Dear Phantom 3: Thirteen is Not the End

Dear Phantom,

First things first: being a teenager does not mean you turn into a monster, and your dad certainly doesn’t dislike teenagers.  Why do you think he enjoyed being a mature student, surrounded by friends less than half his age, if he doesn’t like young people?  I know you make a distinction in your mind between ‘teenagers’ and ‘students’, but most university students are teenagers, at least for their first year or two.

It’s true that there are some adults who are prejudiced against teenagers, and that they don’t seem to realise that being ageist against teenagers is just as wrong as being racist or sexist or homophobic (or being ageist against old people, for that matter).  A few years after the time when you are thirteen, in the early 21^st century, I remember the newspapers gleefully reporting that someone had invented a teenager-deterrent, a buzzer that plays an unpleasant high-pitched whine that only young people can here.  They praised this invention as if teenagers were vermin.

But prejudice against people for being what they are still is wrong, whether people realise this or not.  And your parents don’t think like that.  If dad sounded sad about the thought of you growing up, it was probably just because accepting that you are growing up means accepting that he is getting older.  He mostly doesn’t like changes, just as you don’t.

Yes, your mum has a book called How to Survive Teenagers.  It’s the sequel to How to Survive Parenthood, which your family has had for years.  When you read that one, you didn’t assume that the author hated babies and regarded them as monsters, did you?  So why assume she thinks that way about teenagers?  It’s just that she’s writing a humorous, down-to-earth look at family life with a cheerfully irreverent title, instead of something solemn and worthy like Shepherd of Your Child’s Soul.

There are a few writers on parenting who actually do believe that babies (never mind teenagers!) are born evil, and that a parent’s duty is to beat their children into submission for the first twenty years of their lives, in order to overcome their innate evil tendencies.  Thankfully, your parents have more sense than to read books like this, let alone to believe them and follow their advice.

However, a lot more adults – especially some of those who write children’s books – get sentimental and nostalgic about childhood.  So the next thing you have to bear in mind is: it is not true that children are the only ones with any imagination or creativity.  After all, the people writing children’s books are mostly adults, aren’t they?

It is absolutely not the message of the Narnia stories that Aslan/Jesus loses interest in you when you grow up (though if it seems that way to a lot of child readers, maybe C. S. Lewis wasn’t doing a very good job of writing them).  The point is that most of the child characters we see, after a few adventures in Narnia, return to their own world because their spiritual journey needs to continue here, where it isn’t so easy to be aware of the presence of God.

But that isn’t everyone’s path.  After all, in The Magician’s Nephew, Frank and Helen are brought to Narnia as adults, to become the first King and Queen of Narnia, and the ancestors of a long line of kings to come after them – and there had been at least two larger groups of humans who had migrated to the Narnian world since then.  The only book which is actually about children who were born in the Narnian world, grow up there and have children of their own, is The Horse and His Boy, but obviously this is the normal experience of most Narnians.

In the Bible, it talks about Jesus welcoming and blessing children, and about Jesus healing children who were ill or even dead – but the people he called to be his disciples were adults, weren’t they?  (Though they might have brought their spouses and children along with them – the group of people who travelled around with Jesus was a much bigger group of men and women than just the twelve men who were closest to him, and quite possibly it included children - and teenagers.)

Yes, in Sunday School you sang, ‘Jesus loves the little children.’  But you also sang, ‘Who will help me to grow up?  God is sure to help me.’

Similarly, it is not true that young people are the only ones with the intelligence to be capable of learning.  After all, if that were true, dad wouldn’t have been capable of going to university in his forties and getting a first-class honours degree, would he?

However, with all that I’ve said, I can understand that you don’t feel ready to be a teenager yet.  I didn’t realise until much later, but you/I/we seem to mature emotionally at about half the rate that a normal person would.  You know that you have an above-average IQ, but I think we have an Emotional Quotient of around 50.  So you started learning to read when you were three, and were already reading chapter-books by the time you started school aged four and a half, but you didn’t start to enjoy going to school and seeing your friends there until you were nearly nine.

When I went away to university aged eighteen, and when I left home for good aged twenty-four, I felt like a child who was nowhere near ready to be parted from my parents.  When I was in my late twenties, I finally started to value independence and feel annoyed at mum for fussing over me too much (the way most young teenagers would feel), and when I was in my thirties, I started to be interested in men (when most people start being interested in boyfriends or girlfriends in their mid-to-late teens).

Part of the reason for this may be down to our being autistic.  But I suspect that this isn’t the only reason.  I think you are also afraid to leave childhood because you weren’t a very confident, secure child.  I know this sounds a bit strange, so I’ll explain a bit more in another letter.

Your friend,

Temple Cloud