1/3/2011

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time.  They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.  ~Quentin Crisp

Little children, headache; big children, heartache.  ~Italian Proverb

Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.  ~Laurence J. Peter

Don’t laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith, “Age and Death,” Afterthoughts, 1931

If you want to recapture your youth, just cut off his allowance.  ~Al Bernstein

When buying a used car, punch the buttons on the radio.  If all the stations are rock and roll, there’s a good chance the transmission is shot.  ~Larry Lujack

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.  ~Dorothy Parker

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.  ~Erma Bombeck

Adolescence is perhaps nature’s way of preparing parents to welcome the empty nest.  ~Karen Savage and Patricia Adams, The Good Stepmother

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals.  If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.  ~Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies

Too many of today’s children have straight teeth and crooked morals.  ~Unknown high school principal

Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own.  ~Doug Larson

Adolescence: A stage between infancy and adultery.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

Mother Nature is providential.  She gives us twelve years to develop a love for our children before turning them into teenagers.  ~William Galvin

The best substitute for experience is being sixteen.  ~Raymond Duncan

When the boy is growing he has a wolf in his belly.  ~German Proverb

In the time it takes you to understand a 14-year-old, he turns 15.  ~Robert Brault

Violet will be a good color for hair at just about the same time that brunette becomes a good color for flowers.  ~Fran Lebowitz

The teenager seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding.  ~Edgar Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent

The invention of the teenager was a mistake.  Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don’t have to pay taxes – naturally, no one wants to live any other way.  ~Judith Martin

There’s nothing wrong with the younger generation that becoming taxpayers won’t cure.  ~Dan Bennett

Adolescence is a period of rapid changes.  Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.  ~Author Unknown

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.  But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.  ~Mark Twain, “Old Times on the Mississippi” Atlantic Monthly, 1874

Chaperons don’t enforce morality; they force immorality to be discreet.  ~Judith Martin

Teenagers complain there’s nothing to do, then stay out all night doing it.  ~Bob Phillips

The average income of the modern teenager is about 2 a.m.  ~Author Unknown

Telling a teenager the facts of life is like giving a fish a bath.  ~Arnold H. Glasow

There isn’t a child who hasn’t gone out into the brave new world who eventually doesn’t return to the old homestead carrying a bundle of dirty clothes.  ~Art Buchwald

It’s difficult to decide whether growing pains are something teenagers have – or are.  ~Author Unknown

The average teenager still has all the faults his parents outgrew.  ~Author Unknown

A baby-sitter is a teenager who gets two dollars an hour to eat five dollars’ worth of your food.  ~Henny Youngman

There is nothing wrong with today’s teenager that twenty years won’t cure.  ~Author Unknown

What a shame that allowances have to stop with the teens:  both those that are paid to us and those that are made for us.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

I have seen my kid struggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory:  an empty gin bottle.  ~Erma Bombeck

You don’t have to suffer to be a poet.  Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.  ~John Ciardi, Simmons Review, Fall 1962

I tell my child, if I seem obsessed to always know where you’ve been, it is because my DNA will be found at the scene.  ~Robert Brault

A boy becomes an adult three years before his parents think he does, and about two years after he thinks he does.  ~Lewis B. Hershey, News summaries, 31 December 1951

You can tell a child is growing up when he stops asking where he came from and starts refusing to tell where he is going.  ~Author Unknown

How strange that the young should always think the world is against them – when in fact that is the only time it is for them.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

At fourteen you don’t need sickness or death for tragedy.  ~Jessamyn West

It is hard to convince a high-school student that he will encounter a lot of problems more difficult than those of algebra and geometry.  ~Edgar W. Howe

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, The New Peoplemaking, 1988

The troubles of adolescence eventually all go away – it’s just like a really long, bad cold.  ~Dawn Ruelas

Why do children want to grow up?  Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity.  But what is there today, in America, that very poor and very rich adolescents want to do but cannot do?  Not much:  they can “do” drugs, “have” sex, “make” babies, and “get” money (from their parents, crime, or the State).  For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty.  Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents?  ~Thomas Szasz

I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they do now.  ~Will Rogers

Small children disturb your sleep, big children your life.  ~Yiddish Proverb

My adolescence progressed normally:  enough misery to keep the death wish my usual state, an occasional high to keep me from actually taking the gas-pipe.  ~Faye Moskowitz

Helping your eldest to pick a college is one of the greatest educational experiences of life – for the parents.  Next to trying to pick his bride, it’s the best way to learn that your authority, if not entirely gone, is slipping fast.  ~Sally and James Reston