Image zoom Credit: Priscilla Gragg
Not long ago, my friend Marni was playing tag at a local park with her 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter. They finished the game with shouts of laughter and a three-way hug and as they started to leave, an older mom who’d been watching the family caught Marni’s eye. “Enjoy it now,” she said with a wry smile. “Pretty soon they’ll be teenagers and they won’t even talk to you.”
What is it about teenagers that gets us so panicked? Will our darling cherubs really become sneering beasts once their age hits two digits? This stereotype does a disservice to everyone, says Kenneth Ginsburg, M.D., a pediatrician and the codirector of the Center for Parent and Teen Communication at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute. “If kids keep hearing that they’re going to turn into monsters when they hit adolescence, they’ll think they have to m