Why our teens are stuck in between

WHAT is it with teenagers? Why can't they just behave like responsible adults, the way the rest of us have to?

Well, duuh, here's a thought. Perhaps it's because they aren't responsible adults. They may not be children any more, but don't let their physical size or sophisticated attitude fool you into thinking they are grown up either.

Teenagers inhabit a bewildering, frightening world half-way between the two. And expecting them to be useful, conforming members of society is about as sensible as expecting a professional footballer to keep his trousers zipped up off the field.

There is nothing new about this. What was most noticeable about the recent troubles on the Chapelfields estate, when up to 80 youths "ran amok during a night of mayhem", is how familiar it all was.

Life is boring, youths who spoke to the Evening Press afterwards said. "People race round in cars, people down drinks to give them a buzz because there's nothing to do."

There's nothing to do. It's the age-old teenage complaint: and it will no doubt help to explain why police are warning that over the next couple of weeks we should all brace ourselves for a wave of nuisance behaviour in the run-up to Hallowe'en and Mischief Night. Bored youngsters are only to willing to seize on the excuse for a little mayhem these festivals offer.

But why do teenagers feel this way? Why can't they be satisfied with the TV, their homework, the Internet and the odd computer game the way their parents would like them to be?

Why do they have to be sullen and snappish, answering back at the drop of a hat, locking themselves in the bathroom and spending hours texting their mates? And why, above all, do they feel the urge to hang out on street corners with gangs of other bored teenagers?

The answer, according to psychologist Ruth Coppard, is because they are undergoing the most painful and frightening journey known to man. The journey from childhood to adulthood. They are desperate to stretch their wings and fly; but they don't know how and they don't quite dare.

"When you're a child you're totally dependant," Ruth, a psychologist who works for the NHS in Yorkshire, says. "When you're an adult you're independent. You have to learn how to go from one to the other. It's a suck-it-and-see process. At one end there is you and your mum and dad. At the other end, there is you on your own. It is quite terrifying."

Along the way, there are an awful lot of changes that teenagers have to cope with, Ruth says. They have to get used to the changes in their body, for a start.

"When you're a child you're just that, a child," Ruth says.

"Then you become a boy or a girl and have to get used to different sorts of relationships with the other sex. You have to get used to your body, which is often a disaster. And you've got to learn a different relationship with your parents and with other adults.

"Small children are designed to be very appealing. Not many people look at a 12 or 13-year-old and go 'ah, bless!'"

Teenagers also have to begin to thrash out their own sense of what's right and wrong, Ruth says - it is no good anyone trying to impose one on them - and they have to begin to confront their own future.

"You realise that the future is down to you," she says. "That's also quite terrifying."

Then there are the physiological changes, in their brains as well as their bodies. The brain chemistry of a teenager is actually different to that of an adult, Ruth says - a difference which affects their ability to reason.

"With a teenager it might be 'why are you looking at me like that?' and then bang!" Ruth says. "By the time you're in your 20s, you might be able to realise that actually perhaps that person isn't looking at you at all."

With so much to cope with, perhaps it's not surprising that teenagers can, to adults, seem sullen and rebellious. It is, says Dr Jane Clarbour of the Department of Psychology at York University, completely normal. "It would be more worrying to me if children did not go through a rebellious stage than if they did," she says.

"It is part of the process of them becoming an adult themselves. I don't think the distancing is an intentional thing. It is something that happens."

Clashes at home are an almost inevitable part of that process.

"Children need to develop into adulthood, and that involves them learning how to assert themselves in a way that is challenging to adults," says Dr Margaret Bell, a senior lecturer in social policy at York University. If that is not to lead to sparks flying, adults themselves have to be very confident about their changing relationship with growing teenagers, she says.

Small wonder, then, that many teenagers do seek to escape from the family home into the company of other young people of their own age. And the problem is that, when they do - and despite the best efforts of well-intentioned youth workers - there often really isn't that much for them to do.

We are, as a society, reasonably well geared up to meet the recreational needs of adults and of children. But we don't as a whole quite know what to do with those inconvenient, rebellious in-betweeners known as teenagers.

They are not children any more, and will no longer be satisfied with childish occupations. But they don't have the financial independence to allow them to pursue more adult activities - and they're not, by law, allowed to go into pubs.

"If we don't want young people to hang out on street corners where do we want them to go?" asks Dr Clarbour. "If you think about all the facilities that are provided for other members of society, what do we provide for adolescents? Not very much.

"We don't have special parks for older adolescents. They don't want to sit on swings, but they haven't got anywhere else to go. If they want to go to the bowling alley, they can't afford it. If they want to go to the cinema, they can't afford it. So they sit on swings because it doesn't cost them anything to go there."

Youth clubs aren't necessarily the answer, because almost by definition teenagers don't want to be bound by the kind of rules and constraints that well-intentioned adults will try to impose on them.

So it is not really surprising that they often begin to experiment with forms of behaviour that adults might disapprove of, says Ruth Coppard. For many young people, especially those in outlying villages, it is cheaper and easier to hang out in a gang and experiment with sex and drink cheap booze than it is to get a bus into town.

"So society has to do a lot more about giving them options," she says. Even if it is as simple as a cheap, regular bus service.

To suggest that teenage rebellion is a modern phenomenon is just plain wrong, Ruth says. Teenagers have always been rebellious, frustrated and bored. Nevertheless, she believes the way that today's generation of teenagers behave is subtly different to that of teenagers of her generation. "When I was 13, I'm not sure I would have sworn at grown-ups," she says.

The reason is not that teenagers are changing, but that society is, she believes. Expectations about what is appropriate behaviour have changed - partly as a result of increasing levels of sex and violence on TV and in the media, and partly because of a generally increasing tolerance of certain kinds of behaviour.

So it is hardly surprising that teenagers, who normalise the behaviour they see around them, should have changed too.

Ruth recently attended a workshop in which an educated, sensible woman (she was a nurse) was asked what she would do if her five-year-old swore at a neighbour. "And she said 'it depends what the neighbour said to him'," Ruth says. "I was horrified."

She also watched a weekend children's TV show recently in which a ten-year-old girl won a dedicated performance by the pop singer Robbie Williams. "And the 20-year-old presenter said to her 'You've got Robbie Williams! I bet you fancy the pants off him!'" Ruth says. "The girl was ten years old and I thought it was just totally inappropriate."

It is all a far cry from the innocent days when, as a teenager, she was mortified because she didn't know how to scream properly at a Beatles concert.

So how should we deal with our new generation of teenagers - young people exposed to sex, booze and drugs before they're really emotionally ready for them?

Her preferred solution, jokes Ruth, would be to pack them all off to oil rigs in the North Sea until they reach and age where they're ready to join mainstream society. Failing that, she advises a bit more awareness and tolerance.

And no blame. Because if anyone is to blame for the problem behaviour of our teenagers, it is ourselves. It is, after all, the society we have created that they are reacting to.

Updated: 10:28 Wednesday, October 20, 2004