by Jocelyn Guevara

Created on: June 15, 2008

I, as a teen, can honestly say that life can be tough at this age. You have to look for employment, you have to decide whether or not you are going to college, and where you will attend if you choose to go, and you are responsible for your actions as though you were an adult, even though you must still live under your parents' rules. However, I think that I often have a tendency to overlook all the things my parents do and have done for me. They've paid for private schooling, they pay for my college bills, let me drive their car for free, keep fuel in the car, and let me use their computers and televisions. They keep a roof over my head and food in the house, and they are under no legal obligation to do that anymore. It seems adults do a lot more for us than we like to admit.

The teen years are years of transition. You go from being a child to being an adult in those few years. What many teens don't realize is that it is also hard on the parents to watch their children go through the hardships of growing up. The parents observe their children go through their first heartbreak, and they have to worry about things like their teen's safety. Parents don't want to let go of their children. They don't want them to grow up, because growing up makes the world more dangerous, and most young adults leave home when they are able to support themselves. These factors all strain the relationships between teens and parents.

These factors sound really heavy, so what do they have to do with the simple daily arguments between a teen and a parent? Well, there are a number of ways to answer this question. One very common reason is that the parent feels that the teen is being arrogant for disagreeing with them on whatever it is that initiates the argument. This causes the teen to become defensive. Teens do not like it when adults show them that they think they are uneducated about what they are saying or thinking. To be honest, we know we're not always right, but when we're angry, we don't think as logically as we should, and we tend to speak words of scorn, rather than words of reasoning and wisdom. Another common problem is that the teen does not receive the answer they want to hear, and they think that the parents have ganged up on them. This is very rarely true, but for some reason we think that way. Perhaps it is because of the snobby teens we are used to dealing with at school, or perhaps it is just hormones that make us cranky. The biggest way to irritate a teen when telling

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