Adolescents Quotes & Sayings

I'm amazed and disheartened at how quickly adolescents lose their innocence nowadays. Everyone is in such a rush to give themselves over to someone physically without truly knowing the person to whom they are entrusting with their body and emotions — Karen Amanda Hooper

Peer pressure is not a monolithic force that presses adolescents into the same mold ... Adolescents generally choose friend whose values, attitudes, tastes, and families are similar to their own. In short, good kids rarely go bad because of their friends. — Laurence Steinberg

Reverence is an emotion that we can nurture in our very young children, respect is an attitude that we instill in our children as they become school-agers, and responsibility is an act that we inspire in our children as they grow through the middle years and become adolescents. — Zoe Weil

A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity - or none at all - with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred. — Gore Vidal

To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop. — Muriel Barbery

It isn't about the welfare check. It never was.
It isn't about sexual permissiveness, or personal morality, or failures in parenting, or lack of family planning. All of these are inherent in the disaster, but the purposefulness with which babies make babies in places like West Baltimore goes far beyond accident and chance, circumstance and misunderstanding. It's about more than the sexual drives of adolescents, too, though that might be hard to believe in a country where sex alone is enough of an argument to make anyone do just about anything.
In Baltimore, a city with the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, the epidemic is, at root, about human expectation, or more precisely, the absence of expectation. — David Simon

Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves. — Virginia Satir

I wasn't a stranger to dealing with thirty-plus-year-old adolescents — Terri Anne Browning

Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds
a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents — Albert Camus

Young people, however, tend to ignore the customs of their elders. Adolescent rebellion has been responsible for all manner of absurd costumes. The more ridiculous a certain fashion is, the more adolescents will cling to it. — David Eddings

... we live in a society of larvae--immature human beings, adolescents disguised as adults. — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

For millions of girls around the world, motherhood comes too early. Those who bear children as adolescents suffer higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates, and their children are more likely to die in infancy. — Esther Duflo

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: 'How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?' The exploration is: 'Who am I, what am I doing?' — Alison Gopnik

When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents. — Susan Neiman

The teachers of small children are paid more than they were, but still far less than the importance of their work deserves, and they are still regarded by the unenlightened majority as insignificant compared to those who impart information to older children and adolescents, a class of pupils which, in the nature of things, is vastly more able to protect its own individuality from the character of the teacher. — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Why will you young men continue to write about things that are so entirely uninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists? — Aldous Huxley

Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why music is so important to adolescents, who are struggling with questions of identity and self-expression. — Sarah Churchwell

The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grownups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall - they fell unnoticed - seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year. — James Baldwin

Like children, adolescents need a framework. Otherwise they can't cope. When someone has unlimited freedom, it means there's nobody who cares what they're doing. — Joan Lingard

I believed, in the way of adolescents, in the absolute correctness and superiority of my love. — Emma Cline

The lacks we experienced as adolescents become the driving forces within us as adults. We are pulled to create what we didn't have or didn't get to experience. And so we become the adults we needed as children. — Emily Maroutian

I have a homosexual crush on most adolescents. — Tre Cool

Adolescents, for all their self-involvement, are emerging from the self-centeredness of childhood. Their perception of other people has more depth. They are better equipped at appreciating others' reasons for action, or the basis of others' emotions. But this maturity functions in a piecemeal fashion. They show more understanding of their friends, but not of their teachers. — Terri E Apter

What is a flower? A giant sexual organ in its Sunday best. The truth has been known for a long time, yet, over-aged adolescents that we are, we persist in speaking sentimental drives about the delicacy of flowers. We construct idiotic phrases like "So-and-so is in the flower of his youth", which is as absurd as saying "in the vagina of his youth". — Amelie Nothomb

Most adults would not dream of belittling, humiliating, or bullying (verbally or physically) another adult. But many of the same adults think nothing of treating their adolescent child like a nonperson ... Adolescents deserve the same civility their parents routinely extend to total strangers. — Laurence Steinberg

Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan. — Heather O'Neill

Science for the Citizen is ... also written for the large and growing number of adolescents, who realize that they will be the first victims of the new destructive powers of science misapplied. — Lancelot Hogben

