Yes, Your Teen is Crazy!: Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind

by Michael J. Bradley (2003)

This is quite possibly the worst book on teenagers on the shelves—and that’s saying something. Crude name-calling, arrogance, absurdly wrong statistics, tirades so crazed that you have to wonder if his rage at adolescents has driven him over the edge… Bradley’s book would be better retitled, Let’s Just Shoot Them!

Bradley pretends to tough, straight talk but delivers pabulum for self-centered grownups. His counsel that parents indulge their own satisfactions, ritually dismiss all teenage issues as simply the products of adolescent “brain damage,” and employ whatever ploys are necessary to secure absolute compliance with grownup wishes is a recipe for disaster in an era of rampant middle-aged misbehavior.

Mind-numbingly idiotic introductions are supplied by the late actor and embittered parent Carroll O’Connor warning that we grownups are suffering “an upsurge of irrational behavior in our teen population,” with “teens today” far more “explosive and dangerous” than back in our day, and National Institutes of Mental Health psychiatrist Jay Giedd (“Teens today are faced with a dizzying array of choices, more potent and addictive drugs, and, through the media and the Internet, far greater exposure to sexual material” [p. xi]). Truly dumb stuff, but worse is to come. Bradley then announces his chief point: “Adolescents are temporarily brain-damaged” (emphasis his).

Bradley’s obliviousness and craziness become more disturbing as the book progresses. After accusing teenagers of being “crazy,” “stupid,” “nuts,” and “brain damaged” in a frenzied repetition, Bradley raves on, page after page, with teen horror vignettes that, if even remotely true of the generation as a whole would have killed every adolescent in the country a dozen times over. His jocular list of “common adolescent disorders,” which he prefaces by equating the “toddler and adolescent brain” as one and the same, are as childishly vicious as the stereotypical fourth-grade alphas trashing the second-grade “retards.”

Bradley must find it crucially important to demean teenagers as “just large, brain-dysfunctioned children” (page 329) because he reminds us how stupid they are on just about every page. I skipped to the conclusion after Chapter 2 because Bradley’s ceaseless barrage of ridiculous assertions and name-calling wore me down (even that didn’t help; he repeats yet again on the first page of the final chapter that teens are insane). If he said something useful in the middle chapters, I missed it.

 The new “adolescent world” of Bradley’s fevered imagination (apparently built around his unthinking acceptance of tales from his most troubled clients) consists of boys beating up girls to express “true love,” “terrified parents of adolescents obtaining legal protection against the threats and assaults of their own children,” “savage gang attacks are not only sanctioned by teenage onlookers as acceptable, but prized as entertainment” (emphasis his), “the rage factor… worsening,” “suicide (which) has become a stylized violence ritual,” “teenagers incapable of having intimate relationships (they’re crazy and immature),” and a “world out of control” (chapter 2). How on earth did I—and every other adult who worked with teenagers for years—escape mass mayhem and slaughter?

Isn’t Bradley terrified when adolescents are in his own office? This is a perfect example of unethical generalization by psychologists who attribute to all youth the worst pathologies they encounter (assuming even these are true) among the tiny number of troubled youth they see in therapy.

The “teenagers” Bradley represents as typical are nothing like the teens I worked with, or the thousands who overwhelmingly describe themselves as confident, feeling safe, getting along with parents and friends, and happy with their lives to surveys like Monitoring the Future. Bradley’s book, and especially its laudatory reviews, is a disturbing window on socially acceptable hate speech.

Like most youth-bashing authors, Bradley trumpets a shockingly dishonest series of Butchered Statistics and Breathless Sensationalism about young people and parents:

·                     Bradley: “Adolescent suicide, something almost unknown in the 1960s, has exploded—a 400 percent increase in the last 40 years, with the greatest increase occurring over the last two decades among kids 10 to 14 years old.” Fact, from the National Center for Health Statistics: 8,000 teens committed suicide during the 1960s, and another 13,000 died from gunshot, poisoning, and hanging “accidents” and “undetermined” causes we now know harbored thousands more hidden suicides. The rate of teens’ self-destructive deaths was much higher 40 years ago for youths ages 10-14. For both younger and older teens, suicide and self-destructive deaths peaked in the early 1970s and have fallen since.

·                     Bradley: “Every year we bury 10,000 of our sons and daughters who drink very well and drive very badly” (page 21). Fact: This wild-ass number isn’t even in the right galaxy. The real number, reported by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System: 1,725 persons under age 20 (867 of whom were drivers) were involved in fatal traffic accidents in 2000 with any alcohol in their systems. That’s a lower rate than adults in their 40s—the parents—2,779 of whom (including 1,655 drinking drivers) were in fatal drunken traffic crashes that same year.

