Let your child be the teenager he or she wants to be, not the adolescent you were or wish you had been.

The public probably knows that teen drivers are at greater risk for fatal accidents. What the public doesn't know is what we ought to do about it.

Peer pressure is not a monolithic force that presses adolescents into the same mold. . . . Adolescents generally choose friend whose values, attitudes, tastes, and families are similar to their own. In short, good kids rarely go bad because of their friends.

At a stage when young people want more than anything to be like everyone else, they find themselves the least alike. Everyone their age is growing and changing, but each at his or her own pace.

Adolescents sometimes say..."My friends listen to me, but my parents only hear me talk." Often they are right. Familiarity breeds inattention.

Most adults would not dream of belittling, humiliating, or bullying (verbally or physically) another adult. But many of the same adults think nothing of treating their adolescent child like a nonperson. . . . Adolescents deserve the same civility their parents routinely extend to total strangers.

Adolescents need to be reassured that nothing-neither their growing maturity, their moods, their misbehavior, nor your anger at something they have done-can shake your basic commitment to them.