something to help people like me. I grew up and learned that laws already exist, such as the legal emancipation of a minor, BUT in most cases a kid isn't really ready to support themselves financially, feed themselves adequately, etc. and these practical details mean that such laws are rarely used even in cases where the abuse is sufficient to warrant it.
In my case, the molestation had STOPPED and I was seeking to get therapy, feel safe and figure out how to get a good start in life. If there is ongoing abuse and you TELL a doctor, school social worker, or police officer, they may have no choice but to investigate and you may lose control of the situation.
Once the courts get involved, it's a whole OTHER ball game. I managed to sidestep that. Not everyone does.
The above is what to reasonably expect LEGALLY and practically and what YOU can do to self-advocate in spite of legally LIMITED rights to do so in situations that haven't escalated to the point of involving police and the court system, even though there may well be some amount of abuse.
I am disinterested in starting a separate blog for this topic and would like to keep it relatively succinct, but this page may grow over time as other things occur to me.
0/2/04/2024
A child gains executive function -- the ability to think like an adult, make decisions and plan their future -- around age 12. It takes a few months of practice to be able to effectively use this new ability and most people do not have perfect lives, so teens often dream of just LEAVING but the reality is they usually cannot support themselves yet and are frequently less prepared in practical terms for independence than they think they are.
For very bright teens, especially twice exceptional teens, this can be an especially challenging time because their mind can see a lot of stuff but that doesn't mean they are really well situated to act on it effectively. If there is a history of abuse or other issues, they may come to a head during these years because a child younger than age twelve typically lacks the mental capacity to try to tell other adults something is very wrong with their life and they need serious help.
Teens have limited LEGAL rights to decide things for themselves but they generally have a growing de facto capacity to make their own decisions, start taking control of their lives and self-advocate in terms of doing the research and explaining their logic.
Assuming their parents are REASONABLE, this means a teen can go a long way towards taking control of their own life before they have the legal right to self-determination and this is, in fact, what ALL teens should be working on even if they have a wonderful family and rosy life situation.
It's also what you can generally help any teen try to do without legal drama and unless there is extreme abuse of the sort that merits intervention by the courts, that's what I suggest you focus on. It is both a good answer in practical terms for THEM and also a good answer in terms of looking to cover your own butt should things turn into unexpected drama.
Even in cases of serious abuse, if they are close to age 18 or have recently turned 18, it may still be the best thing you can do to help them.
It is both a practical answer AND will be one of the better things you can do for their mental health. Spending time focused on something they can take control of instead of on their sob story can be a psychologically and emotionally healthy form of "escape" which can help lay the groundwork for them having a better life if they choose to try to make that happen and don't use their past as an excuse to behave badly and remain miserable.
Non-Parental Adults
When I was a teen, I thought OTHER ADULTS -- people other than my parents -- were nicer, more competent and had higher standards than is generally true.That's probably fairly common among teens who know the family dirty laundry and may not yet realize that what they see of most other people is a relatively superficial facade. So other people may be WORSE and they just don't know and don't yet have enough life experience in most cases to recognize that they are making an apples-to-oranges comparison, trying to judge other people on much less info than they have about immediate relatives.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but teens may not yet realize how this applies to social stuff in THEIR lives. They may not yet realize that what they don't know about other people can very much hurt them.
What I expected from people is fairly rare in the world. Even if you can find someone like that, most adults would be fools to try to intercede overly much on behalf of a teenager -- especially if they are a legal minor and not a blood relative -- no matter how smart they are nor how just the cause.
In fact, I helped a barely legal adult teen escape their abusive family and the troubled teen burned me after they no longer needed my help. I had done all I could to account for covering my butt legally and practically with everyone else and it never crossed my mind that the person I helped might be the person who made me pay for the mistake of helping them.
Late in life, I realized my parents were the cream of the crop and MOST people are scum compared to my parents. Even the best parents sometimes don't know how to handle certain things well and that's part of why I continue to TRY to blog on this particular site: I do it to try to put more resources into the hands of parents dealing with challenging situations.
If you are a teenager looking for help, you need to realize that most adults will be reluctant to intercede -- and for some very good reasons -- or will be LEGALLY barred from doing a lot of the things you wish they would do. If you are an adult who wants to help -- either professionally or personally -- you MAY be able to be helpful IF you are very keenly aware of the legal limits of what you can reasonably do without getting yourself into trouble.
Whether you are the teen wanting help or a well-meaning adult hoping to help, you need to understand that the adult in question will have limited information about the teen in question. So this is a veritable MINEFIELD they are stepping into and they should proceed with caution if they have ANY sense.
If you are a teen and some adult offers to help you too eagerly, you need to wonder WHY. In some cases, they will be child molesters or have some other reason for offering to help you that is not in your best interest.
For example: They may engage in human trafficking and a child who disappears is hard to trace and ill-equipped to escape.