We inculcate in our children the sensibilities of raccoons, a fascination with shiny objects and an appetite for garbage, and then carp about 'the texting generation' as if thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who couldn't boil an egg are capable of creating a culture. They grow on what we feed them. It has never been otherwise. The only thing that changes is the food. — Garret Keizer

Adolescents were the most wretched humans of all. — James Patterson

When we were children, there was a silent part of us watching the child. When we were adolescents, there was that same witness watching the adolescent. Middle age, and so on. Every one, now and again, has discovered the self, the one who is watching. — Deepak Chopra

Adolescents have a very rocky insecure time. Grown-ups treat them like children and yet expect them to act like adults. They give them orders like little animals, then expect them to react like mature, and always rational, self-assured persons of legal stature. — Beatrice Sparks

In the bad sixties, when drugs came into widespread use among adolescents and when Scarsdale mothers developed the habit of not asking about each others children for fear of what they'd hear, one knew that they were speaking-or not speaking, keeping their unhappy silence-on behalf of stricken motherhood everywhere in the country. — Diana Trilling

I think that his [Kurt Vonnegut's] appeal, though, will always be chiefly to adolescents. His sense of the world matches that of young people, who feel deeply life's absurdity. — Michael Dirda

Adolescence is a time when children are supposed to move away from parents who are holding firm and protective behind them. When the parents disconnect, the children have no base to move away from or return to. They aren't ready to face the world alone. With divorce, adolescents feel abandoned, and they are outraged at that abandonment. They are angry at both parents for letting them down. Often they feel that their parents broke the rules and so now they can too. — Mary Pipher

Adolescents are like cockroaches: They come out the minute you leave town, crawl the walls, feed indiscriminately, reproduce alarmingly unless drugged, and will certainly outlast you. — Gail Sheehy

While the Internet generally tends to have a stress-relieving function for adults - as long as they aren't inclined toward sex addiction - I don't see this being the case for adolescents. — Volkmar Sigusch

It was a standard fantasy when you fell in love to imagine you could go back in time and find your beloved growing up, appear there, save him or her, get together as adolescents, by magic, and go on together, fighting for one another, into old age, never wavering. — Norman Rush

My dad and mom were more like World War II-era parents, even though it was the 1960s, because they were both born in the '40s. They were young adults before the '60s even happened, and married, and already having kids. But by the time we were adolescents in the '70s, the whole culture was screaming at parents, "You're a good parent if you're open with your kids about sex." They attempted to be open with us about sex, and it made them want to die, and consequently, it made us want to die. — Dan Savage

Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction. — Heather O'Neill

It is an odd fact that what we now know of the mental and emotional life of infants surpasses what we comprehend about adolescents ... That they do not confide in us is hardly surprising. They use wise discretion in disguising themselves with the caricatures we design for them. And unfortunately for us, as for them, too often adolescents retain the caricatured personalities they had merely meant to try on for size. — Louise J. Kaplan

Adolescents swing from euphoric self-confidence and a kind of narcissistic strength in which they feel invulnerable and even immortal, to despair, self-emptiness, self-deprecation. At the same time they seem to see an emerging self that is unique and wonderful, they suffer an intense envy which tears narcissism into shreds, and makes other people's qualities hit them like an attack of lasers. — Terri E Apter

We can begin to address the issue of guns by teaching our young people how to deal with situations in nonviolent ways. Someone said to me the other day, "What our adolescents need is not so much health care, but healthy caring," and I agree. Parents and churches need to provide that. Curricula in our schools [need to] provide that. — Joycelyn Elders

[It is important] not to mistake risk indicators for risk mechanisms. On the whole, at any one point in time, poverty and social disadvantage are accompanied by an increased risk of psychopathology. The secular trend data, however, are persuasive in showing that it is most unlikely that the risk mechanism lies in either poverty or poor living conditions per se. Rather, the evidence suggests that the effect comes about because poverty is, in turn associated with family disorganization and breakup, which are rather nearer to the relevant risk mechanisms (p. 363). Stress research: Accomplishments and tasks ahead. Pp. 354-385 in Stress, Risk and Resilience in Children and Adolescents: Processes, Mechanisms, and Interventions. (R.J. Haggerty, L.R. Sherrod, N. Garmezy, & M, Rutter, eds) — Michael Rutter

