Her words were like a cold shower. I had not thought much about Jason being at the party that night. There were over a hundred kids there, nearly half the school, including most of his varsity swim team.
Jason is a swimmer. He’s an excellent swimmer, actually. There’s been talk of an early college offer from Michigan, maybe even Penn. He’s going to need the swimming, being a B+ student. He works hard, so this really is his limit academically. I knew it might be an issue when I married Julie. I would put her IQ at around 100 to 110. I have found a negative correlation between exceptional IQ levels and emotional stability. The same is true with nurturing instincts. There seemed no point in having brilliant children if their mother couldn’t give them the proper amount of affection. And, indeed, my children are well adjusted, attractive, popular, athletic, and highly competent intellectually. I believe this will give them a kind of happiness that always evaded me.
Jason is a wonderful young man. You can believe me or not believe me. It is the objective truth. If I told you he was the greatest seventeen-year-old kid on the planet, then you could call my objectivity into question. And you would be right. I do not believe he is the greatest seventeen-year-old kid on the planet. I just feel like he is, and like everything he does and says (almost—he is a teenager, after all), is precious, and I find myself soaking it in so I have a full reserve of it when he goes off to college in a year, as my daughter did two years before. That is the parent in me. The objective person in me sees that he is a wonderful young man.
He is kind to others. He sits with us at dinner and talks about the world with compassion and understanding. We discuss everything from the Middle East and terrorism to the economy. Sometimes I smile at the conclusions he’s come to because he is so young and has so much to learn. But at least he cares enough to think and draw conclusions. He gets up every morning with a smile on his face, cracking jokes at breakfast, humming some new song he’s downloaded. He goes to school, goes to swim practice, comes home for dinner and then to study and sleep, only to start all over again. Yes, he is sometimes glued to his phone on the social media or video games, but this does not alarm me the way it does some people. This is their world, and they might as well become acclimated to it. It will not serve them well to treat their technology like a vice and limit their exposure. They will end up without the skill set that is already becoming necessary for the workplace and social environment of their generation.
I know I belabor this analogy, but I have come to see these teenage years as a construction project. I tell my young patients, and my own children, that this is not their life. Not yet. What they are doing now is building a house. It is a house they will have to live in for the rest of their lives, so they’d better get it right. They will be able to remodel, redecorate, and repair. But they can never rebuild. Everything they put into this house, every emotional scar from a bad relationship, every sexual perversion they give in to, every opportunity they secure for themselves, every drug they allow to interrupt the maturing of their growing brains, will be forever in the foundation of that house. The neuroscientists keep moving their conclusion, but the human brain winds down its developing around age twenty-five. What happens between puberty and the midtwenties in the brain, while it is finishing its development—its hardwiring—involves increased risk taking and peer influence. The reward center is trying to sort out what behaviors lead to rewards so it can lay down some wires, some bricks. Those bricks become part of the foundation, and they are there to stay. If those bricks tell you to like alcohol or cocaine or deviant sex acts, you will be fighting those cravings for the rest of your life. And of course, a child who blows off her grades and winds up at a subpar college will have to move to the back of the line when it comes to finding a job. It all matters.
If I have a patient who can’t get an erection with his wife, my first question is whether he uses pornography. My second question is when did he start. Invariably, when he was a teenager. If I have a patient who is an addict, my first question is when did she start. Answer—when she was a teenager. If I have a patient who is abused by a spouse, my first question is when was she abused by her parent? Answer—before she left home at eighteen.