At one apartment complex I hung out at when I was a teen because a "latchkey kid" friend of mine lived there, word went round that some apartment was where kids could go to do something -- make out, drink, I don't remember -- and it later came out the person living there was taking advantage of teens who took them up on the offer. Again, I no longer remember the exact details, but was glad I had been skeptical and didn't partake of whatever this too-good-to-be-true offer had been.
IF they are a genuinely idealistic, good-hearted, upstanding citizen who sincerely wants to help, they may still not be able to because the law favors parental rights and a legal minor has very limited legal right to self-advocate. An adult who tries to rescue you may find themselves in legal trouble for trying to "help."
If they are sincere good-hearted do-gooders who chose to make that their CAREER and they are a social worker at your high school, a lawyer in a legal aid office, a police officer or similar, they still will have constraints upon what they can legally do for you and under what circumstances they can do it.
I know because I TRIED to get help as a teen and ran into the following issues:
- I could NOT speak to a therapist WITHOUT parental consent. Other people willing to pay for it and arrange transportation failed to get me into therapy because the THERAPIST could NOT speak to me without parental consent. (I did get into therapy when things got ugly enough that a therapist told my parents "You will do x or I will and if I do x, YOU lose decision-making power here." so my parents CHOSE to sign the papers themselves instead of letting the therapist sign them. I hope you never find yourself in the kind of situation where someone with a legal obligation to intercede has a similar conversation with your parents. A word to the wise: You would be a FOOL to try to figure out how to manipulate the system and PRETEND to have problems serious enough to merit this kind of legal intervention.)
- I spoke to the school social worker and was basically told "We can put you in foster care." I think all I wanted was to get therapy and was told "We can't compel your parents to let you get therapy UNLESS we take you away from them." I was seventeen, had special dietary needs and CHOSE to not go that route because my parents at least fed me well and I could readily see that going to foster care could be a personal hell that would RUIN my already frail health and no one would believe me (because I got a diagnosis much later in life) and my 18th birthday wasn't that far off.
- When I was 14, I learned that the state of California was changing its age for legal emancipation of a minor to age 15. I was on the East Coast, had no means to financially support myself and traveling across the continent to another state to pursue legal emancipation sounded like "I might as well by hoping to move to the MOON." So I thought about some of the logistics involved and never pursued it.
If a teen is not coming to you complaining of abuse but you suspect things aren't optimal, I suggest you try to offer practical answers, such as:
- Support any interest they have in learning to cook or feed themselves better.
- Support any interest they have in figuring out how to get around -- learn to drive, learn to use the public transit system, buy a bike, etc.
- Support any interest they have in trying to decide on a college major, pick a college, apply for jobs or similar.
- Support any interest they have in harmless hobbies that may help fill their time, help them make friends, help them not be home alone all the time if they are a latch-key kid, help them avoid family members they may have friction with, etc.
If they are seventeen and you do have an adversarial relationship to the parent, it may make sense to offer to drive them to therapy and pay for it or otherwise get them medical help of some sort starting the day they turn eighteen rather than fight with a possibly dysfunctional parent. IF possible, lay the groundwork for this so they feel they can actually count on it and it's not an empty promise.
This might include making a list of potential doctors or therapists and discussing the pros and cons of each with them. ("This one is covered by x insurance but is farther to drive to...")
Prepping for Adulthood
ALL teens should be working on learning to adequately take care of themselves in practical terms, including learning to feed themselves, wash their clothes, manage money, etc. This goes double if they are a troubled teen with family issues or other drama and contemplating "running away" or otherwise wishing they could just get out before they are eighteen.These are things one CAN do without parental permission and without help from another adult and there are no legal barriers. In fact, they should be doing this ANYWAY, whether they have family problems or NOT.
IF they do have family problems, this is something they can do OPENLY and not have to hide it from an abusive parent. There is NOTHING nefarious about a teenager learning to care for themselves. It's what they SHOULD be doing.
If they manage to get out somehow before age eighteen, these will be essential skills. If they don't manage to get out before age eighteen, they will STILL need to know all this whenever they do leave, regardless of age.
I write another blog called Nutrient Dense. This is a potential resource for a teen trying to learn to feed themselves adequately without getting overwhelmed by the process.
Depending on circumstances, it MAY also empower a teen to take over at least SOME of the cooking for the family. Especially if they are in a single-parent household (and possibly doubly so if that parent is the father, not the mother), better nutrition for all and less burden on the parent may help bring down stress levels for all parties.
If you are a teen and your single parent wants to impose on you to cry on your shoulder about, say, their dating problems, you should try to extricate yourself from conversations of that sort. It is not reasonable to impose on your own child in that manner and it frequently is a form of boundary violation where they overshare and tell you things about their love life that YOU should NOT be hearing.
A useful phrase is "TMI" -- "Too much information" -- and also "I don't need to know that about my mom/dad, thanks. You are oversharing and should get FRIENDS of your own. I'm the WRONG person to tell this to."
Learning to cook can be empowering. Do not let it be a means to slippery-slope you into being treated like YOU are the parent and they are YOUR child and YOU are supposed to take care of THEM.
