Time to update what teenagers are capable of?

The Secret We Keep (Danish, 2025)
Miniseries

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33496221/

Imagine travelling back in time by just over a hundred years. Children were expected to express gratitude for their very existence. The mere fact that they survived the challenging early years of life and did not fall victim to infectious diseases was, in itself, a miracle. They had to be eternally thankful to their parents for safeguarding them from these harmful factors. During that era, children had no rights; they were to be seen and not heard. 

Fast forward to the 21st century. Children are no longer perceived as an annoyance; rather, family life revolves around them. They are shielded and have a detailed schedule planned. Family activities centre on them. Children have rights, and the state goes to great lengths to ensure their protection, education, healthcare, shelter, and proper nutrition, as outlined by the 1959 UN Charter which guarantees these rights. 

These achievements have been beneficial. Children are no longer merely fillers for deceased or retired workers. They require a significant period of personal development known as childhood. At this stage, nothing is expected of them except to absorb knowledge, whether actively or passively, that they can utilise in adulthood. 

The trouble is this: all the good nourishment and access to knowledge have made children mature much earlier than their forefathers. In the eyes of society (and law), nothing is expected of them. They are deemed incapable of committing any crime. In their minds, they believe they are unable to consent to anything or to engage in complex matters such as robbing a bank or wooing someone into sex. 

Guess what? The world has taken a leap of change while they were napping. The ease of acquiring information from the World Wide Web at a moment's notice has replaced traditional discussions about ‘birds and bees’ or familiarising oneself with subversives. Nothing is taboo or classified anymore.

We end up with all-knowing teenagers who possess excellent nourishment and health due to science, hovering about like firecrackers with unlit fuses, ready to explode when the moment is right. 

This unsettling miniseries portrays a scenario in which two affluent neighbours, whose husbands are business partners, are also close friends. They share numerous similarities, both having teenage sons and each employing au pairs of Filipina heritage. 

One of the au pairs approached her neighbour's Madame to express her dissatisfaction with her employer. The Madame merely attempted to cut the conversation short, likely not wanting to jeopardise her friendship with the neighbour. The next day, the au pair goes missing. Everyone assumes she has merely run away from home. The police are called in. Things take a turn when the Madame begins to suspect that the husband may have had some involvement in her disappearance. A week later, her body is discovered floating in the lake.

Spoiler alert: As it turns out, one of the teenage sons had raped the Filipina. Feeling guilty and with no one to turn to, she took her own life. The trouble is that the youngster cannot be charged with rape. Legally, he is incapable of such an act. Forget that he is of Nordic stock, athletic, and a school wrestler. If anything, the deceased would be accused of sexual assault of the teenager! Probably because Filipinas are economically disadvantaged, occupy the lower strata of society, and are foreigners, the matter dies a natural death. Everyone moves on with their lives, nonetheless, dragging along huge burdens.

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“Where We Go One We Go All”

White Squall (1996)

In my teen years, I remember helping an older teenager to organise a religious outing for a group of children. We were to arrange for a bus to get the kids to the other side of town for Sivarathri prayers. As it involved overnight event, somebody thought that verbal consent was not sufficient. Each participant was asked to get their parents to sign a release form. We got the replies promptly from all except one. It seemed his father, an Army man, refused to sign the consent form and wanted to see the organisers. That was the first time I was exposed to an unreasonable person who thought that the whole world out there was just out to kidnap his child. His coveted son did not make it to the prayers as we could not convince his father. Later in life, the calculating father must have miscalculated his drinking habits and succumbed to the effects of the bottle. The obedient son was also devastated much later, in an unrelated event, when he woke up one fine morning to discover that his wife of ten years had absconded with her lover and he was left to care for their three young children.

The motto of Albatross
'where we go one, we go all.'
(inscribed on the bell on JFK's boat)

There must surely be three ways to raise children - the hippie style, the helicopter type and the one in between. The helicopter type of parents would be the ones who put their children in a bubble, trying to protect them for adversities in life, but the offspring end up as a mimosa pudica. The hippie one would want their kids to be in sync with Nature. All the falls and bruises, in their minds, would make them anti-fragile.

