Teenagers

Teenagers get a poor deal in advice writing. Most of it is addressed over their heads to an anxious adult, pitched in a register of alarm, and concerned mainly with control — curfews, monitoring, rules about phones. That approach has a thin record, and it has a specific failure mode: it produces a young person who has learned not to mention things.

So the material here is written to be read by either the parent or the teenager, and it assumes the second is likely. Someone of fifteen can look up what to do about a blackmail message or a spiked drink faster than most of the adults around them, and generally will, and would rather not be talked down to while doing it.

This is also where the health and safety material for this age sits, rather than in a section of its own. Almost everything that matters at this stage is a safety subject of one kind or another, so splitting the two would only scatter the same content across two pages.

What is here so far: online safety, which is largely about financially motivated blackmail and about where the law on images actually points; going out, which is about getting home, spiking, and what to do about a friend who is in trouble; and road safety for new drivers, including the rule that can end a licence in a single offence. Sexual health is also a matter to consider.

One thing runs through all of it, and it is worth stating once here rather than three times further in. The most protective arrangement available to a household at this stage is not a rule and not an app. It is that someone in trouble says so the same evening, instead of sitting on it for three days while it gets worse — and whether that happens depends almost entirely on what they expect to follow. None of the advice on these pages works as well as a phone call that costs nothing to make.

The counterpart, for the teenager rather than the parent: the situations described here — the blackmail script that arrives looking like a conversation, the drink that lands far harder than it should, the lift home that turns out to be with someone who has been drinking — are common, are not evidence of having been stupid, and are not things anyone is expected to sort out alone.