KEY POINTS:
Talk to to the parents of troublesome teenagers and they'll complain their parents had it easy by comparison. They wouldn't have dared be so disrespectful, scream and swear during an argument, call their mother a "bitch" or worse, binge drink, take drugs, throw a party and trash the house while the parents are away.
Some "grown-ups" will argue that memories are short - that all of those things went on in Elvis' day or when the Stones were wrinkle-free, or when Napoleon was a boy.
But therapists and youth counsellors agree that, while teenagers have always clashed with their parents, being a parent is harder these days. It's also harder being a teenager, and more dangerous.
So why have those few hormone-charged years become so fraught for both sides?
Orewa youth worker Penny Lucas thinks adults are partly to blame. Adult decisions have allowed teenagers to drink at a younger age, drive high-powered cars, have credit cards and unlimited access to cellphones and internet sites through which to talk to peers or older people.
"We as adults have allowed kids to become what they have. We have allowed them to drink at 18. We've allowed a situation where kids answer teachers back."
Under-age sex and teenage pregnancies have become normalised, Lucas says. She questions how many times the police have bothered to prosecute young men for under-age sex, or why so many young teenagers in the Rodney district are not in school and are getting away with it.
At the Hibiscus Coast Youth Centre, which runs public health and family planning services, Lucas sees the fallout - teenagers with sexually-transmitted infections, hooked on P and bored kids getting to trouble. Lucas despairs at what she sees as a "lost generation", teenagers with no direction, no interests, no schooling, no purpose.
She questions why scores of 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds in the Rodney area aren't in school. The truancy services are "pathetically" funded, parents aren't interested or don't know and the schools don't follow up.
"They end up on P because they have been disengaged from their education."
She says neither central nor local government have done enough planning to accommodate teenagers coming through, or dropping out of, the system. Neither has the school curriculum kept pace.
Where is the financial and risk management training for young people to prepare them for options they will be bombarded with - student loans, credit cards, hire purchase, bank loans, she asks?
"We don't sit down and explain what a hire purchase agreement is. 'This is what will happen if you don't pay it. This is how it will have an impact on your life for the next 10 years.' None of those things are ever taught."
Lucas agrees that children and teenagers should be given choices and responsibility, but says it has gone too far.
"We need to feed them out responsibility as they get older. What we've done is dump a pile of responsibility on them very young."
In doing so, adults have helped to make life for teenagers unsafe. Today's parents, many of whom were teenagers in the 70s, knew where they stood and had limited responsibility by comparison.
They find themselves powerless to control troublesome teenagers when things start to go wrong, Lucas says.
There is something wrong with a system that allows a 13-year-old girl to get contraception, get pregnant, get an abortion and "and come home and bleed out". But, under the Privacy Act, the parents are not entitled to know about it. Or that a child can run away from home at 14 but the police refuse to bring him or her home if they consider the child is in a safe place.
"We're allowing this. It's easier to stop than most people think. We spend more time talking about it than doing it."
Echoing Lucas' comments, Australian psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg, who specialises in teenagers and has written several books on parenting them, says there is something terribly wrong when, in counselling sessions, "13-year-old girls wring their hands about whether they are satisfying their sexual partner, or when 10-year-olds write to magazines reporting they have lost their virginity and can't understand why 'he' doesn't return their calls."
Lucas, mother to twin 17-year-olds, a 20-year-old daughter, and foster mother to children who come to her through Child Youth and Family (CYF), is firm in her belief that if some teenagers are out of control, adult decisions and policies are mostly to blame.
"The Government has taken away our governance of our children."
She means the lawmakers have set too many things in concrete that have affected parental control. For example, why don't we raise the age of driving to 17? Or restrict under 18-year-olds to drive cars that are 1200cc and under? Or turn the spotlight on under-age pregnancies by "putting a few guys in court and making them responsible"?
"Maybe we should put the drinking age back up to 20 and start policing it - but we won't.
"We are constantly hitting on these kids for making the wrong decisions. But we made the wrong decisions."
In the end, parents have no power to keep their children safe.
"Their lives are very difficult in that we are not putting in those barriers to stop them getting hurt."
Parental rights have gradually been whittled away, Lucas says.
"We simply have no tools to control our kids if they look like they are going off the rails."
Emily (not her real name), a solo mother to a 17-year-old daughter and a 14-year-old son, knows what it's like to feel desperate and powerless in the face of hostile and unruly teenage behaviour. Emily, who works fulltime in communications, would return to her Onehunga home to find her daughter had not gone to school and was still in bed.
