Adolescent Independence Quotes

So, am I friendly with my daughter and her friends? Yes. Am I their friend? No. Does she shut the door? Yes, and I very much support the shut door.

A mother can legitimately be said to 'have a baby' - but in a civilization such as ours, she can never claim to own a teenager.

An adolescent is both an impulsive child and a self-starting adult.

Adolescence is a time when children are supposed to move away from parents who are holding firm and protective behind them. When the parents disconnect, the children have no base to move away from or return to. They aren't ready to face the world alone. With divorce, adolescents feel abandoned, and they are outraged at that abandonment. They are angry at both parents for letting them down. Often they feel that their parents broke the rules and so now they can too.

When you are 16 you are supposed to be doing cool things, like sneaking alcohol, not living in Disney World and doing skits about mice.

Teenagers blithely skip off to uncertain futures, while their parents sit weeping curbside in the Volvo, because the adolescent brain isn't yet formed enough to recognize and evaluate risk.

I hitchhiked at high school. My parents thought was a perfectly normal thing to do even though God knows I got blown a lot of times riding home from school.

Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.

The only thing I said to my parents when I was a teenager was Hang up, I got it!

This is just one of those annoying and unjust differences between you and your younger sibling...I was probably fifteen before I could go to a friend's house without giving mom an FBI dossier on the people; Bex can practically hitchhike on the freeway with a mere "Have fun, honey.

The independence and rebelliousness of our adolescence offer us yet another quality essential to our practice; the insistence that we find out the truth for ourselves, accepting no one's word above our own experience.

I think when you're 16, if you have good parents, they generally just fade in the background. I had great parents, and because they were great, I thought very little about them in high school.

Negotiating the adolescent stage is neither quick nor easy. . . . I have often said to parents, "If it isn't illegal, immoral, orfattening, give it your blessing." We do much better . . . if we find and support all the places we can appropriately say yes, and say only the no's that really matter.

Once your kid reaches middle school, parents are really supposed to fade out of the social picture. Kids are supposed to make their own plans, keep up with sophisticatedly crude discussions, and be able to go out on their own without supervision.

Ronan merely invested a look with as much contempt as he could muster. A lady reached over the top of Noah to pat Matthew's head fondly before continuing down the aisle. She didn't seem to care that he was fifteen, which was all right, because he didn't, either. Both Ronan and Declan observed this interaction with the pleased expressions of parents watching their prodigy at work.

If you raise children, you forget what age they are. I mean you don't literally forget, but you treat a 13-year-old like she's 10 and there's a big difference in those three years and they can't stand it. They want to be treated like they're 17 when they're 13. And sometimes you can't help thinking of them as if they were 10 or 10 months old because it's all so recent. So we do overprotect sometimes.

You get into your teens, now they can't hold you back. You jump to the next number, or even a few ahead.

You’ve never been a teenager, sweetie. You know what’s best for you.

Our youth want less adult contact if that co ntacttreats them like boys. They want more adult contact that treats them like young men. Tired as they are of the former, they are hungry for the latter

When children reach the age of sixteen, they discover the meaning of life: car keys.

There are great parents of small children - they keep their little hair in bows - but those parents are not always good parents of young adults. As soon as their children get up to some size, it's "Shut up, sit down, you talk too much, keep your distance, I'll send you to Europe!" My mom was a terrible parent of small children but a great parent of young adults. She'd talk to me as if I had some sense.

I bet you never thought the hardest part of finding your ‘saviorʹ would be getting her mom to let her stay out past curfew.

My children are now adults and just kind of guide them while they allow you to have input in their lives without controlling them the way you did when they were toddlers. These are good steps to use for fathers at each step of their children's lives.

I got my first car when I was 16 but I didn't have a license; it was a Ford Escape and I just let it sit there for two years because I enjoyed having my mom drive me.

Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.