Riera's talks to junior high parents in Marin County, California. He talked
as if he were both fifteen and forty-five, describing teenage behavior to a
tee -- drawing howls of laughter from the parents -- and then translating
their behavior into adult language. Their teenager's behavior wasn't always
about them as parents (a difficult concept for us baby boomers), and it
wasn't always what it seemed to be. Once parents could start understand-
ing how a teenager's brain worked, they could start communicating better
with their child and ease up on being so defensive and judgmental and
crabby.

I took notes furiously, as a parent more than a journalist. Mike's insights
struck home. If I wanted to have an open, loving relationship with my son
as he moved through adolescence, I'd have to be more clued in to the emo-
tions, pressures, temptations, conflicts, and complex dynamics of the
teenage world. Not long after that talk, two boys went on a killing spree at
Columbine High School in Colorado, one of more than half a dozen
deadly outbursts by teenage boys in two years. We already knew how girls
struggled with body image and self-esteem as they hit their teenage years,
how they can turn to cutting themselves, or something worse, to release
their emotional pain. Now boys, too, were making us pay closer attention
to how confusing and treacherous the teenage years can be.

Sometimes we dismiss the seemingly irrational behavior and moods of
teenagers as normal kid stuff, the stuff we went through and survived just
fine. And some of it is. But our children live in a different world from the
one we knew. They know more. They see more. They are both more
grown-up and more vulnerable than we were. They and their friends can
make us feel like anthropologists in a baffling, unfamiliar culture. We try
to be like our own parents, but their ways don't always work anymore. The
game has changed, but nobody is out there handing out the new rule-
books.

Now somebody is. Two people, actually. Mike Riera teamed up with his
friend Joseph Di Prisco, a longtime English teacher, administrator, and
writer, to produce Field Guide to the American Teenager. I met Joe over a
long lunch one day with Mike. He's wry and self-deprecating and passion-
ate about his work. He's the kind of teacher who managed to present the
tragedy and betrayal and passion of Shakespeare in way that tapped into
his students' lives, helping them to understand what they already knew.

Field Guide to the American Teenager isn't a rulebook. It can't be. Every
teenager is happy and moody and tense and confused in different ways.

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