Integrity is not something that grownups have and adolescents can aspire to. Integrity is something that all of us, at all ages, are constantly striving for. — Harold S. Kushner

But I guess that's just a reflection of how the educational system today, being so overcrowded and impersonal, makes it so hard for adolescents to break through the preconceived notions of one another, and get to know the real person underneath the label they're given, be it Princess, Brainiac, Drama Geek, Jock, Cheerleader, or Guy Who Hates It When They Put Corn in the Chili. — Meg Cabot

Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves. — Sherry Turkle

Adults," Phillips writes, "are not less excessive in their behavior than adolescents. Concentration camps were not run by adolescents; adolescents are not mostly alcoholics or millionaires. — Jennifer Senior

Too often what are called "educated" people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years. — Thomas Sowell

Though they themselves might be as surprised as their parents and teachers to hear it said, adolescents
these poignantly thin- skinned and vulnerable, passionate and impulsive, starkly sexual and monstrously self-absorbed creatures
are, in fact, avid seekers of moral authenticity. They wish above all to achieve some realistic power over the real world in which they live while at the same time remaining true to their values and ideals. — Louise J. Kaplan

Reward systems, such as those mediated by dopamine, also destabilize during adolescence in order to allow for the creation of new attachments, behaviors, and goals. This search for purpose and meaning makes adolescents more vulnerable to good and bad social influences, — Louis Cozolino

As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity
say, while waiting to be called to eat
becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.
The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet. — Jane Jacobs

Today's population of adolescents and young adults is the largest in our nation's history. — Ruben Hinojosa

Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them. — Maria Montessori

We're all adolescents now," writes Thomas Bergler. "When are we going to grow up?"17 Bergler explains that churches and parachurch organizations first began to provide youth-oriented programs - mainly to help at-risk kids in the cities (e.g., the YMCA). Then the "teenager" was invented as a unique demographic in society. As a result, the youth group was created, offering adolescent-friendly versions of church. "In the second stage, a new adulthood emerged that looked a lot like the old adolescence. Fewer and fewer people outgrew the adolescent Christian spiritualities they had learned in youth groups; instead, churches began to cater to them." Eventually, churches became them. — Michael S. Horton

Our young people think about nothing more than love affairs and pleasure. They spend more time attempting to seduce and dishonor young women than in thinking about their country's welfare. Our women, in order to take care of the house and family of God, forget their own. Our men limit their activities to vice and their heroics to shameful acts. Children wake up in a fog of routine, adolescents live out their best years without ideals, and their elders are sterile, and only serve to corrupt our young people by their example. — Jose Rizal

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing- persons reports, then moved on themselves. — Joan Didion

That is where we stand as a nation today. Twenty years ago, our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a "serious mental illness." That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug-based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and already it has put millions onto a path of lifelong illness. (246) — Robert Whitaker

While group collaboration can certainly be a source of collective intelligence, it can also get you to jump off a cliff or drive too fast. And that's probably why some form of continued connection to the adults and their adult perspectives still exists in traditional cultures, and even in our animal cousins. Without adults around, young adolescents can literally go wild. — Daniel J. Siegel

Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next. — Mary Doria Russell

A lot of people believe that mental illness does not affect our children within the school system. But the truth is that a lot of bullying stems from untreated or poorly treated mental and behavioral health problems. — Tamara Hill

Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid. — Jason Katims

Instruction in sex is as important as instruction in food; yet not only are our adolescents not taught the physiology of sex, but never warned that the strongest sexual attraction may exist between persons so incompatible in tastes and capacities that they could not endure living together for a week much less a lifetime. — George Bernard Shaw

The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets. We say that at home, we can "be ourselves." Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks.

