parent-teen relationships Quotes

Wise parents know that fighting a teenager, like fighting a riptide, is inviting doom.

When I was a teenager, for the most part, I had a really great, easy relationship with my mom, but there are those occasional mom/daughter things that are unavoidable. That's what makes it more upsetting and more true to life. We have great moments, and then we have terrible moments as well.

Adolescence can be a time of turmoil and turbulence, of stress and storm. Rebellion against authority and against convention is to be expected and tolerated for the sake of learning and growth.

Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out.

Don't throw away your friendship with your teenager over behavior that has no great moral significance. There will be plenty of real issues that require you to stand like a rock. Save your big guns for those crucial confrontations.

Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls

It's as if once you hit high school, you're programmed, like a robot, to be an asshole to your parents.

I love the complication of the kids in the characters' lives. I love that these two people are very capable in all these ways. They're so trained. They're kind of deadly. They're smart and vicious at times, but I love that they're undone by a teenager, like we all are. We're all incensed and undone by the ungratefulness of a child, and I love that it matters so greatly to them, in a way that it matters to every parent. Teenagers are going to do that no matter where you live or who you are.

It is upsetting to many parents that their teen-agers introduce them to their friends as encyclopedia salesmen who are just passing through ... if they introduce them at all. I have some acquaintances who hover in dark parking lots, enter church separately and crouch in furnace rooms so their teen-agers will not be accused of having parents.