It's no wonder parents of children approaching the teenage years are scared.
Google the words "raising teenagers" and you will find more than 300,000 entries on the subject with confidence-inspiring lines like:"tips from the trenches", "How do you breach the barriers of adolescence?", "How do you keep your teen from making a mistake that could ruin his life?", "tips for raising drug-free teenagers" . . .
It may be small comfort to know that American parenting guru Dr Benjamin Spock, in the revised edition of his classic Baby and Child Care wrote 40 years ago: "Being a wise parent to adolescents has always been a difficult job.
"If the child is made of good stuff he is bound to feel rivalrous and rebellious, whether or not the parent is being reasonable.
"The job is greatly complicated in the 20th century by the fact that parents have all read psychology of one kind or another and have been made uneasy about the theoretical possibility of doing harm by well-intentioned efforts.
"This is too bad, because in most cases it's better to do the supposedly wrong thing with an air of confidence than the supposedly right thing with a hesitant or apologetic manner.
"Then there's also the fact that many children today have the bit in their teeth and have their parents on the run."
Dunedin psychologist Nigel Latta says parents are bombarded with so much information they may believe they need a science degree to be a parent, or they read parenting books "all about kids feeling good all the time" and somehow lose sight of common sense.
But while parenting teenagers can be difficult, parents should not get too anxious about it.
Mr Latta says parents can run the risk of making it too complicated . Most parents do the best they can: "I don't often see parents who are deliberately trying to screw people up."
Adolescents, while some of them might enter puberty earlier than they used to, are still essentially the same as they were 10,000 years ago when they might have been "tagging the cave walls", he says.
What is important is that parents understand what is going on with adolescents; why they are different from adults, why they do crazy things.
When your 11-year-old son suddenly loses the gift of speech, it doesn't mean his next steps will be going on drugs or robbing banks, it just means he is going to be a teenager for a while - a time when he will be mentally, emotionally and physically at a stage of intense change and flux.
Mr Latta acknowledges that teenagers can be incredibly hurtful. Their outbursts are more sophisticated than those of a younger child who might say: "I hate you. You suck".
The teenager is more likely to say something like: " If it wasn't for you, Dad would never have left".
While he does not advocate tolerating rudeness, Mr Latta's advice is to treat such statements as if they had come from "Mad Uncle Jack".
Teenagers are not normal relative to adults and should not be regarded as such.
It may not occur to many teenagers that their parents have feelings.
However, in more than 17 years of working with some tough teenagers, Mr Latta says he has never met one who genuinely hated his or her parents, even if many said they did. A sign of the irrationality of teenagers is making a big deal over trivial things.
He recalls from his own youth having enormous fights with his brother over who was going to put the dish rack away - a task which would take three and a-half seconds. He knows, because he timed it.
The fights were totally illogical and involved a broken window on one occasion.
Years later he asked his mother what she thought about this. She thought her sons were mad.
In his new book Before your teenagers drive you crazy, read this! Mr Latta explains the changes occurring during teenage years, gives parents principles to apply to situations and shows how these can be used to develop plans for change.
The book includes case studies to show how this works for issues as diverse as laziness, drug use, rudeness, parents feeling helpless, and situations where a teenager has gone completely off the rails.
He emphasises that while there are patterns to problems faced by families, there are so many variations that paint-by-numbers solutions are not possible.
Mr Latta has yet to negotiate the teenage years with his own children, but expects it will have its ups and downs.
At those moments of peaks and troughs, he says, having a really good idea of what is normal and what isn't will help.
With that in mind, the book is intended to help parents who can feel that coping with teenagers is like "driving fast through fog with the headlights off", not knowing which way to go.
By the same token, teenagers do not need the helicopter parent who is constantly hovering, making sure they are OK.
This is one of the topics he will deal with in his forthcoming six-part television programme The Politically Incorrect Parenting Show.
Such intense parenting is not good for kids, because they will never learn to deal with life.
