I love this article on raising teenagers by Rachel Cusk. I didn’t at first. During the beginning paragraphs, I thought that it was going to be another generational screed about how teenagers are monsters.
I still remember when I was a teenager, I went to a conservative Southern Baptist church and heard James Dobson quoted often. He said that teenagers should be locked in a barrel and fed through a knothole. Then when they turned 16, parents should fill in the knothole. The parents in our church quoted this advice often, with winks and knowing nods, like we weren’t standing right there.
(I just looked this up. Dobson was quoting Mark Twain. And I feel a bit better that the advice came from a humorist, but I didn’t know that when I was young. I just got nervous anytime I was in the same room with a barrel and my parents.)
