Not So Freaky Friday

I dislike films like ‘Freaky Friday’. Where do we start? Let us start with Freaky Friday and its genre.

I am sure that you have seen a hundred ‘body swap’ comedies. The premise is very simple, two people who do not get on for some reason swap bodies and usually by the end of the film come to a greater understanding of the other person. Every now and then there will be films, often involving a mother in her mid thirties swapping with a sixteen year old daughter, and it is also a staple plot for television drama and comedy series too. My dislike though is reserved for those which are about a swap involving a teenager. The problem is that they assume that if a thirty-five year old returned to a teenager’s body then they would think like a thirty-five year old and not like a teenager.

Most people reading this will be unaware that they have adult privilege or, as I would say it, the advantages of being an adult. Indeed, if I told you that, you would probably think that I mean the freedom to have a mortgage, a full-time job and the knowledge and experience to be taken seriously. We know that the media forever portrays teenagers as aggressors when actually they are more likely to be the victims of crime than any other age group. That we currently have a generation that drinks less, smokes less, studies more and is more politically-engaged than previous generations is barely mentioned. Comedians will still make cheap jokes about teenage pregnancy when there are more over 40s giving birth than under 20s. I was at a conference once where a speaker said that the average age to start puberty had fallen by two years over the last twenty years. Yes, there were a lot of questions about the impact of this on education but I wanted to ask ‘why’. No-one seemed to have done any research or indeed thought about why puberty would be starting earlier. I am not blaming plastics in the ocean, climate change or tight lycra cycling shorts, I would simply like to know if anyone has thought about why this change is happening and the impact on teenagers (and pre-teens) rather than the ‘problems’ of dealing with this change. Part of adult advantage is getting to see teenagers as a problem to be fixed.

You see, the thing that most people miss about teenagers is that they are not adult human-beings. You should never tell them this, unless you want a door slammed in your face and a shout of ‘you treat me like a child!’ (although I will explain in a moment why this is a sensible reaction to your comment). The human brain does not finish forming until the early twenties. The last bits to form involve things like understanding consequences, impulse control and so on. In other words, we blame teenagers for not having the skills that they simply do not have yet. We very quickly forget that the same applied to us when we were their age.

Even less widely known is the teenage brain’s way of reacting to things. Experiments have been done where a teenager and an adult have been linked to MRI scans and then shown or given things associated with risk or reward. The adult’s reactions are fairly average levels of brain activity. The psychologist who told me about this emphasised that the difference in the teenager’s reactions are not just that they are higher and lower respectively, it is that they are not even on the same chart. Teenagers are constantly reacting to huge highs and huge lows, it really is a rollercoaster of emotions and reactions that does not settle down until your twenties.

So, when your teenager slams the door in your face and shouts ‘you treat me like a child!’ what they are doing is no different to you telling someone who has just said something upsetting that you are mildly disheartened by their attitude. I always tell parents that when their teenager shouts ‘I hate you and I want you to die!’ then that is a pretty kind way of saying ‘I love you’. I am not completely joking.

Yet, adults constantly want teenagers to behave as if they were adults. More to the point, they punish them for not behaving like adults. Sadly I have seen this in education for years now.

“I told X that she may not like that bit of the course, but it is only 68 sessions over a year, so why can’t she just accept that?” – because when a year is one seventeenth of your life, then that is a long time

“I said to her that if she reacted like that then what chance would she have of getting a job in two years’ time!” – who cares about two years’ time? That’s a lifetime away and it means understanding consequences

“She broke down because her mother would not let her keep her gerbil, how pathetic is that?” – if your life is lived through extremes, then feeling deeply upset about the loss of a gerbil is a huge deal

“X told me that she had decided that tonight is the night for her and her boyfriend and she wanted some condoms. I asked if she could come back tomorrow when the welfare officer was available” – no, tonight is the night and abstinence requires impulse control

I also deeply dislike it when young people, especially those who have grown up in care, are described as ‘playing the system’. Usually this is used when it is clear that a teenager is manipulating their social worker in some way. I think that if most people grew up in care then they would learn to get as much as they could from ‘the system’ too. Why on earth would you not do that? As for the social workers who are derided for being weak and susceptible to manipulation, why would you not want the best for the young people who you are working with , meaning sometimes that you err on the side of believing their latest story, even if it means that you get fooled?

This all brings me back to Freaky Friday. You see, the adult in these body swap movies always behaves like an adult in a teenager’s body. Would it not be more interesting if she behaved like a teenager again? Rather than having restrained and sensible adult emotions, what if they had teenage emotions? Keeping them as an adult in a teenage body helps to support the myth that teenagers are no different to adults, if only they would behave properly. If you have any experience of teenagers then I am sure that my comments about lack of impulse control, inability to think of consequences and extreme reactions will have struck a chord. Let us have an adult go back to that frightening mess of emotions and hormone soup and try to deal with the world.

I should say that the only exceptions to the ‘Freaky Friday’ rule that I can think of are ‘Big’, which is not really a body swap so much as a child trying to be an adult and a book I once heard about where a teenage girl becomes a dog. I cannot remember anything about this book other than a damning review delivered by adults on a BBC2 review programme. As I recall, the plot of the book was that the teenage girl became a dog and ran around with her pack, causing trouble, getting in people’s way and having casual sex. The reviewers disliked it because at the end of the book she is given the chance to go back to being a human and she says no. Why would she? What are the advantages of being human? What is so great about free will and a sense of good and evil anyway?

Writing this I am reminded of when the psychologist told me that teenage brains only react in terms of extremes – he asked why no-one considers that that may be normal and it may be that adults who are wrongly-wired.