·                     Bradley: “Over 8,000 of our children died by gunfire last year” (page 38). Fact: Is he brain-damaged? The true number reported by the National Center for Health Statistics in 2000: 1,544 (if “children” means under age 18), or 3,042 (if under age 20), including all suicides, homicides, accidents, and other gun deaths. (By contrast, 4,786 Americans ages 40-49 died from gunfire that year, a rate 40% higher than for teenagers.) Further, the FBI reports that three-fourths of the murder victims under age 18 are killed by adults, not by other children.

·                     Bradley: “From 1984 to 1994, the death-by-gun rate among teenagers increased fourfold” (page 33). Fact: Another lunatic statement. The only thing I can deduce is that Bradley must be referring only to black teenagers and homicide, not all teens and all guns. In 1994, the black-teen gun murder rate was 20 times higher than for white, non-Hispanic teens, whose rate did not increase. Bradley, like other authors, cites the horrendous numbers of the poorest urban youth as if they applied to all youth. And what are 1994 numbers doing in a 2001 book?

Bradley gives no sources for his harebrained statistics of teenage mayhem, which are so far off base that he, or someone without even the vaguest notion of what teenage reality resembles, must have just randomly made them up.

It’s astonishing when a teen-basher cites a statistic that’s even close to factual. “Over a million teenage girls become pregnant every year,” Bradley says, well above the 834,000 reported by the National Center for Health Statistics in 2000, but nowhere near the gargantuan errors of fact he makes elsewhere.

That suicide, drunk driving death, gunshot death, and other ills are real tragedies affecting family members of all ages makes Bradley’s carelessness and blindness even more inexcusable. The most searing indictment of his me-me approach to parenting is his complete obliviousness to the even worse statistics surrounding the adults he lionizes as “mature and competent.” For example, Bradley combines appalling ignorance and callousness in the following claim:

While some suicides [by teenagers] result from hopelessness, zero-option scenarios like crippling depression, many adolescent suicides are self-centered acts of anger, a kind of terrible “screw you” to the true victims, the loved ones who must survive the aftermath (page 35).

Nowhere does Bradley tell us where he dredged up this barbaric tripe. Nor does he mention the hundreds of thousands of confirmed violent and sexual abuses of children and teens by parents and caretakers that are substantiated by investigation every year—and which are far more implicated in suicide and suicide attempts by teens (especially girls). For example, the Rape in America report found women who had been raped (51% before age 18) were four times more likely to have contemplated suicide, and 13 times more likely to have attempted suicide, than non-victims (National Victim Center, 1992).

Bradley’s delusion that suicidal teens are simply self-centered jerks is mean spirited. Again and again I wonder, is he really a therapist? He betrays no awareness of elementary psychosocial factors in youth risks, no empathy or compassion for young people, and not even a rudimentary sense of social trends.

In 2000, the year before Bradley’s book went to press, there were 300 suicides among age 10-14, and 1,621 among teens age 15-19, a total of 1,921 teen suicides. These are unquestionable tragedies. Among Bradley’s age group, 45-54, which has a population three million smaller, there were 6,437 suicides. Those are also tragedies. Teenagers are nearly three times more likely to suffer a parent’s suicide than the other way around. No sympathy from him for teenagers facing that horror—but then, he dismisses all adolescent feelings as brainless inconsequentialities.

Bradley goes completely off the rails in talking about drugs. He spends 30 pages on “the unprecedented levels of teen drug use” that leave parents “agonizing” (page 284). Aside from his ignorance of the fact that teens today don’t use or abuse drugs as much as past generations, Bradley again reveals how narrow his experience must be.

In 2000, a total of 484 teens ages 10-19 died from overdoses of illicit drugs, including all accidents, suicides, chronic, and undetermined deaths—drug behaviors that Bradley passes off as part of “the insanity of adolescence.” Yet, among Bradley’s age group, 45-54, there were 4,940 illicit-drug overdose deaths. A teen is 12 times more likely to suffer a parent dying from illegal drug abuse than the other way around.

Bradley claims 27 years of therapy practice and work with “troubled adolescents”—and he never noticed that the drug abuse problem among parents is a dozen times worse than among their teens? That the 22,000 illicit-drug overdose deaths, 600,000 hospital emergency cases, and more than one million drug-related arrests every year involving adults ages 35 to 64—the parents!—are not a joke? That his one or two random sentences on parents’ drug use amounts to a cruel dereliction of a therapist’s duty to confront a real grownup epidemic that contributes to teenagers’ much more justifiable “agonizing”?