The home is the wellspring of personhood. It is where our identity takes root and blossoms, where as children, we imagine, play, and question, and as adolescents, we retreat and try. As we grow older, we hope to settle into a place to raise a family or pursue work. When we try to understand ourselves, we often begin by considering the kind of home in which we were raised. — Matthew Desmond

People think that it's the beast that makes us lose our sanity. They think the beast takes over and we become loup. Animals don't destroy each other for pure pleasure. They don't have serial killers. They kill, they don't murder. No, it's not the beast in us that makes us lose our balance. It's the man. Of all the animals, we're the most aggressive and the most predatory. We have to be, otherwise we would've never survived. You can see it in children, especially adolescents. Life is hard for them, so they attack it and fight for their own place in it. Homo homini lupus. — Ilona Andrews

Adolescents sometimes say ... "My friends listen to me, but my parents only hear me talk." Often they are right. Familiarity breeds inattention. — Laurence Steinberg

I've had a great deal of experience with adolescents over the centuries, and I've discovered that as a group these awkward half children take themselves far too seriously. Moreover, appearance is everything for the adolescent. I suppose it's a form of play-acting. The adolescent knows that the child is lurking under the surface, but he'd sooner die than let it out, and I was no different. I was so intent on being "grown-up" that I simply couldn't relax and enjoy life.
Most people go through this stage and outgrow it. Many, however, do not. The pose becomes more important than reality, and these poor creatures become hollow people, forever striving to fit themselves into an impossible mold. — David Eddings

Pertussis is a disease that adolescents and adults give to children. — Paul A. Offit

Even when they're not stoned, adolescents live in a world of ideation of their own making and follow trains of thought to extreme conclusions, despite overwhelming evidence that they're just plain wrong — Marc Lewis

Adolescents are travelers, far from home with no native land, neither children nor adults. They are jet-setters who fly from one country to another with amazing speed. Sometimes they are four years old, an hour later they are twenty-five. They don't really fit anywhere. There's a yearning for place, a search for solid ground. — Mary Pipher

People are so involved with immediate care, but at the same time there needs to be investment in educating people as adolescents when they're still HIV negative. — Charlize Theron

Wine is a sign of happiness, love and plenty, how many of our adolescents and young people sense that these are no longer found in their homes? How many women, sad and lonely, wonder when love left, when it slipped away from their lives? How many elderly people feel left out of family celebrations, cast aside and longing each day for a little love? — Pope Francis

It is clear from all these data that the interests of teenagers are not focused around studies, and that scholastic achievement is at most of minor importance in giving status or prestige to an adolescent in the eyes of other adolescents. — James S. Coleman

How many of us readers say this quote and mean it. "If I knew what I know now life would be different" ... — Robert Reed

While approximately one in every 400 children and adolescents have Type I diabetes; recent Government reports indicate that one in every three children born in 2000 will suffer from obesity, which as noted is a predominant Type II precursor. — Tim Holden

The ubiquitous and acutely conscious presence of our adolescents is a major problem, especially since much of their consciousnessseems to be focused on sexuality
ours and theirs. They expect us to ignore them if they are kissing their dates in the family room; but let us so much as wink at one another, and they whistle loudly. — Augustus Napier

Middle-aged adolescents are a libel on the real thing. — Mason Cooley

Hate causes distress, potentially leading to mental and physical health problems. Adolescents — Graeme Simsion

In idyllic small towns I sometimes see teenagers looking out of place in their garb of desperation, the leftover tatters and stains and slashes of the fashion of my youth. For this phase of their life, the underworld is their true home, and in the grit and underbelly of a city they could find something that approximates it. Even the internal clock of adolescents changes, making them nocturnal creatures for at least a few years. All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits. "I have been half in love with easeful death," said Keats who died at twenty-six and so were we, though the death we were in love with was only an idea then. — Rebecca Solnit

All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents. — Laura Riding

Only certain portions of the line had to undergo carnage in the French style, but knowledge of it was all-pervasive. Everything the 19th River Guard knew came from quiet meetings in the communications trenches, conversations with sleepless, bitter infantrymen who had been transferred up from the fiercer fighting in the south. If some of the River Guard were on the edge, many of the regular infantry had gone over it long before. Especially disturbing to the naval contingent were reports from down below that Italian troops now were shot quite casually for disciplinary reasons, and that the Italian generals, like their French counterparts, were executing men in decimations for crimes they had not committed. Men with families were pulled from the ranks along with equally mystified adolescents and put to death for acts attributed to others whom they had never seen. — Mark Helprin

His Majesty has done absolutely nothing but waste his time darling around eating sweets, contributing to the boy's adolescent chubiness, and to the sense of the country's political drift. Rather than being encouraged to govern, the Shah's courtiers preferred to encourage him in his idleness. — Charles Emmerson

