OUR SCIENCE EDITOR

EVER THOUGHT your good advice to your teenager was going to waste?

It is.

“The teenage brain sees everything it does not agree with as an act of aggression,” says Professor Albert Adult, an expert in adolescent behavior. “It cannot differentiate between good and bad advice and it is incapable of responding rationally when presented with sensible old fashioned guidance.

“Thus, when you ask the teenager to help around the house, you are suddenly interrupting some school work they have just discovered they have to do; and when you tell them to clean their bedroom, you are bullying them.

“It all goes back to pre-history when the teenager we know was already paired off and mating prior to an early, probably brutal, death at the claws of some huge predator.

“In the teenage brain, parents now represent the huge predator, and their sense of being their own master (or mistress) plays out against the backdrop of actually being a useless, soft, utterly reliant semi-child in reality. Nature has not really caught up with human progress. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

“Anyway, our children stay dependent for far longer than nature has made allowance for, which leaves your teenager feeling like they are imprisoned and subject to unbridled aggression. It’s a sorry mess.

“Parents, who always see their children as just that, no matter what their age, fail to realize they have a fully grown spiteful wild savage on their hands. Or perhaps they do.”