Three Things About Adolescents/Adolescence To (Maybe) Make Your Life Easier
February 18, 2026 – I have dedicated my academic and professional life to understanding and advocating for adolescence. To be honest, I have dedicated a great deal of my personal life as well to these strange creatures that walk among us. Why?
Part of it was that I both hated and loved my own adolescent years. I was so aware during that time that something important was happening. I never would have put that into words, but I wrote many words about the experience, trying to capture this thing that I was going through. Later, when I became a teacher, I chose to work with middle school and high school students. I realized that I was trying to counsel teenagers rather than teach them. So I became a therapist.
I was able to connect with teenagers who came in sullen, silent, refusing to sit, declaring with bravado that they weren’t going to stop drinking or smoking weed. I have ushered and scaffolded kids through their adolescent years and out the other side. And I accompanied most of their families along the way. It is challenging work and the best work I know.
Here are some things I learned along the way that might make things a bit easier for those who work with and live with teens.
Adolescents are, indeed, members of our society.
This simple obvious fact can make our lives easier because the burden of supporting teenagers doesn’t have to fall on the shoulders of just parents, teachers, or the kids’ peers. Nor should it. Scaffolding adolescents into adulthood must be a joint venture between all members of their communities.
David Marcus in his book What It Takes To Pull Me Through: Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out writes: “[P]arents and teachers can only do so much. If we truly want to help adolescents, we need to change our priorities as a country [here in the USA]. We can start by pushing insurance companies and social service agencies to make mental health services available to all teenagers and parents. We also need to rethink the way we plan communities, the way we build public spaces — even the way we design houses.” In other words, we need to build validating ecologies.
Rest easy, mom and dad. Don’t fret too much if you’re the teacher or school guidance counselor of teens. This isn’t all on you. It’s on all of us. Don’t be afraid or too ashamed to ask for help.
2. Adolescence is supposed to be challenging.
As I’ve written more than once, Adolescence is a time when transformative processes are at work. There will be struggle, challenges, chaos, and falling apart. We often associate the word transformation with beatific, transcendent moments. Generally, however, transformation is messy, takes us down into the depths, and we come out the other side vulnerable and ready to fly. Just like the butterfly coming out of the cocoon.
One of the most helpful things we can do is normalize adolescence. There will be: melancholy; internal and social drama; the doldrums; roller coaster mood swings; experimentation; boundary pushing; pulling away from family and simultaneous anger that you’re not there when they need you; indulgence in counterwill and defiance; flirting with ideas of death and dying; asking unanswerable questions, spouting philosophical thoughts, and obsessing about hair products. The list goes on. They are intensely private and social at the same time, walking contradictions, and sly shapeshifters.
Sometimes the problem isn’t a diagnosis or a mental illness. Sometimes the problem is that we fear for them. And we’re afraid of them. Or we’re afraid of their strangeness and intensity. Remember, this is the way we’re designed as humans. We don’t stay children forever because we do this thing called adolescing, this thing we call becoming. And it’s a beautiful thing.
3. There is an inherent future within our most difficult teens. There is always hope.
This is easy to forget when the going gets really tough and scary. Certainly the teenager in the depths of despair cannot see nor believe in a future. Nor do they really care at times when the most important and immediate thing is what their friends are saying about them, the argument they had with a parent, or how to hide the life they’re exploring on the edge of things. The future is a perspective we as adults must hold.
Yet it is easy for us to lose sight of this future as well. Fear will close off possibility, potential, and imagination. The child that talks back will be for the rest of his life oppositionally defiant, unable to get along with people, and will never find a partner who can deal with him. The one who lies is destined to be a sociopath and end up committing white collar crime. Yes, this is where our minds go when we see our teenagers infracting and delinquenting.
There is a wonderful concept called teleology, stemming from the Greek word teleos, which means “goal” or “end.” To have a teleological perspective of adolescence gives meaning, hope, and reason for the challenges we and our teenagers face. Richard Frankl who wrote the seminal book The Adolescent Psyche, invites us to consider “the most difficult aspects of adolescent development in the context of an imminent source of energy and future way of being that is trying to manifest itself in the adolescent personality. Rather than pathologizing the disruptions that this energy brings, would it not be wiser and therapeutically more meaningful to develop ways of being receptive to it?”
I’ve seen again and again young people and the adults in their lives who are challenged by their adolescing come into their young adulthood mostly intact, a future full of possibility and potential before them. I have seen how this future was seeded in the tilled ground of their adolescence.
Conclusion:
If there is a single thread running through all of this, it is an invitation to widen our lens and soften our grip. Adolescents are not problems to be fixed or projects to be completed; they are people in motion, in process, in the midst of becoming. When we remember that they belong to our communities, that their struggle is not only normal but necessary, and that a future is already stirring within even the most bewildering or frightening behaviors, our fear loosens. And when fear loosens, so does our capacity to stay present, curious, and compassionate.
Working with and/or loving teenagers will likely never be easy. But it can be meaningful. It can even be enlivening. Adolescence asks a lot of us as adults—it asks for patience, imagination, humility, and faith in processes we cannot fully control. Still, if we can hold the long view and walk alongside rather than ahead or behind, we may find that this strange, intense, beautiful stage of life gives as much as it takes. And maybe—just maybe—it will make all of our lives a little easier.
Starting Saturday, March 21, 2026, I am facilitating Validated Families: A 6-Month Group for Strengthening Teen–Parent Dynamics, designed to support families impacted by adolescence. We won’t be pointing the finger at the kids or the parents but approaching the family as a system. We’ll find our way with resources, education, therapeutic support, and communication skills to a family that feels more balanced, more harmonious, and safer for everyone. Find more information and the registration link here.
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