This movie depicts the story of 15-year-old boys who went on a character-building expedition aboard an ill-fated sailing vessel, Albatross. This is based on a true story in 1961. Imagine 14 students of different background in 1960 allowed by their parent to make a man of themselves by sailing all the way from the Bahamas through the Caribbean. They were under the tutelage of four experienced crewmen. Unfortunately, the Albatross capsised after encountering a white squall (a sudden and violent windstorm at sea), killing two crew members and four teenagers.

Later investigations suggested that the Albatross probably lost its balance due to the additional fittings that had been affixed on her. Albatross actually is an old vessel. She started her service back in 1920 in the Netherlands as a pilot boat in the North Sea. During the WW2, she served as a radio-station ship for submarines. After the war, she was a trainer for Dutch sea-merchants. In 1954, she was brought to the U.S. and was featured in a few Hollywood blockbusters. Her final stint was preparing college students in sail training. The refitting, over the years by her owners, must have made her' top heavy' which jeopardised her stability when encountering the storm.

This movie is mentioned as one of President Trump's favourite film, even though he was quoted to have said to have enjoyed 'Citizen Kane' and 'Gone with the Wind'. (Definitely, not 'Parasite'). I think the conspiracy theorists would like to believe so. Many of the lines in this movie have been used by Q-Anon as Q-drops for his followers to pick up and draw conclusions. The bell on board had inscriptions which read 'where we go one, we go all'.


Interestingly, this is the recurrent motif that appears in social media post as hashtag #WWG1WGA. Q-Anon and followers promise that Trump, the chosen leader and his team, will expose the evil plan of the Cabal and offset the agenda of the New World Order. A skipper is as good as his crew.

N.B. "Where We Go One We Go All" was inscribed on the bell on JFK's boat. It is a rallying cry for unity, and now headlines an extraordinary set of events.

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What is your priority?

Wild Rose (Scottish; 2019)


Sure, they say it is possible to lead a balanced life. One should be able to have a fulfilling life juggling between having a family life and pursuing your dream, whatever it is. After all, that is all the stars are doing having a fantastic experience moving seamlessly from work to pleasure to being cosy with their loved ones. Having children is no problem, just another cap in the feather. At least, that is what the media seem to portray. Shuttling between being a mother, a creative, a star, a public icon is easy peasy. In reality, it is far from it. Sacrifices need to be made. It is not possible to have the cake and eat it as well. It is a constant struggle between a good parent and achieving life's ambition. Are we selfish by putting our goals before the kids? Is the parent-child bond too self-defeating? To get the creative juices flowing adequately, do we have to sacrifice householders' life? 

This is not your usual happy ending movie of an unknown working-class girl with a one-track mind to be a country music singer. Keeping up with bad company and being released from prison after a year of incarceration for drug possession, Rose-Lynn finds life not a bed of roses. Having two kids in her teenage years is no help. With no father figure and only her single mother to keep an eye on the kids during her absence, she finds herself a stranger with her kids. Her passion, singing to country music in Nashville remains an unachievable dream. The club she was singing before her imprisonment does not want to hire a felon. She has to pick up the pieces working as a maid while mending her fences with her children. 

Through a twist of fate, she gets a stint to get a go at Nashville. Now, she has to reevaluate her priorities - pursue her dream or savour the pleasure of seeing her kids growing up.

(P.S. All is not lost. When one does not have the luxury in the spring of his youth, there is always a possibility that it can be achieved much later in life. That is, provided there are adequate economic resources and the presence of good bodily as well as mental functions. Sadly wrong decisions at a young age have devastating irrevocable sequelae.)

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The tumultuous years...

Lady Bird (2017)

This coming of age movie is made by a debutante director. Bringing up children may not be so gratifying after all. After the initial awe of the wonder of the Universe to create a body within a body, reality soon hits you. You do not mind all the sleepless nights and backbreaking chores to keep the little one breathing. All the lethargy somehow vanishes at the sight of the little one carving a slight smile at us. Devious devils soon reveal their dormant selves quick enough.

