Bored, bolshy and entirely your fault?

There's no escape. That adorable bundle of joy is going to turn into an overgrown, teenage pain in the ass, however great a parent you are. Hold on tight, says Markie Robson Scott, it's going to be a bumpy decade

YOU'VE SEEN Finley Quaye in concert, you smoke the occasional joint, you enjoyed Trainspotting and you've seen Kids. So are you 14 or 43? In the Nineties, boundaries between middle youth and real youth are so blurred as to make a parent's life extremely confusing, never mind a teenager's.

You may think you're hip and part of popular culture, but that doesn't help when your daughter tells you she's staying the night with her best friend and you discover that after the party they both slept rough in the park (and the friend's parents apparently don't mind). Or when your son tells you to fuck off when you ask him nicely to empty the rubbish.

Or when he's smoking skunk at 14. We know what being stoned looks like, unlike our own parents, who thought drug-taking meant deathly pallor and arms riddled with track marks. Though according to Professor Howard Parker, co-author of the forthcoming Illegal Leisure, which studied 700 teenagers for five years, there's still a huge generation gulf when it comes to drugs. "In the Sixties it was mainly middle-class students, doing it away at college. Now they're much younger, and they're still at home. Many parents can get their heads around cannabis use, but most teenagers are too concerned about their parents' mental health to let them know about the other drugs they're taking." And let's not even start on money and clothes.

We've tried not to make the same mistakes our parents made - no rigid authoritarianism, no smacking, lots of explaining - but it was a whole lot easier before that sweet boy you were so close to turned overnight into Harry Enfield's Kevin - or something far worse, if Kids is anything to go by. What models have we got to fall back on now? Howard Marks? As the author of Life After Birth, Kate Figes says parenting is no longer about making things as easy for oneself as possible; instead it's all so child-centered that the parent almost disappears. "You've pandered to their needs so much from the ages of nought to ten that when you feel you have to pull the reins back because they're adolescents, you can't."

Baby-boomer parents like having books to consult, but Penelope Leach and Miriam Stoppard no longer hold the answers in the way they did only a couple of years ago. When I went to my local bookshop in search of advice after a particularly traumatic phase with my two teenage sons, I couldn't find anything much except helpful books for teenagers themselves - and sometimes they seem so empowered, you wonder if they need any more support.

Nick Fisher, who's written several such books (The Complete Guide to Kissing, How to Live with a Willy) says British publishers don't take the market seriously, unlike those in the USA, where a self-help book can be a bestseller. (There are 46 teen-parenting books on Amazon.com's virtual shelves, and Anthony Wolf's seminal work Get Out of My Life But First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall: A Parent's Guide to the New Teenager has been in the best-seller lists since 1991. Here, says Fisher, a book like Wolf's would be called Dealing with Difficult Teenagers, or it would be a joke book with cartoons. His own works do well in libraries, and are usually "surreptitiously borrowed or stolen".) In Britain people think they should know how to parent by the time their kids are teenagers, that they should be on top of it. "And they're frightened of others pointing the finger at them for having a bad teenager; in the US, it's all about sharing it and dealing with it." Howard Parker actually does think there's little hope by the time they're teens. "The parenting style has already been set, the way you cope has been laid down already. It depends on the quality of trust that's there."

But surely this stage requires new coping techniques, and we need guidance. (Specialist books published by the Tavistock, or the Trust for the Study of Adolescence, are out there, but rarely on sale in your local Waterstone's.) Kate Figes is planning a book; parents of adolescents are particularly in need of one, she says, because talking to each other about problems is not only an admission of failure and inadequacy, but also (unlike in baby and toddlerhood) a betrayal of their child's trust. Suzie Hayman, whose book You Just Don't Listen: A Parent's Guide to Talking to Teenagers (Vermilion) comes out in the summer, is all for negotiation and discussion, words which strike fear into many a parent's heart. If you've rubbed along for 13 years without honing your powers of negotiation, can you start now it's crisis time? "You need to listen to them if you want them to listen to you," says Hayman. "Have family conferences. If you're trying, they'll come round; don't attempt to impose in a sly way. Don't manipulate. Be open."

Hayman is keen on Parent Network classes, which give desperate parents tips on how to be calmly assertive. Use the broken record technique: calmly repeat a short one-sentence refusal ("I know you are watching TV and I want you to do your homework".) Or use the four-part message, as in "When you come in at 2am instead of 11, it makes me feel worried, because I don't know where you are. What can we do about it?" instead of "What the hell do you mean by coming in at this time, you're grounded." Starting the sentence with "when", you see, forces you to describe the behaviour rather than abusing the teenager (heaven forbid) and "therefore it's more likely you will get cooperation". But I've heard of adolescents so weary of these techniques they just reply, "Don't give me that Parent Network shit." That, says Hayman, is because the parent is using the technique to win, which is unacceptable. Or it could be that the kid just wants to get a rise out of you.

We're scared our children won't like us - lovable, laid-back us - if we lay down the law. And they're big - even if we do, will they take any notice? What do we do if they don't? According to Anthony Wolf, it's very rare for teenagers to disobey completely. Rules have power, he says. "They sit inside the teenager's head and exert a constant pressure. And teenagers, though they would like to, can do nothing about these rules unless the parent abandons them." Teenagers don't want to be really free and responsible for themselves: they know they have a pretty good deal. "They don't want to overthrow the system of parental control, they just want to get around it." This means that "parents of teenagers have considerably more power over their teenage children than they realise."

Well, that's a relief. But don't try to be your child's best friend, however tempting that might be. "You'll be cast as the bad guy even if you're not, and being the bad guy helps the relationship get where it needs to go," says Nick Fisher. "Don't try and condone behaviour that's not necessarily useful." If you make drug-taking safe and boring, for example, by letting the teenager smoke at home or even buying the dope for them, there's the danger they'll rebel in unfathomable ways: "like wanting to work in C&A, or join the Army or wear bri-nylon." Set boundaries, say the experts. Charlene Giannetti and Margaret Sagarese, authors of The Roller-Coaster Years (just out from Bloomsbury) issue dire warnings about admitting to your child that you used drugs. Why do so? They ask. Some things can be kept private. Or give them an edited version. Some parents reveal all in order to seem more human. "Our children know we're human," snarl the authors. "Without digging up our past, we make enough mistakes in present day-to-day life to point up that fact." And the learning- from-my-mistakes approach doesn't wash: even if you tell them about your time in the mental hospital after those 20 acid trips, "Human nature still dictates, `It won't happen to me'", especially as teenagers feel more invincible than other age groups.

"We're a liberal generation, we want to be tolerant, and we're frightened of our own authority," says psychotherapist and painter Gabrielle Rifkind. "It's easy to give up on parenting and lose confidence when teenagers push you away, but you mustn't push away in response. You'll get it wrong, but they need you to get it wrong. Parenting has to become more clandestine; you have to be present - perhaps at home more than you were when they were younger - but not in an obvious way."

Although having an adolescent child may feel more like a nervous disease than a stage, things do change. Robert Coles, author of The Moral Intelligence of Children, calls adolescence a second birth. And as Anthony Wolf says, "The unabated nastiness does run its course and fade away. Ultimately, much of being the parent of a teenager is a matter of faith." Perhaps we need a guide book to give us a bit more faith in ourselves.