I have a friend who has an adolescent daughter. Surprisingly, there are moments when the relationship is more rocky road than dairy milk, if you follow me. As he described his current set of frustrations, it suddenly occurred to me that adolescence is the new black.
Here are the two things he’s noticed:
- It doesn’t matter how many concessions you make, or how hard you try to meet the other person halfway; it’s never enough. For his daughter, at this moment in her life, any attempt to restrict her freedom is an assault on essential human rights; it’s unacceptable. Apparently loving concern is just the mask of evil paternalism.
- Matters of practical wisdom always turn into matters of morality. When my friend tries to point out the blindingly obvious and particularly uncontroversial facts about her current lifestyle—for example, that drunken parties are much more likely to be the scene of physical harm and sexual violence—the conversation morphs instantly into a heated discussion about the rights of some (particularly parents, who are part of the old-school authoritarian elite, trying to bolster an indefensible inequality in the system that consistently represses the voiceless majority) to impose their morality on others (who just want to live their own little lives in their own little way without hurting anyone else).
Two generations ago, we’d have expected her to grow out of it. Today, she just sounds like every second grown-up we talk to. Her arguments are exactly like the arguments that I read in the newspaper and hear on breakfast radio every day. It doesn’t take long to realize that they’re lousy arguments. But somehow, if you shout them loudly enough when you’re forty, they become the wisdom of the mature.
In our folly, we’ve managed to enshrine adolescence as the wisdom of the age.
