My View: Tackling the terrible teens, their tantrums and their terrors

There's the drinking, for a start, and the hanging round parks and smoking and taking who knows what else, and then there's the sex – a TV documentary last week showed a depressing insight into teenage sex life, with a normal- looking mum trying to persuade her newly teenage son, also quite normal-looking, to stop sleeping with his girlfriend.

No wonder many parents are almost exploding with stress, as age-old problems – and sex and drugs are age-old – are compounded by instant access to friends and dangers via mobile phones and social networking sites. Even when they are grounded, they can still get into so much trouble – and we're not necessarily talking about bad teens here.

"Between the ages of 12 and 14, there appears to be an astonishing change in some children," says Charlie Taylor, who is head of a special school in London for children with behavioural difficulties. "Parents suddenly find their charming, sweet, biddable child becomes, almost overnight, argumentative, uncommunicative, bad-tempered, lazy, messy and disrespectful."

Often the teenager can't help his or her behaviour, he explains, as to kick-start and maintain the process of puberty, hormones increase substantially, causing mood swings, loss of concentration and aggression. In his book, Divas and Door Slammers: The Secret to Having a Better Behaved Teenager, he extols the power of praise and recommends a six-to-one strategy, as in six pronouncements of praise for every one instance of criticism. For what he calls the "hard cases", he suggests using hard cash, dividing weekly pocket money up into behaviour tokens, deducted each time he or she misbehaves.

Like many parents, I feel uncomfortable with the idea of paying teenagers to behave like reasonable human beings. Surely the acquisition of money and possessions is part of the problem, valuing stuff above human decency?

But our children live in an increasingly confusing world, one in which technology threatens to do away with the need for human decency and even direct human contact.

It's easy for parents to judge, even easier for grandparents, who often and all-too-readily offer unsupportive and unhelpful advice such as "keep them in" and "don't let them have it", without stopping for one moment to think about the baffling, challenging and sometimes terrifying new world that today's teens find themselves in – a world that they will have to engage with and make mistakes in if they are ever to grow up to survive, let alone succeed.

Perhaps all we can do is follow our teenagers' lead in embracing new communication, even if that means sitting in a separate room in the same house and talking to each other online, as many parents now find themselves doing. "Heya wot u up 2". I know, pity about the grammar.