As they hit puberty, they metamorphose. Blame it on growing pains, changing hormones, undeveloped pre-frontal cortex or dopamine cravings, they view the hands that feed them as aggressors. They feel that the parents suffer from a siege mentality. Their obsessions with thrift and stickling to time are utterly too stifling. Growing up sheltered, the chicklings perceived the whole wide world as gentle as their domestic guardians. The peer pressure to conform to the herd further accentuates the tensions in the household.

The parents, on the other hand, only want to pave a smooth passage for their offspring. Not wanting to repeat the silly mistakes they had done, so as not to miss the similar opportunities that had come their way, they try their level best to impart the wisdom that they acquired along the pebble-filled path of life. Sadly, all these would fall on deaf ears as it had happened during the elders' generation and the one before them.

Is it not the spring of youth, the new found freedom and immaturity that blinds us from all from the potentially blistering fire in front of us? Maybe experience would teach us. We have to have our fingers burnt to feel the pain.

This simple real-to-life depiction of a mother and her teenage daughter during the tumultuous years of high school to college period. The mother is a psychiatric nurse who has to work double shifts and count every penny to make ends meet. The father had been recently retrenched. The daughter seems oblivious to all these but is content to keep up with the Joneses. She yearns to get the best memories of her youthful years and wants to do something with her life. She does not want the melancholy of the household to bog down her ambitions. Through all that, they seek a middle ground.

 https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

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You don't know what you have got until it's gone!

Mom (Hindi; 2017)

Legend has it that a swan gives a melodious song before its demise. Even though this fact has been disproved scientifically, somehow the romantic imagery of a female swan, a pen, rendering her last vocalisation before her final breath sounds poetic enough.

Sridevi, in her swansong, gives a sterling performance here in the role of a scorned mother. She yearns for the approval of her late teenage stepdaughter to accept her as 'Mom' whilst struggling to find justice to punish her daughter's rapists.

Even though the storyline is riddled with holes and is relatively predictable, it is compensated by the excellent acting shown by Sridevi. There are many non-verbal cues that are pivotal in any good filmmaking; here it is in abundance. The director manages to keep the audience glued to the edge of their seats with suspense.

DK, the interesting private investigator who 
provides some light comic relief.

Another character, DK (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), who assumes the role of a private eye, is an interesting one. Appearing weird in his 'soda glass' oversized spectacles, prominent frontal balding and a thick occipital lock of scalp hair, he gave the persona of a shady character. It turns out that he himself carries a heavy burden and genuinely wanted to help.

Is it not funny? Over the years, I have viewed many of Sridevi's movies. In most of them, save some of the Tamil ones, I thought of her as a glamour actor who cashed in on her youth,  external attraction and dancing prowess to bowl audience over. Only after her demise, in this film, do I see her in an entirely different light. Her depiction of a grieving mother is so surreal. I have seen enough in my lifetime to appreciate one.

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

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Should some things remain unseen?

The Talwars: Behind closed doors (HBO Asia, Documentary; 2017)

It all started with Fr Martin Luther pinning his thesis on the church door some 500 years ago. He posited that people wanted to know and experience the truth for themselves. They want to read the scriptures in their mother tongue. They do not want the Truth to be exclusive to the few in power. The elitists reiterated that the general public cannot handle the truth. Some things are better left to the experts to interpret.

Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution and Internet era, people's thirst for the Truth had escalated to phenomenal heights. Still, they feel inadequate, devoid of comprehending most of the Universe's secrets. Media practitioners took the bold stop of mongering news right into their living rooms. They even televised real-time combat scenes as it happened as seen during Desert Storm.

This documentary which is a summary of a real-life case that happened in 2008 shows, among other things, how the interference of press may hamper the investigation and steer the progress of a case according to public sentiments.

In a gist, this famous murder of a 13-year-old girl of two dentists parents, Talwars, and their butler, in Nodia, outside Delhi, took the country by storm. It was fuelled partly by the media-seeking parents. Maybe they did it to seek swift apprehension of the perpetrator. Perhaps because we live in a media hungry society, our every action is broadcasted. The investigations and trials went on for almost ten long years. The local police and two teams of the Central Bureau of Investigations were involved.

From the word go, police investigations did not progress smoothly. The crime scene was not cordoned. The press and the curious general public had free access to the flat of the Talwars like it was a funfair. TV viewers almost had a live coverage on the scene on the ground as and when police discovered something.

