I challenge this notion completely. There are only two reasons for a teenager’s current abilities, what the parents have taught them or didn’t teach them. I also challenge that parents do not know how to teach. We do it all the time in our business and work life. Employees get trained to do their job, improve their sales, streamline their tasks, and some companies even give employees behavioral training. These training schedules are planned out and get put on calendars. Yet in our culture, when we get home to our children, for many parents the training slows down and sometimes even stops. It can be because they are tired, overwhelmed, or had a bad day. It is sometimes due to many messages in our society and media, that advocate a type of softness with children. No zeroes at schools and it’s not mandatory to hand in homework anymore, some sports don’t keep score, and people shouldn’t have strong opinions on life or how to live it because that can exclude other people with different ideas.

Many people are growing in the direction of allowing kids to discover life for themselves instead of training them. It can be an “anything goes” culture at times. No training for children how to live life emotionally or intellectually means no competence in dealing with “internal skills”. No training in how to succeed in outside world both financially and physically leads to no competence in “external skills”.

Little competence in living life, and you have a young mammal with a very unhappy nervous system that can feel anxious, insecure and unable. Unhappy nervous system equals unhappy neuro-transmitters constantly in the brain. Unhappy neuro-transmitters can very quickly lead to drug abuse, mental illness, and behavioral problems.