ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the key elements that are associated with each of the letters in the word STAGE. These are S - Significance, T - Two-way communication, A - Authority, G - Generation gap, and E - Emotion. The chapter also discusses S – the idea of significance – showing why parents of teenagers are so very important. One of the most common views of parents is the belief that they are not important any more. In the interviews people carried out parent after parent talked about their sense that they no longer mattered very much. A well-known psychoanalyst and writer on adolescence, Erik Ericson, describes this stage as one of negative identity. In this stage it is necessary for the teenager to show independence and to be separate from the parents. The "S" represents the fact that parents of teenagers matter just as much as parents of younger children, it is just that they matter in a different way.