As the situation became more complicated, the parents were charged with honour killing. The murdered long-time resident butler was accused of rape. It later evolved into a trial by media of the clash of the classes; where the upper middle class hurling baseless accusations against the lowly working class and immigrants to cover shame in the family. There were also accusations of manipulation of the investigation by nepotism and steering of public sentiments via a media frenzy to conserve the good names of the affluent.

In October 2017, the Talwars were acquitted for lack of evidence. The case remains unsolved. Also see the write-up on Bollywood's film based on this murder, (Rahasya)

The documentary begins with Drs. Rajesh and Nupur Talwar on the morning of 16 May 2008, discovering their daughter, Aarushi Talwar, lying dead in her bed, bludgeoned and with her throat cut. Their Nepali servant, Hemraj Banjade, is missing and believed to be the culprit until his bloated and battered body is discovered on the apartment roof terrace. There were seemingly just the four people in the apartment that night and only two of them are still alive. To the police investigation teams leading the inquiry, the parents must be the murderers, but after nine years, three investigations, a trial and appeal, and now an acquittal, nothing is as it seems. Featuring never-before-seen exclusive interviews with Aarushi’s parents, THE TALWARS: BEHIND CLOSED DOORS speaks with those most closely involved in this twisted tale of intrigue, mystery that has turned this double murder into one of India’s most notorious crimes. [HBO]

What were they thinking?

The whole nation has been hit by a spate of bullying, of late.Youngsters, without batting an eyelid, have no remorse to resorting to violence to assert their authority over the others whom they perceive as weak, disadvantaged or just different. perhaps, they are just apeing their role models, their parents or even leaders.

In the latest incident, the nation is reeling from the death of a 19 old boy who never gained consciousness after being hit on and sodomised for being effeminate. Although the information is patchy, the gist of the string of events is that a quarrel ensued over a heckling which progressed to a lopsided fistfight and bashing of the victim and his friend by four other teenagers.

Looking at the faces of the helpless relatives, one can just wonder at the meaning of this violence. Forget the fact that we should all live within our boundaries, live and let live.There are people that who are different from us for us to learn and appreciate but not to change them to follow our path.

Imagine what would have gone through the minds of the perpetrators as they pounced and punched with the anger so intense to make a pulp out the boy, all because he was not 'man' enough! The pictures of the accused which had been circulating in the social media just show faces of regular guys whom you would not give a second look of suspicion if you had seen them on the street. Telltale signs of scarred face and triad tattoos are conspicuously missing.

It is not that their minds are so juvenile or primordial that they are unable to differentiate what is right, virtuous and hurtful. Is there a competition for territory, mate or food? Just perception of what is right and should be accepted as the norm! This, fueled by the pleasure of power and control in a mob-like situation in the company of the herd, the reptilian brain took charge. Here we see an interesting interplay between the pre-frontal cortex which is the new kid on the block which processes thoughts with emotion and the lurking primitive feelings of the archaic reptilian brain.

This whole scenario reminds of the case of Leopold and Loeb in the US Courts in 1924 in which two highly intelligent young men decide to do the perfect murder, just for the heck of it, because they could. The trial was dubbed the trial of the century and for the first time brought in experts in the field of forensic psychiatry. They were incarcerated with life imprisonment.

If there is any way of destroying hatred and all that goes with it, it's not through evil and hatred and cruelty, but through charity, love, understanding. (dialogue from 1959 Hollywood blockbuster 'Compulsion'.)

http://famous-trials.com/leopoldandloeb

Welles delivers a stirring plea for the lives of Leopold and Loeb in the climax of the 1959 film Compulsion. 

      The final summation is taken directly from the transcript of the real trial. As good an oration against the 

death penalty as you'll ever hear.

Thirteen is a crazy age!

Thirteen (2016, Miniseries; BBC 3)

Thirteen is supposed to be a crazy age to be, especially if you are a girl. You are not a girl, but you are not yet a woman. This, together with the raging hormones, lack of dopamine and sub-optimal maturation of the prefrontal cortex, looks like a lethal cocktail for disaster. Nevertheless, through failures and mistakes, a girl becomes a woman. Just imagine that this transitional period is lost. How would she handle such a situation? How would the family handle such a situation?