Or she'd come home in the evening to find a party in full swing, the house trashed, cigarette burns in the carpet and furniture, empty booze bottles on the floor and signs of drugs.
Her daughter, she says, would brush it off, blaming her mother for arriving home early. Telling a house full of testosterone to get the hell out without the back-up of a male partner was not easy, Emily found. Her daughter's male friends were disrespectful and rude.
"I'd tell them to leave and it was like 'oh yeah, whatever' or they'd say 'you're just a bitch."'
Once she found a note written by one of her daughter's male friends saying "your mum's such a bitch. It's probably because she hasn't been laid".
While she is able to talk over issues with her ex-husband, the lack of immediate back-up during confrontations leaves her exhausted and angry.
And her daughter plays one off against the other - lying to her father that it was okay by mum to get her belly button pierced, or get a tattoo or get money for a particular must-have item. And when her daughter was caught out, she would lash out.
Emily warns the parents of pre-teens, gearing up for the puberty war, to "know your weak point because kids will go for the jugular and say nasty stuff.
"They are much more aware than when we were kids. They will say things that you wouldn't believe that we would never have said to our parents."
Like other parents spoken to for this article, Emily admits there have been times where she simply hasn't liked her child.
"Sometimes I think, God, does this ever get better?"
At one stage Emily and her ex-husband were paying their daughter to do basic things - like get out of bed and attend school. And still the out-of-control behaviour persisted.
Emily, single for nine years, admits to feeling resentful at the time and energy her daughter has taken up.
"I must admit there's a resentment that, just when your think your life is going to start becoming easier and freer, you almost have to revert back to a toddler-like level of supervision. "
In the end Emily, at a loss to make her daughter listen, banished her to her father's house.
"It got to the point that she was trashing the house so badly I could no longer trust her to be at home alone. The moment I went out her friends would be there."
Emily is at a loss to explain where she went wrong or what she could have done differently. She's observed the outcomes for parents who have been far stricter.
"Their kids just jump out the window rather than walk out the door."
Easy access to cars, money and cellphones gives teenagers these days a kind of tribal pubescent power, parents complain.
Michael Carr-Gregg talks of a generation "bent on getting and spending."
To deprive a child of an iPod is seen by many as "akin to cruelty, neglect and abuse," he says in his latest book The Princess Bitchface Syndrome - surviving adolescent girls.
Young women are more worried about pleasing their peers than listening to, or respecting, their parents, he says.
"Right across Australia, battle-weary parents are raising the white flag and beating a hasty retreat from the fray."
Adults feel helpless and ineffectual. Wish lists become do lists. Suddenly, teenagers are in charge.
Cellphones coupled with sites like Bebo and Facebook give teenagers a powerful tool through which to communicate quickly, find information, arrange lifts, drugs, alcohol, dates, and get into trouble.
Auckland family therapist Diane Levy questions the role of cellphones in children's and teenagers' lives. While parents believe they are helping to keep their children safe by giving them (and paying for) a cellphone - they are also giving them a tool to help get them into trouble.
"If kids want to get involved in a clandestine activity they have the most amazing ways of communicating with each other," Levy says. "It gives our children freedoms way beyond the things they have the responsibility to manage."
Says Penny Lucas: "Texting is incredible. I've had kids from CYFs in a room and 10 minutes later they are gone. They've texted friends to pick them up. They have this network which is impossible to control."
Those who work with teenagers and their families warn not to underestimate the power of peer pressure and the lengths to which they will go to stay in with their friends.
Says Emily: "Get to know their friends and realise how powerful that bond is. Their friends are the ones that actually have the major influence."
Pauline and her husband Michael (not his real name), shut out by their 13-year-old daughter who seemed depressed and withdrawn, turned to Youthline for help.
The teenager had reached the point where she would either refuse to discuss anything or she resorted to shouting. And she knew how to push the guilt buttons of busy, professional working parents. The counselling has been uncomfortable.
"She's full of how little we do for her. She makes me feel like a failed parent," Pauline says. "She basically doesn't want to share any part of her life with us. She doesn't want to tell us what she's doing, what she's feeling, what she's enjoying or not enjoying, who she's talking to on Bebo."
Like other parents, Pauline fears that her daughter will come to harm before the rebellious teenage brain matures enough to make sensible decisions.
"It is very hard to keep a teenager safe when they won't talk to you. I want to discuss drugs, alcohol and sex with her, and friendships and bullying, but she won't talk."
