Do You Really Remember Your Teenage Years?

How many of you secretly harbor the fantasy that you actually do remember what life was like for you when you were a teenager? Be honest.

Sure, I joke around and cringe with my friends when I look at my high school yearbook. And, of course, I readily join in the refrain, "I would never go back to high school again!" But the truth is, for better or for worse, I can remember most of what happened to me in high school and the kinds of things I used to think about; it's just that it's too painful to bring back all those memories. But, yeah, I think my memories are pretty accurate.

Even though most adults don't say this aloud—especially to our own teenagers—deep down, most of us believe that we can remember what it was like when we were teenagers. On this topic, most of us are wrong. No matter how difficult it is to admit, we have been successful in blocking out much of what happened during our own adolescence. In addition, we have distorted much of what we were feeling and thinking, as well as how we remember the way others behaved towards us. In The Seven Sins of Memory, author Daniel L. Schacter makes a pervasive case about the extent of our distorted memories when it comes to adolescence:

We're all capable of distorting our pasts. Think back to your first year in high school and try to answer the following questions: Did your parents encourage you to be active in sports? Was religion helpful to you? Did you receive physical punishment as discipline? Northwestern University psychiatrist Daniel Offer and his collaborators put these and related questions to sixty-seven men in their late forties. Their answers are especially interesting because Offer had asked the same men the same question during freshman year in high school, thirty-four years earlier.

The men's memories of their adolescent lives bore little relationship to what they had reported as high school freshmen. Fewer than 40 percent of the men recalled parental encouragement to be active in sports; some 60 percent had reported such encouragement as adolescents. Barely one-quarter recalled that religion was helpful, but nearly 70 percent had said that it was when they were adolescents. And though only one-third of the adults recalled receiving physical punishment decades earlier, as adolescents nearly 90 percent had answered the question affirmatively.

For now, the why of this phenomenon is not important, but that it exists is hugely relevant to you and your teenager. Perhaps the most important insight to derive from Offer's research is that in the areas he examined, the one that had the most anxiety (physical punishment as discipline) also had the most distortion. In a strange twist, this means that when we are adults, the adolescent memories that are the most unreliable are the ones concerning issues that made us the most anxious.

Sure, everyone remembers scoring the winning basket in the big game or getting the lead in the spring musical and performing in front of packed houses during senior year. But even these memories are open to distortion, or maybe it's just plain exaggeration. Over the years, that final shot you made to win the basketball game tends to get farther and farther from the basket and more and more opposing players swarmed over you as you took the shot. And over time, the crowd at the musical tends to swell in your memory, as do the thundering ovations afterwards.

Memory distortion over time is natural, so don't deny the possibility, bordering on certainty, that you have some inaccurate memories about your own adolescence. More than ever this points us in the direction of curiosity over expertise. In simple language, you don't know what your teenager is going through, and if you pretend otherwise you're headed for a crash into that proverbial wall that many teenagers build to keep their parents out.

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