One day, the scriptwriter of the film was wondering as she was reading a newspaper article, "Whatever happens to all the girls who had been abducted and returned after all the camera lights dim on them? How do their lives continue?" With that thought, she penned this fictitious story.

Ivy Muxom was kidnapped at the age of 13 from school and was kept captive in a cellar for 13 years. One fine day, she made a dash for freedom, and she created a media frenzy. Everyone, the family members, the public and the police were left wondering about her story - the unbelievable story, whether she is mentally unstable, whether she is in cahoots with her kidnapper and if Stockholm Syndrome attributed to some of her behaviours.

The family and friends had moved on with their lives after giving up on seeing her alive after all these years. Her parents had split up. Her 'boyfriend' had married, and her sister is to be married soon. Her sudden reappearance rocks the whole status quo. Ivy too has problems adjusting living in a different world accepting to changes that happened in her 13 years of absence. First, there is the smartphone and the digital world.

Things get complicated when investigations on the possible kidnapper go nowhere, another young girl is kidnapped, and a dead body is discovered buried in the house where she was held captive!

A gripping and emotional 5-episodes police procedural drama which showcases succinctly the emotions of a family,  friends and the victim who had been struck with this tragic malady. She yearns for long lost years of her childhood, stunted emotional development and coming to terms with her lost years and the years spent with her obviously maladjusted dysfunctional kidnapper.

The kidnapper, as we can meet at the end of the series, is a perfect description of Freud's lessons in psychology - of a person with Oedipus' complex, fixated with his mother, dressing up his victim (Ivy) in an old lady's housecoat ala Norman Bates in Psycho style!

What has sorry got to do with it?

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/459087/A-case-of-affluenza-The-drink-drive-killer-16-who-is-too-rich-and-spoiled-for-jail

A case of 'affluenza': The drink-drive killer, 16, who is too rich and spoiled for jail

IT'S the case that’s outraged America: a drunken teenager responsible for four deaths walks free because he’s a ‘victim’ too – of his parents’ wealth

By: Simon Edge

Published: Tue, February 11, 2014

Ethan Couch from Texas, USA, killed four people in a crash while drink-driving [AP]

It was shortly after 10pm on a hot June evening last summer when a bunch of teenagers from an affluent suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, stole two cases of beer from a Walmart supermarket. They had been drinking already and when an hour later 16-year-old Ethan Couch volunteered to run an errand to a late-night chemist some of them told him he was in no fit state. But when he insisted on it they all piled into his father’s red Ford truck, six in the cab and two in the open back.

The truck was accelerating at 70mph in a 40mph residential zone when it ploughed into two parked cars. Breanna Mitchell, a young chef on her way home from work, had stopped with a fl at tyre, and local resident Hollie Boyles and her twenty-something daughter Shelby had come out to help her. Brian Jennings, a youth pastor in his early 40s, had also stopped his car to lend a hand.

All four were thrown 60 yards and died instantly. Emergency staff called to the scene described seeing body parts all over the road. The speeding truck turned over and hit a tree. None of the joyriders were wearing seat belts and two were seriously injured, including Sergio Molina, 16, who was left unable to move, eat or talk as the result of a brain injury.

Meanwhile Jennings’s car, in which two of his children were waiting, was knocked into the path of a passing Volkswagen, one of whose occupants was also injured. Of the 12 survivors, only three did not require hospital treatment.

One of those was Couch. Belligerent with the police, he was so drunk that when he tried to walk away he got tangled in a wire fence. His blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit three hours after the crash and he was found to also have valium in his system.

Expressing no remorse, he pleaded guilty to four counts of manslaughter and might have expected a 20-year prison sentence. That’s what another 16-year-old drink driver, Eric Miller, received when he was up before the same judge a decade earlier – and he had a much lower blood alcohol level and had killed one victim not four.

But as a result of a judgment that has shocked America, Couch will not serve a day in prison. Instead he was given 10 years’ probation, during which time he can’t drink or drive, and was ordered to attend a £275,000-a-year rehab centre in California at his family’s expense, for an unspecified time.

