Why? You should be kind to your teenagers the same as you’re kind to your toddler. But they’re ur-humans whose brains won’t be fully developed for another decade. They have little to teach you, but you have lots to teach them. After all, you’ve been in their shoes but they haven’t been in your’s.
I never grew up in a world where:
- we had ‘hide from an armed attacker’ drills in school.
- what I said as a 16 year old could jeopardize my career a dozen plus years later (thank god Usenet is dead.)
- marijuana was considered genuinely harmless and pseudo-legal.
- getting a ~5.0 weighted GPA and perfect SAT scores wasn’t enough to get you into any state school.
- even the most chaste kids are desensitized to porn as teenagers
Because teenagers can go off the rails pretty quickly if you're not paying attention to what they think. They could be influenced by a malicious peer or get caught up in some thought cloud which you know is damaging and dangerous. Teenagers are susceptible to social contagions, like self-harm or suicide.