Why Do They Act That Way?

One: Making Sense of Adolescence

Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.

Socrates, Fifth Century BC

Probably the best way to describe adolescence is to say that it begins at puberty and ends...sometime. That may sound silly and unscientific, but it's the most accurate description of adolescence that I've come across. It is vague precisely because adolescence is an in-between stage determined not so much by what it is but by what it is not. Adolescence is not childhood, and it is not adulthood; it is the period in between those two stages. And because today's kids get through childhood faster than kids did in the past, their transition to adulthood now seems to be taking longer than ever before.

The gap between teens and adults seems to be gr ... read full excerpt from WHY Do They Act That Way?, A Survival Guide to the Adolescent Brain for You and Your Teen ebook