When we arrived the first thing he did was jump in the pool with his clothes on, rip his shirt off then start downing a big bottle of vodka. He was really knocking it back. He must have drunk about six or seven shots in one go

Why? Because, according to a psychologist who testified in his defence, the teenager was a victim of “affluenza”. In other words he was so rich he didn’t know any better and couldn’t understand that his actions would have consequences. That the judge seemed to agree with this view has outraged his victims and caused a national furore across the United States.

“What is the likelihood if this was an African-American inner-city kid that grew up in a violent neighbourhood to a single mother who is addicted to crack and he was caught two or three times… what is the likelihood that the judge would excuse his behaviour and let him off because of how he was raised?” asks distinguished psychologist Professor Suniya Luthar.

Ethan’s father Fred Couch is a businessman who owns a sheet metal works with an annual turnover of £9million and around 30 staff. After a difficult divorce from Ethan’s mother Tonya, he reportedly gave his son the use of a mansion in the suburb of Burleson where he lived alone and ran wild.

A teenager invited there three nights before the fatal crash reported: “Ethan lived in this big place with a long winding driveway that went all the way round to his back yard, which had a large pool in it. When we arrived the first thing he did was jump in the pool with his clothes on, rip his shirt off then start downing a big bottle of vodka. He was really knocking it back. He must have drunk about six or seven shots in one go.

“That set the tone and from then on he was just boasting and trying to impress us about how much he drank and how much he partied. He also boasted about selling drugs and getting big amounts of marijuana delivered to his house. He kept saying that he lived in the place alone and could do whatever he wanted. At first I didn’t believe him but when we went inside there were empty liquor bottles everywhere and what looked like joint butts in the ashtrays.”

At the trial psychologist Dr Dick Miller testified that Couch had been brought up in a household so indulgent that boundaries had never been established for his behaviour, giving him “freedoms no young person should have”. He cited his parents’ decision not to punish him after he was found by police in a parked truck with an unconscious, undressed 14-year-old girl a year before the crash. He had also been allowed to drink from the age of 13.

One of his friends testified that Couch said his family “would get him out of anything”. Despite that boast, district judge Jean Boyd’s decision not to impose a custodial sentence – originally made in December and upheld last week after prosecutors asked her to reconsider – has left the victims aghast. “There needs to be some justice here,” said Eric Boyles, who lost his wife and daughter in the carnage. “For 25 weeks I’ve been going through a healing process. And so when the verdict came out, my immediate reaction is: I’m back to week one. We have accomplished nothing here.”

The suggestion that Couch was a victim of his family’s wealth may yet backfire on his parents. They are now facing multi-million-dollar legal claims by the victims and their families. Wendy Davis, Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, has called the sentence a “disgrace” and even Dr Miller says he regrets ever mentioning the word affluenza, which was coined by two Australian academics as the title of a 2005 book about the stress, depression and obesity associated with consumer life.

“I wish I had not used that term,” he says. “Everyone seems to have hooked on to it.”

He is right about that. In California, a member of the state assembly has introduced a bill that would ban trial lawyers from invoking the supposed condition as a defence or in mitigation for sentencing.

“It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that the relatively lenient sentence that this gentleman in Texas received will lead attorneys to see this as something to use in their overall tool box,” he says.

And before you think this is the kind of thing that could happen only in America, a pair of Scottish oil workers got away with community service orders last month after launching a drunken attack on a fellow customer in a bar in Aberdeen. Their defence was that they were suffering the effects of having too much money.

Meanwhile Ethan Couch has said nothing. Having been proved right in his pronouncement that his parents could get him out of anything, why should he need to say sorry?

Don't blame me, it is my brain!

Blame my Brain (the amazing teenage brain revealed)
Nicola Morgan 2005

Had the honour of meeting the author of this book in KL recently when this Scottish lady was conducting a workshop for writers of teenage stories. Her passion to write ignited at the age of 9 but had to wait for 27 years to publish her first book. She has written books in many genres, fiction and non -fiction, mainly for teenage readers.It is an amazement how those cuddly lovable cuties metamorphose into a volatile piercing thorns, something in the line of gremlins when exposed to water. In the case of tweens, it is adolescence! They may be the next most difficult thing to analyse after the female brain!
In this 200 odd page book, the author offers an reasonable explanation for this transformation. It can basically be blamed on nature, 3 main punching bags - genes, evolution, neuro-chemicals.
The author's target group seem to be teenagers and those in constant contact with teenagers with the hope of giving a reasonable explanation to their sometimes bizarre behaviour, probably to knock sense into the youngsters and to avoid adults from breathing down their necks.

