The "adolescent" condition is reformulated by each new generation, from agreement with the dominant socio-cultural currents. The typical character of the adolescent remains, but not his or her way of life. For example, the adolescent hunter of the Samoan tribes hardly experienced any transition crisis to adulthood, unlike the lifelong learner living in today's urban communities.

Our children are affected by the disappearance of "the culture of effort". Since teenagers are very sensitive to challenge, I suggest parents to raise the demand as challenge.

It is advisable to present adolescence as "the adventure of growing up", which entails successive personal challenges. For example the challenge to have fun without "getting high" beforehand with several drinks.

It is also very desirable that parents see the Education of their teenager not as a "torture", but as an opportunity to face exciting educational challenges. For example, the challenge to understand and communicate with him financial aid to de-dramatize this task and to carry it out with enthusiasm and sportsmanship.

Overprotective and dictatorial parents are not the only possible culprits of generational conflict in the family.

Cristine Collange, a French journalist with several teenage children, has written an autobiographical book: "I, your mother".

I select a fragment:

"Have pity on the parents of today's teenagers! We are accused of all their faults, which serves as an alibi for them. We have not been such bad parents. It was not easy to take the helm educational in a society in complete transformation, in which all values have suddenly aged."

Teenagers are children of their parents, but also of their time.

 Today's postmodernism is a reaction against modernity. The modernist man (19th century) valued reason over feeling; on the other hand, the postmodernist values feeling over reason and is interested only in satisfying his desires. The consistent is thus replaced by the banal and the ephemeral. In this way, value vacuums emerge which are formative vacuums.

The titles of three essays by Gilles Lipovetsky, philosopher and sociologist of postmodernity, express this very well:

"The age of emptiness"; "The empire or of the ephemeral"; "The twilight of duty".

For Sequeri, what some adults and many young people today resemble the most is an indolent, satisfied and gawking Narcissus who is carried away by the idols of postmodernity, including information saturation through the Internet.

The postmodern adolescent is only interested in enjoying the immediate pleasurable moment. The cult of self-image in social networks known as "Selfies Syndrome" is a clear symptom of their narcissism.

Vicente Verdú's prologue to Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X (1993) situates the problem perfectly. He describes a large sector of today's adolescents as a large agglomerate of conformist, passive and abulic people, who are an unknown quantity; that is why he speaks of "Generation X".

Lately, postmodernism is causing more than just a change in habits. I am referring to a worrying drift of adolescence, to a deviation from its true direction and its authentic function; it is ceasing to be a bridge stage between childhood and adulthood to become an end in itself and without an expiration date. The "eternal adolescents" are gaining ground every day.

Is there a solution for the teenagers of postmodernism?

I suggest a dialogue with each of them, to help them demystify the pseudo-values of the subculture in which they are immersed.

 The most effective is preventive work: both the family and the school must educate by promoting a humanist culture. It is that which affirms the primacy of the spirit over the subject and of ethics over the idolatry of technology. Some sociologists of postmodernism (among them Sequeri) propose to revalue the spiritual life proper to Christian humanism.

The preventive Education involves teaching children to distinguish between culture and subculture.

Culture seeks knowledge, the truth of being, while subculture is only interested in useful and/or pleasurable truth.

In a society that contrasts morality and happiness and that confuses happiness and sensible pleasure, it is a priority to promote the development of some virtues that are a manifestation of positive rebellion.

The Education of sobriety is an act of rebellion against consumerism; the Education of modesty is an act of rebellion against the escalation of eroticism.

Today we need educators of humanity ("artisans of humanity", according to Pope Francis).

It is urgent to cultivate what is properly human, to awaken in students from childhood the love for what is true, good and beautiful.