• Author and secondary school teacher Tania Roxborogh, whose soon-to-be released book Kids Behaving Bravely deals with fostering resilience in children, agrees.
Instead of parents leaping in to solve all their children's problems, she and co-author Kim Stephenson (with whom she previously published the anti-bullying book No, Its Not Ok), show strategies families can use to help equip their children to face challenges, whether it be dealing with a loss or working out what they will do if they miss the bus.
Being an overprotective parent could exacerbate fear in the child, never giving the child the chance to face new situations, or the child's fear of something could be confirmed by the parents' affirmation of their behaviour.
She said some large overseas studies showed children with higher levels of drug dependence and depression were often those who had been indulged materially - children who had a television and a computer in their rooms, cellphones, ponies, regular overseas trips and so on.
They were also indulged emotionally. Their parents wanted to make their lives better than theirs had been, but they were not equipping them to deal with life.
Dan Kindlon, in his book Too Much of a Good Thing, Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age says that by protecting children from failure, adversity and pain we deprive them of the opportunity to learn important coping skills; a realistic sense of their strengths and weaknesses.
Ms Roxborogh says in an earlier teaching job, one of her 15-year-old charges was eating chips in the classroom and spilled some on the floor.
She told her to get a vacuum cleaner and clean it up, but was astounded to discover the girl had no idea how to use such a machine.
That prompted her to ask the girl's classmates about the sorts of things they did at home - mowing lawns, house cleaning, cooking.
She was surprised how many of them did not know how to undertake many basic tasks. Some parents said they had not taught their children to cook because that was what schools were for.
Ms Roxborogh knows a thing or two about resilience. She had a tumultuous and traumatic childhood, shifted 28 times before she was 20, has had third-degree burns, has been in two car accidents in which there were fatalities and has gone through the windscreen of a car.
She sees it as absolutely critical for children to have healthy relationships with adults, other than their parents, to whom they can go to offload or seek help. In her own case, wherever she moved there were always neighbours or teachers who took an interest in her.
Ms Roxborogh says parents and their children do not want to be like Eeyore, the Winnie the Pooh character, who in today's parlance might pessimistically say: "Life sucks, I suck and expect to fail".
In the worst situations, children who did not learn how to cope with disappointment, for instance, might react violently as adults when things did not work out the way they hoped. Life is hard, but it is how you deal with the hard things that matters.
"I would encourage parents to think 10 or 20 years ahead and picture the person they desire their child to be and think: `What am I doing to help that child become that person?'."
Because New Zealand is a civilised society, it is often assumed that children instinctively know the right thing to do and the right way to behave, but most of these things need to be taught, Ms Roxborogh says.
She expects her book to be most useful to parents of school-age children and older. They might not wish to read it from cover to cover, but zero in on particular things that concern them at the time - changing houses, the death of a pet, getting a part-time job, homework, family disputes.
She is an avid reader of parenting books herself, believing it is helpful to return to them from time to time to be reminded of various aspects of parenting and get a focus again.
A common theme in parenting books is the need to be clear about what you want, she says. Having set the boundaries, don't move them, and be prepared for the effort that's required.
As Nigel Latta says: "Life is suffering. Nothing is perfect, and parenting is one of the least perfect things of all. Most people would say that being a parent has been both the best and the worst thing they have ever done. It is.
"The trick with all that stuff, if there is one, is simply to accept that the ride is long and varied. The bad and the good will be your constant companions, so don't fight it. That will just make you tired."
Most parents are pretty good, he says. They should keep their sense of humour and remember that most kids don't end up as axe murderers, drug addicts or bank robbers.
Mr Latta's book is out in June while Ms Roxborogh's will be available in shops in July.
Tips for parents
• Understand what is happening with the teenage brain
• Don't be afraid to parent
• Don't be over-protective
• Keep rules fair and reasonable
• Set boundaries and stick to them
• Be in for the long haul - don't stop making decisions
• Keep your sense of humour