Compared to other animals including primates, human spend a much more time in adolescence as they need to learn much more to seep into adulthood. Even though we tend to think that the brain stops growing quite early in life, it continue growing to much later and the dendrites and synapses undergo pruning and remodelling during this crucial age. The frontal cortex connexion to other areas of the brain is not fully developed explaining the sometimes rash decisions. The melatonin secretion which is related to sleep, is abundant at a time when a lot of work need to be done, hence the apparently sleepy-head teenagers. Dopamine which is sometimes associated with satiety sensation in certain part of the brain is increased with alcohol. When it consumed by the brain which is not fully developed, the chances of addiction and mishaps seem higher.

Risk taking brings up us in the evolution ladder and helps us improve our technology. The risk takers survives the cold winters!
Evolution is often called an easy animal which can explain many of our behaviors. A cat is a cat in spite of years of births and rebirths with limited skills of purring and scratching their fur. Man, on the other hand, have evolved from a wheel rolling population to one who sends nuclear powered vessels to other planets. A long adolescence is needed to prepare these children to adulthood to continue the good work done by their ancestors. Nature has shown that breeding with closely connected siblings or offspring is unhealthy, hence it tries to prevent breeding within families by creating intolerance between parents, children and amongst siblings for this very reason.
It goes on to educate on other teenage problems like eating disorders, self harm and depression.
What I find quite intriguing is that we blame our behaviours to everything but ourselves. Affluence, luxurious living, living in absence of poverty may pamper us till we all turn pompous, fat and spoilt to the core.
What we all, as mankind, need is an occasional calamity to shake us and put us all in other. We can all then see how fast we all mature, literally overnight! (this is not the author's recommendation,of course!)
Good advice from the author for the teenagers on the need to stay focused. As the brain connexions are being pruned and being complete, they need to constantly practice, prepare and stay out of trouble because their future starts here.

Imp in the making? Or just a transition?

Imp

Again, I have become a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on for one of my old friends who had to deal with his rebellious teenage daughter. She thinks that he is a worthless piece of shit. At least this is how he perceives her to think about him and the impression he gets. I know the worse thing that anyone can do is to take sides in a family feud. I had had enough of melancholic tales in my lifetime but he seem to jump into talking about his sad tale every time I make a courtesy call to him. Maybe I look like a sucker and sponge for everyone's woes. So, I punctuated my replies with the occasional 'Oh?', Oh!', "Is it?'.
There is always two sides of the story and I am listening to one side of it. He was telling about how his teenage daughter does not know the value of money and how friends take precedence over everything else in her life. She is forever on her mobile phone, either texting, emailling or speaking as if her dad is a telecommunication magnate whose telco charges are free or just petty cash. My friend, growing up in humble background and saving every penny to get an overseas education, is thrifty with his wallet. Being a cancer survivor himself, I am sure he means well for her. All for a reason, imparting his lessons in life to her to guide her into adulthood.
His other wife, also sees eye to eye to his ideology and gives her two cents worth of advice to her daughter in a harsh way. Somehow, he is painted as a bad guy, leaving him to feel unwanted and redundant, just a cash cow, nothing else.
What can a seemingly understanding friend like me can tell him? That it is every modern father with a teenage daughter living in a big city who believes in giving equal opportunities to their children and exposing them to modern thinking and American TV goes through. And that things could be worse and unthinkable... It is alright!
Just like in the song by Travelling Wilburys, one of my favourite pop group - George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lyne and Jim Keltner. They made only 2 albums. Orbison died before the 2nd album. In the you tube music video below, notice how Orbinson's part is voiced over and in his chair an electric guitar is placed. (#1:40+) How sad! Have a peek...
 http://youtu.be/cwqhdRs4jyA