Ever since old Marsullis farted in Holden Caulfield's face, we have viewed adolescence as a time of inevitable storm and upheaval. But it looks like we've got it exactly backwards.
After following more than 200 families and their children into and out of adolescence, a Wisconsin psychologist claims there's turbulence all right, but it's more in the parents than in their kids. Teenagers, argues Lawrence Steinberg, Ph.D., "coast through life in a sort of pleasant fog."
But the biological changes they undergo at puberty trigger a crisis in their parents. First, a child's changing appearance is "a constant, and perhaps annoying, reminder that we are growing older--and it marks time in a way that is both indisputable and irreversible," Steinberg says in Crossing Paths (Simon & Schuster).
Then there's the anxiety provoked by a child's changing size. "We have underestimated the positive feelings parents derive merely from being able to physically control their children when they are younger," Steinberg offers.
