Barbara Strauch's The Primal Teenage

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Parents are Accountable for their Teenager’s Misbehavior Teenagers have a reputation of being dreadful and awful human beings. Most parents, do not comprehend why teenagers act the way they do, when they might be at fault for it. Barbara Strauch appeals to pathos and developes a erudite tone in The Primal Teen : What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids to argue that parents have to obtain authority over teenagers , so they do not undertake vacuous things. Barbara Strauch utilizes a erudite tone throughout the passage, by introducing a knowledgeable individual about the teenage brain :“Peter Jensen, a former head of child and adolescent research at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) , now director of the Center for the Advancement of Children’s Mental Health and a professor at Columbia University, a practicing child psychiatrist, and, perhaps most important, the father of five who’s made his share of mistakes along the way, …show more content…

According to the mother of the rebellious teenager in the story, the teenager relished doing negligent things, ‘She “liked the excitement” of being with the bad kids, starting cutting school and, one night in a house where the parents weren’t home, she had sex, at age fourteen, and got caught’ (Strauch Page Number 34) . As we can discern, the teenager was behaving in a recalcitrant and unruly matter; therefore, the mother was bewildered, and asks another mother for advice. Then decides to have authority over her teenager :‘”So i asked a wise friend who said that sometimes you simple have to be the parent. So we told her that changed her friends, she had to change her school. I think she wanted someone, some adult, to tell her to just stop. And it worked. She joined the lacrosse team and the high school swim team where she was elected captain. Her grades went back up and she was back to herself again”’ (Strauch Page Number

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