You’ve heard it a million times — parents of older children dishing out the warning to parents of young kids, “Just wait until they’re teens!!” New parents look ahead with foreboding at what’s to come. Being warned that you “don’t want to go there” when there is nowhere else to go but there is a hard pill to swallow. The trajectory of human development does not, after all, offer an ‘opt-out’ or ‘hold here’ option at any given stage. We can’t say, “I’ll take infancy and adulthood, but skip the pesky toddler years and adolescence.”   So, what then is a parent to do? Our adorable kids will turn into teenagers at some point. Are teens-as-nightmares an inevitability? Or are horrific teens simply a by-product of the parenting they receive (meaning how we raise our young children now shapes the teens they’ll become)? Teenagers, of course, have a reputation for being: unpredictable, impossible, irresponsible, moody, disrespectful, dramatic, entitled, and just plain difficult to be around.  Is this something that as parents we must grin and bear? Or, as experts like Julie Lythcott-Haims suggest: Is it possible that the contemporary culture of parenting (where irresponsible and disrespectful behavior, as …