It's funny how the more removed you are from your youth, the less you seem to understand the inner workings of the mind of the teenager. I'm not even gonna pretend to know the motivation of the pre-teen (I guess they're actually called 'tweens' now). My first niece is now 11 and getting into all of the supposed drama that comes with being that age. It is a lot different to be that age now than it was when I was her age. When I was 11, I was raising hell (well one time I did anyway) in Catholic school, not too into girls and had been through sex-ed once. She's already into boys (much to my and her father's disdain), she loves music and hockey and she thinks she's mature enough to make all of her own decisions. No sign of any hellraising yet so we live in fear on that front (karma and such). I've decided this is the point at which humans would eat their young if we were more like animals. This is the age where they start to turn on you and are embarrassed by every little thing you do (she's even embarrassed by me sometimes and I'm her favorite). These are the last few years where she'll be sometimes sweet and nice before becoming an official teenager and getting all moody for the next seven years.
Teenagers...that word says it all but, to elaborate, a close friend of mine has a nephew who is 18 and graduated high school this year. He was a pretty good student and a wonderful football player who declared to his parents in 2009 that he wanted to wait a year before going to college. His dad said he'd think about it while his mom said, 'Hell no!' and he dropped the whole subject and no one gave it anymore thought. He announced two days after his prom that he was engaged to his girlfriend, who already has a two year old daughter (not his), and that they were going to be a family. His mom also vetoed the engagement but allowed them to continue to date. Now he's officially put off college for a year and is convinced that they're gonna get married next year and then he'll start school. Obviously the reason his mom is so against this is because marriage is hard, parenthood is harder and balancing all that while also trying to get a college education is extremely difficult. ('Boy Meets World' did an entire story arc about marriage while in college, it was not pretty). He, of course, thinks that he can handle it and that he knows all there is to know already (don't we all at that age) and is standing his ground about marrying this girl.
I wonder if it's like something in the brain or in how humans have evolved that makes us feel like we know all there is to know at certain ages. My 2-year-old thinks she knows better than me some days and is not afraid to show it and that makes sense since she's getting older and she has friends that she can now communicate with, (I tell ya, it's gonna break my heart when she inevitably turns on me someday). Maybe it's more about freedom since this type of rebellion seems to come at times when you're just itching to have more of that; middle school and high school. Even when you begin college you think you're an adult and you know best and, more often than not, you screw up in some way and realize that you're not as smart as you thought you were. And that builds character. Then you graduate college and think you know all you need to know to get out there in the big, bad world and make it on your own but you get your ass handed to you again as you go through your 20's. I think when you become a parent is when you finally resign yourself to the truth, which is that you don't know even almost all and that's okay because you don't need to. You just need to be good enough. But then, what fun is it if you don't get your ass kicked by reality in high school and college? It's a rite of passage.