Again and again, I wonder: Why can’t the experts see this burgeoning crisis of drugs and crime among middle-aged parents that’s as subtle as the Matterhorn in Kansas? Is Bradley another expert on youth who never left his office to see the real families of the troubled youth he berates?

The truly bizarre—let me add, crazy—aspect of Bradley’s violent ridicule of teenagers at every turn is that here and there, he seems to realize much of what he’s saying doesn’t make sense. He admits that “youth violence has plummeted,” even going so far as to concede that “in the early 1970s, twice as many kids under the age of 13 years committed murder than in 1999” (pages 30-31, emphasis his). He acknowledges that we treat adolescents as “scapegoats” with a particularly pointed statement: “We parents who scream at the violence in the media are far too often the same ones who scream at, demean, and hit our children” (page 34). He admits that “the wounds of (their parents’) divorce to an adolescent are deep, ugly, and largely unseen, often boiling over years later as acting-out behaviors” (page 146)—though he never acknowledges that parents’ breakup affects some 50% to 60% of all youth. The larger reality is that parents get along with their teenagers better than they get along with each other. Doesn’t that add up to a powerful suggestion that teenagers are not brain damaged vexations to stable, calm parents?

He also acknowledges parents are the biggest influences on how their kids act. He even admits “we should be thankfully puzzled” that teenagers don’t act worse, given all the bad adult influences on them (page 34). But these sporadic intrusions of sense are nowhere integrated with the rest of the book. Bradley doesn’t explore the extent to which the vast numbers of crazy adult behaviors—the hundreds of thousands of children who are violently or sexually abused by parents every year, the millions of teens living with alcoholic or drug addicted parents, the tens of millions who suffer serious family conflicts from parents that presage divorce and separation—create the supposedly dysfunctional behaviors for which Bradley ridicules adolescents.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration on Children, Youth, and Families (2008) reported the following substantiated abuses of persons under age 18 in 2006:

·                     142,000 cases of physical abuse

·                     78,000 cases of sexual abuse

·                     212,000 cases of psychological abuse, abandonment, threats of harm, and chronic drug addiction by caretakers.

These cases involve real and substantiated injuries, not including simple spankings, shoving, yelling, arguments, or child neglect, and some involve multiple abuses. Incomplete reports indicate that physical and sexual abuse of children by adults appears to have declined over the last 15 years (though not as quickly as other forms of violence), by about 11% from 1990 to 2006. In this most extreme area, dangers to children have fallen slightly.

Of the 83,000 teenagers who were confirmed victims of physical and sexual abuse in 2006, 80% were victimized by parents and another 10% by caretakers such as foster parents, parents’ partners, or legal guardians. Research consistently has linked histories of physical and sexual abuse (not the innate “craziness” Bradley claims is the whole issue) to severe teenage behavior problems and failings.  If Bradley didn’t see the seriousness of this problem of adult, particularly parents’, violence against children and teens in his 27 years of practice, can his perceptions be trusted at all?

In the end, Bradley’s biologically-warped ideology militates against facing larger realities beyond the troubled families he bases his book on. “We’ve somehow come to view adolescents as if they were adults, and not children,” even giving them “adult privileges,” he complains. This “disastrous notion” makes them “depressed and rageful,” he adds “Adolescents today are powerful because we’ve allowed them to become that way” at an age at which they’re “stupid because they’re brain-challenged,” leaving them “seriously at-risk” (pages 16-17).

Consider, then, how Bradley’s misdirected ideology—and that of other youth-bashers who insist that teenagers today have too many rights, are growing up too fast, spend too much time with peers, are increasingly influenced by popular culture, and are being allowed by adult default to “raise themselves”—would dramatically reverse if the reality of massive improvement in teenage behavior is admitted. Doesn’t that suggest the opposite ideology is more appropriate:  that more teenage freedom, independence from adults, peer and cultural influence, and autonomy are good things?

Much of the frantic efforts of the teen bashers to establish that young people today are bad and getting worse—even those, like Bradley, who in contradictory flashes of honesty admit they actually might be doing better—seem designed to prop up their anti-youth ideology rather than to advise on youth today. Their alarm seems founded in the challenge to adulthood that adolescent precocity implies rather than a rational assessment of modern youth and adult behaviors.