Twenty-two-year-old Amanda (not her real name), an AUT graduate, looks back at the teenage tantrums she had when she wasn't allowed to stay out late with her friends with a measure of curiosity. Although the fits of rage and hysteria were only five years ago or so, she can't recall what she got so worked up about.
"I remember it was the end of the world if I couldn't go somewhere. I was in tears, there were hysterics. If I had to leave a party because of an 11pm curfew, I got upset about what I would be missing."
She took to lying, telling her parents she was staying at a friend's house. She got into trouble, got grounded, she "hated" her mother and life seemed to be a cycle of endless misery between the ages of 13 and 17.
As a teenager at a private girls' school, she saw herself as "a slightly fat girl with buck teeth, glasses and mousy brown hair." She wasn't allowed a mobile phone until she was 16. Life, remembers Amanda, sucked.
"I found it difficult to make friends. I was a social reject."
She took to stealing money to buy food from the tuckshop and, desperate to be accepted, to lend money to help her make friends. She got caught, more trouble. At one stage her parents called in the police to give her a fright.
It didn't help. As Amanda saw it, her father could afford it. Her parents took the phone out of her room as a punishment, but Amanda had another one hidden which she plugged in for late-night phone calls to friends.
Now, five years later, the hair dyed blonde, the eyes fixed with laser surgery and the teeth perfectly straight thanks to teenage braces, Amanda is poised, confident, ambitious and likeable.
These days she and her mother laugh about her teenage antics. When her mother visits Amanda's flat, she can't believe the spotless bedroom or the sight of her daughter scrubbing the kitchen. Amanda's mother spent five years asking her daughter to clean up her disgusting bedroom.
The turning point came in Amanda's final year at school. She discovered she was naturally good at media studies and set her sights on a communications degree. And her parents separated.
"After my father left, suddenly I had to be the strong one for mum."
While the reasons behind the tantrums may be hazy, Amanda can still remember the force of peer pressure, the desperate attempts to hang out with the cool crowd at school, being on the receiving end of bullying by text and the internet.
Parents and youth experts say the effects of bullying by today's cyber tribe should not be underestimated.,
Says Emily: "There's a lot more pack mentality and pack brutality."
Bullying through texting and sites like Bebo, Facebook or My Space give teenagers false courage. "It makes them bolder and it means the bullying can get out of hand."
It's more effective, spreads quickly and widely. The results can be deadly compared with a nasty note passed under a school desk table 30 years ago.
Penny Lucas says text bullying alone makes life much harder for a teenager now.
Diane Levy agrees: "It's a very much more difficult world for our teens to navigate."
But both point out it is usually adults who allow children and teenagers to have cellphones and pay the bills.
Levy, who has counselled parents of teenagers over the past 30 years as well as navigating her own three children through their teens, thinks today's parents could do well by claiming back their self-respect.
When she hears parents complain their children hurl abuse at them, calling mum a "stupid bitch", (or worse,) a dad a "bastard" (or worse), her advice is unequivocal. You wouldn't take it from anyone else, don't take it from children, she says. If someone outside your family treated you that way, would you run them places in your car, top up their cellphone, give them money, she asks?
Parents, faced with hostile teenagers, feel helpless. Don't, Levy says. There's "heaps" you can do.
Children need their parents' love and support, they need boundaries - and they also need services. Levy advises parents to quietly and calmly "withdraw".
"Within about seven minutes they will need something."
And remember this, she says. While it's difficult these days to make teenagers do something, "they can't make us do anything either.
"If a child is rude, we owe them a roof over their head, meals, access to education but we don't owe them anything else."
She means subtly withdrawing parents' help; essential to all teenagers.
She does not mean using their services to punish or ban as that will provoke an even greater reaction. Rather, it is a subtle adjustment to make the point that those being abused by the teenager have rights too; that their dignity should also not be affronted.
"It is perfectly possible to shut down, stop delivering services to a child who has called you a 'stupid bitch."'
To that end, Levy doesn't believe in punishments like confiscating cellphones and grounding.
She believes that causes a vicious cycle and teenagers wind up feeling "hideously resentful".
Withdrawing services is far more effective. And hold out until the apology and remorse is genuine. Parents need to hear 'I'm really sorry, I was way out of line.'
Levy, who has just published, Time Out for Tots, Teens and everyone in between - how to get your children to do as they're told, acknowledges she sees a slanted view because the parents she helps can afford fees. But most parents at some stage strike problems with teenagers and should be able to access help.
Penny Lucas agrees but says parents who can't pay are stuck in an unsupportive and underfunded system with few options unless teenagers have reached a desperate stage - attempted suicide or drug overdose.