Adolescents' immature thinking makes it difficult for them to process the divorce. They tend to see things in black-and-white terms and have trouble putting events into perspective. They are absolute in their judgments and expect perfection in parents. They are likely to be self-conscious about their parent's failures and critical of their every move. They have the expectations that parents will keep them safe and happy and are shocked by the broken covenant. Adolescents are unforgiving. — Mary Pipher

Adolescents may be, almost simultaneously, overconfident and riddled with fear. They are afraid of their overpowering feelings, oflosing control, of helplessness, of failure. Sometimes they act bold, to counteract their imperious yearnings to remain children. They are impulsive, impetuous, moody, disagreeable, overdemanding, underappreciative. If you don't understand them, remember, they don't understand themselves most of the time. — Stella Chess

Adolescents sense a secret, unique greatness in thems.elves that seeks expression. They gesture towards the heart when trying to express any of this, a significant clue to the whole affair. — Joseph Chilton Pearce

What would happen if most people tried to act intelligently on their own behalf? Anarchy. ( ... ) So what can we do with this intelligence we don't need and can't use? Stupefy it. Valium for housewives, glue-sniffing for schoolkids, hash for adolescents, rotgut South African wine for the unemployed, beer for the workers, spirits for me and the crowd I left downstairs fifteen minutes ago. — Alasdair Gray

When it comes to raising civilized kids there are no hard rules, but there are two things on which most parents agree: Boys are generally wilder than girls, and adolescents are wilder than kids of any other age. If you've got an adolescent boy, you're in the sweet spot for trouble. — Jeffrey Kluger

Today I know I was right. The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia. My Sunday columns were there, life an archeological relic among the ruins of the past, and they realized they were not only for the old but also for the young who were not afraid of aging. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Ryan White Care Act provides money for community-based counseling centers. While that may sound noble and compassionate, we know from experience that "AIDS education" becomes a platform for the homosexual community to recruit adolescents and lure teens into a self-destructive sexual lifestyle. — Christine O'Donnell

I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon ... [p. 48] — Siri Hustvedt

To the American, English writers are like prim spinsters fidgeting with the china, punctilious about good taste, and inwardly full of thwarted, tepid and perverse passions.
We see the Americans as gushing adolescents, repetitive and slangy, rather nasty sometimes in their zest for violence and bad language. — Evelyn Waugh

We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible to us. — Natalia Ginzburg

1 So Uganda is a nation of young people. Roughly half its citizens are adolescents, and there are few — Katie J. Davis

Perhaps the postponement in modern culture of the historically relevant challenges of adolescents, — Louis Cozolino

Adolescents are the bearers of cultural renewal, those cycles of generation and regeneration that link our limited individual destinies with the destiny of the species. — Louise J. Kaplan

I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture? — Margaret Mead

God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness. It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is useful to the point of necessity when they are adolescents. — Phyllis McGinley

Over the course of the 1970s conservatives made the endangered child into a kind of political and rhetorical abstraction, a way of thinking about the country and its citizens that could help advance a wide range of policy initiatives. They opposed the counterculture on the grounds that rock and roll caused adolescents to lose respect for family life. They promoted the War on Drugs with racially tinged morality tales about addicted inner-city mothers and, crucially, the "superpredator" "crack babies" to whom those mothers supposedly gave birth. (That particular epidemic was later shown to be a myth.)40 And when Anita Bryant led a campaign to allow Dade County to discriminate against homosexuals in hiring teachers for public schools, she named the effort "Save Our Children." The fear that tied all of these campaigns together was of the ease with which children could be victimized or else corrupted and turned against the society that was supposed to nurture them. — Richard Beck

Adolescents have the right to be themselves. The fact that you were the belle of the ball, the captain of the lacrosse team, the president of your senior class, Phi Beta Kappa, or a political activist doesn't mean that your teenager will be or should be the same ... Likewise, the fact that you were a wallflower, uncoordinated, and a C student shouldn't mean that you push your child to be everything you were not. — Laurence Steinberg

How displaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life without the consolations of habit or the wisdom of maturity. — Barbara Pym