The persistent notion that the teen years are some overflowing font of unprecedented rebellion bothers me. Was this idea perpetuated by those leading child rearing experts that never actually got around to having children of their own?
Someone obviously blinked. Often.
Babies fuss their preference for certain foods, certain ways of being held, and certain people allowed to hold them.
Toddlers insist on going the wrong way up the slide, no matter how many times you correct them, or how many times they injure themselves in their quest to defy physics and common sense.
Young children resist their parent’s help in doing whatever it is that they believe they are capable of doing on the grounds that they’re “a big girl/boy now.”
The desire to assert personal power, exercise choice, refute accepted knowledge and reject conventional ways of doing and thinking are not unique to teen development—they are a fundamental aspect of human behaviour; a characteristic facet of our identity. It is that part of our nature which makes us what we are, and continue to aspire toward what we can be.
Note to self: Endeavour re-read this daily when your own brood of children become teens.
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