Teen-agers: "Mom, You Don't Know Nothing"

"Mom, you don't know nothing!!" your teen exclaims with the desparation of a psychologist who tries to make a patient listen to him. It seems that 30 or 40 years would have given you some insight in how this world works, but not according to your teen. After 14 or 15 years of living a rather protected life under your roof they have gained all the knowledge in the Universe, accumulated by some clever souls over the centuries., now as by some miracle ending up in their minds. And you don't know anything of it! You were born when you were 40 you see, and looked exactly the way you do now. You never were a teen-ager, and so you don't know what is is like.

You try hard to look "cool". It is no longer enough to pierce your ears several times but now your belly-button needs a fake-diamond. You try to listen to music-channels, so you can talk knowledgeable about their music, only to find out that this rapper is completely out of style. Yes, he was okay last week, but not now anymore. Perhaps a small tattoo will be cool though, but then they are hard to get rid of.

But haven't we gone through the same thing before? Is this a deja-vu of some sort? Parents in the sixties and seventies looked like replica's of their parents, unconventional to say the least. But we were "cool", or so we thought. We certainly didn't want to look like our parents, nor act like them. No, we did the exact opposite: we let our hair grow, wore tight jeans, and listened to Jimmy Hendrix. Because our parents "didn't know nothing" either. And we yelled at them and in an argument we didn't give an inch, because we were convinced we were right!

Mothers wore aprons with pockets in those days and had curlers in their hair, Fathers wore hats. Mothers didn't have jobs; their job was to look after the family and bake apple-pies. Dads went to work. Did they even try to be "cool"? Ah no, they were a bit more clever than that and listened to Beethoven. While I listened to Jimmy in my bedroom on full blast and was cool as a cucumber. They didn't understand me anyway. My friends did, of course. Sheep-like we rounded up as by an unseen hand and discussed our unfair society. Because you don't want to be alone when you are a teen, you need a herd of like-minded souls around you.
These days you use the cell-phone for this constant contact, when you are a teen.

Just in case you are wondering what all these text-messages are about: nothing. No important information that will interest the C.I.A anyway. It is not even about you as a parent, because you are way too unimportant on their list to discuss with their fellow-sheep. It's not even about their friends; no it's all about themselves. Because when you're a teen, the whole world purely revolves around YOU. This might sound selfish, but they need this, believe me. It is a process of weaning off your parents, to get ready to step into this world, as an independent adult. You see, you have done the same, years ago in another century.