As part of preparing for adulthood myself, I also effectively arranged a kind of "dowry" for myself.
Dowries are property or money brought by a bride to a marriage and are intended to help a young couple get a good start in life. I was looking to establish enough household goods that moving out would be as easy as possible.
So I began collecting silverware from cereal box offers and things like that as early as age twelve. I also habitually requested things like furniture for Christmas and birthdays and had an understanding with my parents that my furniture in my room was MINE and would go with me when I left home.
When I moved out, all I needed to finish furnishing a one bedroom apartment was a dining room table and chairs plus a couch for the living room. One relative gave me a hand-me-down couch and another bought me an inexpensive dining room set and I was good to go.
I didn't have EVERYTHING -- for example, I had no coffee table -- but I had enough to make life work without running up a bunch of credit card debt right out the door to make that happen. And it was in line with the middle-class expectations I grew up with, not cheap garbage because that's all I could afford.
Academics, Programs, Hobbies
There are limits on how many hours per week a minor can work for pay. If they want a job, need a job, can get a job, cool. Whether they have a job or not, a teen may find they have too much time on their hands not filled by school and essential self-care, like sleep."Idle hands are the devil's workshop." Having too little to do can leave a person depressed, give them time to sit and stew and feel sorry for themselves and feel they are wasting their life. It can also be opportunity for friction with relatives to turn into drama. Having someplace to be can reduce the amount of arguing and have many other benefits.
I knew someone who got very involved with the school paper and it kept them very busy, both during school hours and after school. They got out of a lot of classes because "They were doing a thing for the paper" and they pulled this off in part because they had very good grades and an excellent attendance record.
The were awarded a college scholarship, so this proved to be a path to a future for this person. It led to a college degree which was a stepping stone to a career.
College can be a halfway measure for figuring out how to live as an adult. You may be able to move out of your parental home and live in a dorm room or apartment of your own while still getting some parental support, financially and in other ways.
When I was seventeen, I became a girl gamer. It was a hobby, which meant I had no obligation to attend like I would with something like a school program (and that was important for me because of my undiagnosed health issues), but I was involved with a very intense group and the core members met Friday night, all day Saturday, part of Sunday and sometimes on Wednesay evening.
This meant I could just be GONE most of the time I wasn't in school. Four days out of seven, I had someplace I could be for several HOURS and the rest of the time I was studying, often in bed and falling asleep on my school books.
I looked into dropping out my senior year and pursuing some maybe job training program or something. Something school-like but that promised to help you get well-paid empployment quickly. I didn't pursue it but did look into it.
I applied for The Governor's Honors Program, which was a six-week long summer residential enrichment program for good students. I was the "alternate" meaning if one of the two people who got awarded it failed to show up, I would have replaced them. So I didn't actually go but this could have been a means to give me someplace else to be for six weeks one summer.
One spring break, I basically spent all nine days at a cousin's house. I only went home to drop off my laundry and get new clothes every few days.
So it wasn't planned or anything. I was going to stay a couple of nights and then got clothes for a couple more nights, etc. But it did mean I was away from home for nine days straight without any legal intervention, getting into foster care or whatever.
If you are a teen, you may have more power than you think you do to arrange to have some place to be and avoid relatives you don't much care for without it ending up in the court system. If your parents are divorcing, you may also be able have some say which parent you prefer to stay with most of the time, among other things.
Custody arrangements are a NORMAL part of divorce proceedings so this may serve as a natural means to choose the parent you like better and get along with better without having to necessarily prove abuse. If there is abuse, you may have some ability to tell the courts you would like to see one parent a lot less without a whole lot of "extra" or out-of-the-ordinary drama.
Footnote
I was a troubled teen. I was molested from age 11 to age 13.5. As a consequence of that, I was suicidal starting at age 12 and attempted suicide at age 17.I spent time in a mental institution where staff initially assumed I was "a bad kid" and then learned my backstory and one of them apologized to me. As a consequence of my undiagnosed medical condition, I missed the maximum number of days per year I could without having to repeat that grade.
In my teens, I fantasized about growing up and changing the laws or something to help people like me. I grew up and learned that laws already exist, such as the legal emancipation of a minor, BUT in most cases a kid isn't really ready to support themselves financially, feed themselves adequately, etc. and these practical details mean that such laws are rarely used even in cases where the abuse is sufficient to warrant it.
In my case, the molestation had STOPPED and I was seeking to get therapy, feel safe and figure out how to get a good start in life. If there is ongoing abuse and you TELL a doctor, school social worker, or police officer, they may have no choice but to investigate and you may lose control of the situation.
Once the courts get involved, it's a whole OTHER ball game. I managed to sidestep that. Not everyone does.
The above is what to reasonably expect LEGALLY and practically and what YOU can do to self-advocate in spite of legally LIMITED rights to do so in situations that haven't escalated to the point of involving police and the court system, even though there may well be some amount of abuse.
I am disinterested in starting a separate blog for this topic and would like to keep it relatively succinct, but this page may grow over time as other things occur to me.
0/2/04/2024