“How old are your children?” “Fourteen and sixteen!” “Oh my God, poor you… terrible years await you… then it will get better” -“My son is ten years old, he is a very affectionate child and we have a wonderful relationship” “Seee… You say it now, wait until I become a stinky, mute teenager or a screamer” – “Kids are never okay with anything, they don’t appreciate anything because of our sacrifices” – “You have to wait a while, then they calm down and you can talk to each other” – “They say adolescence is terrible for teenagers but it’s worse for adults who have to deal with it”
I hear people talk this way all the time, almost like automatic speech. They sound like bar chatter, but I think that’s what people really think. These teenagers are just obnoxious to everyone apparently. I wonder what this terrible thing is that younger people embody and that worries, fatigues, wears out the older ones.
I don’t think it’s a “problem” for younger people. In the sense that the adolescence test is already enough and certainly not being condescending with adults that will help them understand who they are and want to be. I think that devaluing the modus vivendi of adolescents is a “problem” of adults.
And I think “adolescence ends and they become adults” has a catch somewhere. The rip-off of becoming like one’s parents, of normalizing or otherwise identifying with adult models. At that point it is easier for adults to talk to those who have become like them as if it were the only possible way of relating among human beings, that is, between equals. Much harder is dealing with the different, respecting it and not making it disappear.
We have said it many times in this blog, I have seen it a thousand times in my work with children: the incommunicability, the inability to understand each other between young people and adults is due to something that growing up you risk forgetting. As if the price of being accepted into adult society, the price of identification is missing something. But what? And above all, is it really necessary to lose it?
Teenagers are disagreeing.
Guys don’t like what they liked yesterday anymore today, much less tomorrow.
Teenagers grieve over the war, they suffer to see other human beings suffer.
Teenagers are outraged by the pollution, the speculation, the hypocrisy, the narrow-minded.
Teenagers are pissed at their parents who say no, without a why, or, at worst, they always say yes to everything: they do not even have the taste to rebel, so everything is fine.
Young people reject the status quo more than anyone.
Then they do it in a disorganized way, without understanding well, without knowing well what they do but to skin they do it. In this rebellion there is something important in my opinion, almost a lesson. It’s that precious thing that you risk losing, but it makes you dislike.
Is that why the environmental movement, starting with Grata Tumberg for example, has become dangerous and annoying for the maximum systems? If it is not the younger people who remind us that the world our fathers left us in many ways is terrible, who will? Only the youngest could succeed: not sweetened, not ruined by compromise, not adapted.
Here… adaptation. It is said to be a symptom of intelligence and an evolutionary criterion. But we are no longer apes. I like to think that the human characteristic is rather mismatch. Of course this could make us complicated, difficult, grumpy, moody, silent or angry blacks. It could make us eternal teenagers.
In this blog we often talk about the responsibility of adults in the relationship with teenagers.
Well… adults know more, they have more resources and even material possibilities.
They could do a lot if they hadn’t adapted to this world.
Maria Giubettini
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