dragon-in-a-fez:

testblogdontupvote:

Hot take: the “rebellious teen phase” is not a result of teenagers being unreasonable. It’s a result of it being a cultural norm for parents to control their children to an absolutely unacceptable degree. The “rebellion” is a 100% necessary process of figuring out one’s boundaries and asserting and enforcing them in a hard way. The “phase”, which is just our culture’s word for “enforcing boundaries”, ends when either parents get used to the existence of boundaries and stop trying to probe them all the time, or the teenager moves out, gains legal, financial, and logistical independence from parents, makes the relationship with parents less close, and thus removes them from the position of being able to probe their boundaries as much; this results in removing the need enforce the boundaries as much, and thus the “rebellion” (a.k.a. “enforcement”) mostly ends.

The lack of this phase in someone’s life probably means one or more of:

1. The parents hugely defying the social expectation to be control freaks and respecting boundaries and consent instead;

2. The teenager gaining enough logistical independence roughly at the same time as gaining understanding that they can have and enforce boundaries, and thus not actually ending up doing much of the enforcement that would have been associated with having boundaries while still being in a close relationship with parents;

3. The parents miraculously starting to respect boundaries once they’re stated;

4. The parents still very much controlling their adult child’s life, in which care the rebellion – hopefully! – is just gonna happen later.

I just want to say as someone with a PhD in the anthropology of childhood this is 100% correct and something that’s been recognized by theorists for decades. teenage “rebellion” is not a cultural universal. it wasn’t a general expectation in most of the world if you go back a couple hundred years. the fact that it’s a Thing now is precisely because young people are being forcibly kept in a state of dependence and subordination longer and longer into their lives, which includes not being able to assert control over even the most basic aspects of their existence.

now, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that young children also have the right to establish and assert boundaries and have those boundaries respected, a right which they rarely experience in practice, and that problem has a much longer history. but responding to their eventual development of the ability and desire to push back and declare boundaries more forcefully by continuing to treat them like those boundaries are meaningless – that’s relatively new, and fucked up in a whole different direction.