Gaah! We CAN’T let teens be babies till they’re 30

AS THE mother of two adolescents in full sail, I won’t exactly say I’m looking forward to the day they leave home — but I am looking forward to them growing up.

To the day when not absolutely everything is my fault; when I’m not always either picking up or dropping off, or vetoing yet another item of micro-clothing/tattoo request.

When I don’t lie in bed, shattered, listening to the thud of the bassdrum coming from upstairs and wondering: ‘Was this really what all those sleepless nights were for?’

If it’s not one of them leaving the bath water in for hours after they’ve used it, it’s lights left on in every room, or a mess in the kitchen when one of them has been ‘cooking’.

I’m not alone, of course. Most parents of teenagers experience the same: there’s very little one can do, save open another bottle of pinot noir (we’d pour ourselves a vodka, only they’ve nicked it) and remind ourselves it doesn’t last for ever.

Except, apparently, it does. Well, at least until they’re 30, which, from where I’m staggering, might as well be for ever. Teenage years are like dog years, you see: as a parent, you age seven for every one of theirs.

By my calculation, that will make me 149 by the time my daughter comes of age. I’m feeling it already.

Neuroscientists now understand far more about the brain and, it transpires, it doesn’t finish developing for three whole decades.

THEprocess of becoming an adult is, says Professor Peter Jones of Cambridge University, less of a clearly delineated switch and more of a ‘nuanced transition’.

‘There isn’t a childhood and then an adulthood,’ he adds. ‘People are on a pathway, a trajectory.’ As for the notion of becoming an adult at 18, forget it. At that age, the brain is still undergoing major changes. And all the stuff that comes with being a teenager — the angst, the anger, the inability to hang up a towel — carries on throughout their 20s.

One thing is for sure: I’m not putting up with this for another 20odd years. Not so much for my sake as for theirs — because young adults

have to be able to strike out on their own in an age when even changing a plug or mending a torn jumper is beyond many of them.

It is the job of a parent to equip them with the skills to survive solo. Because, as I know from personal experience, it’s that independence that teaches them so much of what they need to understand about life.

Admittedly, my experience was a little extreme. For various complex family reasons, not only did I leave home at 17, I also moved countries, leaving Italy, where I had grown up, and returning to the UK.

I lived alone in a rented flat in Brighton, attending the nearby technical college in Lewes.

There were, it’s fair to say, some pretty hairy moments. But I survived and the experience taught me a certain resilience that has proved very useful. In particular, the realisation that I was truly responsible for my own actions had a huge — I believe positive — impact on my behaviour.

I never, for example, got drunk. Because, for me, there was no safety net. No concerned parent to check on me, no one to pick me up and take me home. I, and I alone, was responsible for me. It is a principle that has never failed me.

Perhaps it’s true that our lives as fully formed adults begin at 30. But none of us should wait that long.

Besides, there’s a part of everyone that never grows up at all. To this day, I still have teenage moments when I am neither rational nor responsible. But allied to that is the sensible 17-year-old who had to learn the rules of the game of life.

Rather than cosset our youngsters, wouldn’t we be better off teaching them to stand on their own two feet?