For me, the study couldn't have come at a better time. A few months
ago, my son,
Sam, turned 13.
You don't have to be a scientist to know what that means. That's
right: goodbye
car radio.
It also means I get to relive the worst time of my life, except
this time through him. Adolescence is hard on teenagers. I hear
it's even harder on their parents.
Which is why I've been wondering for a while if maybe I had
developed ephebiphobia.
Ephebiphobia isn't a fear of vegetables. That's lachanophobia. It's
not a fear of cats. That's ailurophobia. It's not a fear of bald
people (peladophobia), rain (pluviophobia), or getting peanut
butter stuck to the roof of the mouth (arachibutyrophobia). It's
not phobophobia, either. That's the fear of phobias.
It's definitely not makingitupaphobia, which is the fear of making
things up. I have no fear of making things up. None of the phobias
mentioned above are made up. Except makingitupaphobia.
Ephebiphobia is the clinical name for the fear of teenagers.
They scare me, teenagers do. They're like aliens. They speak in
some indecipherable tongue. Unlike regular people, they don't sit,
they spill. Their moods change as rapidly as Irish weather.
I approach Sam's bedroom nowadays with trepidation.
The room seems to throb, like something out of a science-fiction
movie. It appears to pulsate with an
energy of fearsome
unfamiliarity. What awaits in there?
I cautiously turn the knob on his door and enter a foreign
landscape. There are landfills littering the floor, otherwise known
as clothes. Not just laundry. Clean clothes. Why it is so much
easier for teenagers to simply drop their pairs of jeans on the
floor rather than hang them from the bedpost is another vexing
question I trust science is working on.