But your route has a number of risks. One, that you know what you’re doing when you do the pruning. This may be true for Dominic and for trees and shrubs, but this is not always the case. Think about frontal lobotomies and ECT.

The second risk is that what you do is in the context of what you “consider good”, an extremely subjective stance. This may work when the relationship between you and what you prune is possessive, the plant is yours and yours alone. It is somewhat more worrying when the plant being pruned is someone else’s head.

I prefer to think of it this way; plants get pruned in order to coexist in an ecosystem with specific constraints in the context of nutrients and water and sunshine and space. Without the pruning, they are suboptimal in the context of the constraints and of the overall garden.

It is about evolutionary adaptation in order to coexist, sometimes self-driven, as in heliotropes, sometimes with Invisible Hands, such as Dominic and his shrubs. Kids and youth and even adults go through that, at home and school and university and work and life.

They adapt. They evolve. They respond to external stimuli. Good. But would you let me prune Gilbert?

I prune stuff in my garden to encourage growth. Yes, I am shaping the tree or shrub in a particular way that I consider good and you may say that I am not allowing it to develop naturally, but on the whole pruning is a positive contribution to the well-being of the plant and the glory of my garden.

Perhaps “synaptic bonsai” is more like what you mean :-)

I feel that many teenagers mature before they hit adulthood ; could be due to the different situations they have experienced that forced them to be aware of what the “big, bad world” is like. However, many adults simply brush off the 2 cents worth that teens give. This is just due the mentality of the adults that they feel that the teens have no idea what they are talking about.

Also i do agree that teenagers find it unreasonable for being treated in this manner when there are loads of adults out there that behave worse than them and have no common sense.

I am inclined to believe that a teenager’s brain is much different from that of an adults because of so many differences between an adult and a teen.

As much as i do not like Britney Spears and her songs, i could not help recalling her song: I am not a girl, not yet a woman. Because that really does hold some truth.

Bottom line: teenagers are less able to control impules, are more susceptible to mood swings and in general have a harder time making rational decisions in the way that adults do.

I don’t know that it invalidates the questions you ask about Generation M, which has a lot more to do with the different kind of world they find thereselves in. And it doesn’t invalidate your point that the teenage phase is in part a cultural phenomena: part conventoin and part myth. But I do believe that the biological differences are real.