Kate Figes - The Terrible Teens: What Every Parent Needs To Know

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE TERRIBLE TEENS

Critical acclaim for Life After Birth

A sanctuary of revelation about the bafflingly contradictory experience of becoming and being a mother In places I laughed out loud in relieved recognition Rebecca Abrams, Independent on Sunday

Vital reading for parents-to-be Sensible, with a lot of helpful details thrown in Time Out

[I] salute Kate Figes's sensitive book which, admirably, helps redress the balance between the plethora of pregnancy manuals and the ridiculous paucity of advice on how to cope after Leonie Miller, Mail on Sunday

Work out your maternal worries with this practical, deep and therapeutic book Baby Magazine

Should be compulsory reading for every first-time mother Rosemary Carpenter, Daily Express

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Figes was born in 1957. Her previous books are Because of Her Sex:. The Myth of Equality in Britain (1994), The Cosmopolitan Book of Short Stories (1995), The Penguin Book of International Women's Stories (1996) and Life After Birth (1998).

What Every Parent Needs to Know

KATE FIGES

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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Published by Viking 2002

Published in Penguin Books 2004

Copyright Kate Figes, 2002

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

The permissions on page constitute an extension of this copyright page

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192848-7

For both my daughters
and both my parents

The young are in character prone to desire and ready to carry any desire they may have formed into action They are changeful, too, and fickle in their desires, which are as transitory as they are vehement; for their wishes are keen without being permanent they are passionate, irascible, and apt to be carried away by their impulses Youth is the age when people are most devoted to their friends or relations or companions, as they are then extremely fond of social intercourse and have not yet learned to judge their friends, or indeed anything else, by the rule of expediency. If the young commit a fault, it is always on the side of excess and exaggeration; for they carry everything too far, whether it be their love or hatred or anything else. They regard themselves as omniscient and positive in their assertions; this is in fact the reason of their carrying everything too far their offences take the line of insolence and not of meanness.

Aristotle, 4th Century

I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.

Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, 1611

He can, for example, wearily congratulate himself on the fact that his children do not as far as he knows steal cars or bomb buildings or inject themselves with drugs; that they have not got themselves arrested by the police yet, or pregnant. Sometimes Brian wishes they had done so; then at least they would be somewhere else in jail or an unwed mother's home and someone else would be responsible for them.

Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates, 1974

The idea for this book came from Fanny Blake. Fanny edited Life After Birth and as she signed off the last chapter said, Now you have to do the same thing for parents with teenagers. She has given me acres of advice on our dog-walking excursions and has edited this book with her usual determination and care.

Thanks are also due to Jeannie Milligan and Sue Stuart Smith at the Tavistock Centre in London and John Coleman as well as all his staff at the trail-blazing Trust for the Study of Adolescence in Brighton. Lindsay Mackie and Colin Edgley helped enormously at the grass roots level. The librarians at the National Children's Bureau and the British Library have been inordinately patient.

I am deeply grateful to Felicity Rubinstein, Sarah Lutyens and Susannah Godman at Lutyens and Rubinstein for everything they do for me, not just as agents but as true friends indeed. Thanks also to Juliet Annan, Kate Barker, Lucy Chavasse and the sales and marketing team at Penguin for working so hard to publish this book well.

I have had some good times and some bad times during the tortuous process of writing this book. But the best times have been the countless hours I have spent in the company of parents and teenagers, discussing the issues that matter to them about living with adolescence. I met many wonderful people and some of their stories are contained in this book. As their names have been changed to preserve their privacy, I cannot thank them individually here, but they know who they are. Thank you all so much for your honesty, generosity and hospitality.

My own family have put up with years of grumpiness, exhaustion and obsession during the writing of this book, for which I can only apologize. Christoph and our daughters, Eleanor and Grace, are owed all the love and gratitude in the world, for without them, there is nothing.

I'm fit to burst, to burst I tell you, when I think I'm only sixteen! All the years ahead years of exams, matric, professional training, years of messing about and groping in the dark. Oh, how I destest this moment in my life, Vinca! Why can't I, all at once, be twenty-five!

Colette, Ripening Seed

It was as I staggered out of a restaurant one spring afternoon, clutching a large bunch of flowers, that another woman leaving the restaurant said something that seemed to speak for an entire generation of troubled parents: Well if you think this bit's hard, just wait until they hit adolescence.

She had been celebrating her birthday; I, the publication of my book Life After Birth, which chronicles the upheavals of new motherhood and seeks to reassure mothers when they feel miserable or inadequate that they are not alone. This was a book founded on my own experience of new motherhood, which mercifully was now history. Adolescence seemed like a long way away, except that it wasn't. My daughters were barely out of nappies before they were wearing nail varnish, worshipping pop stars and singing, If you wanna be my lover or Picture this, we were both butt naked banging on the bathroom floor. I'm regularly told to get a life, and rows in our house have long resembled those that parents are supposed to have with teenagers as my children express their opinions and assert their autonomy while I try my best to socialize them for adult life and stay in charge. Middle childhood, that calm oasis between toddler tantrums and the teenage years, seems to be contracting. Puberty begins earlier, drugs are now found in primary schools and teenage culture is being marketed to younger and younger children.