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Dave Barry
Warning: An American Teenager is Loose in Europe

The last thing I said to my teenage son as I put him on the plane for Europe was: “Don’t lose your passport!” The second-to-last thing I said was: “Don’t lose your passport!”

In fact, if you were to analyze all the statements I made to my son in the week before his departure, they’d boil down to: “Don’t lose your passport!”

The message I was trying to convey was that he should not lose his passport. Of course, he did not need to be told this. He is a teenage boy, and teenage boys already know everything. When a boy reaches thirteen years of age, the Knowledge Fairy comes around and inserts into his brain all the information in the entire universe. From that point on, he no longer needs any parental guidance. All he needs is parental money…

Excerpted from I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers Copyright c 2000 by Dave Barry