There’s plenty of switches on the tracks you know. Doesn’t really matter which train your on as long as you take the turn to the right one while there’s still time.
A friend’s teenaged daughter is rebellious, gothish with vapiristic tendencies, and has been trying to get pregnant. She’s currently insitutionalized for a year in the hopes of getting straightened out.
I probably would have been considered a “bad” teen if there had been any rules to speak of at my house.
As it stood, I got the occasional admonishment for growing weed in the backyard, but that’s about it… as long as I did my job (school), I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. Dad knew I was basically a good kid and he trusted me not to be stupid. I did a lot of drugs, and I had some sex-- not a whole lot, 'cause one thing Dad wasn’t cool with was the boyfriend staying the night in the same bed, but I understood that and respected it-- but I made good grades, so I had no curfew and no parental stress. If I had been raised by anybody else, I would have been considered a hellion, because I would’ve done what I wanted to do regardless of my environment… probably even more so just for spite, if anybody’d tried to stop me.
I turned out fine. I took forever graduating college, but that had very little to do with partying and much more to do with burnout. I have a decent starter job now, I’m healthy and happy, and I have a great relationship with my Dad and extended family.
I think the fact that my limits were self-imposed as a teen forced me to develop a sense of independence and self-respect. I also had a great group of friends; all of us were stoners and bullshitters, but we all had success in mind for ourselves and we differentiated ourselves from the dim-bulb slackers and/or fuckups who would never become anything. I wasn’t wrong about any of those people. A couple of them killed themselves; most of them still live with their parents in the same damn neighborhood working or selling drugs off-and-on, half-ass trying to support their five snot-faced kids.
So I guess the answer is, it depends how “bad”. And one person’s definition of “bad” will vary from another’s, but anything I would consider truly “bad” in a teenager… I haven’t seen very many people recover from.
I have (had?) a brother who was pretty bad. I won’t go over the list of what he did; I’m sure you can make your own picture based on previous responses and it’ll be accurate enough.
He dropped out of college after two years and was so ashamed that he didn’t tell my family. We haven’t heard anything from him since. That was maybe 8 years ago, and as far as we know, he could be dead.
It still bothers my dad a lot. It’s one thing to have a kid die, but a whole 'nother to have them just disappear.
I was the good girl and stayed home and tried to please my parents. My brother stayed out until his curfew (my parents didn’t want to know where he went). He drank and drugged but we both ended up going to a good college. I became an average student and he drank and drugged. He dropped out for a while and ended up graduating after me. He has had a good job for probably 15 years, during which he drank and drugged on the weekends. He had a heart attack last year (presumably the cocaine had something to do with it, but he also had a blocked artery) and has drank and drugged maybe once since then.
He’s been unhappy his whole life and that hasn’t changed, but he’s only hurt himself and continues to be functional. I think he could kill himself but wouldn’t hurt other people.
I have a brother like this. He was one angry kid, slamming doors and scaring the dog. Pretty much right after he graduated high school, he got on his 10-speed, gathered some provisions, and rode off into the sunset. He spent a good while bumming around California along with western Mexico and western Canada, rode back on a new 10-speed, stayed at home for a couple of weeks–during which he was actually nice–then rode off again. This time for Europe, again bumming around for at least a year. While Europe, he picked up smoking cigarettes, and possibly other stuff.
He came back from Europe, stayed at home again–nowhere near as nice as last time–and eventually went to the same college where most of our siblings had gone. College life was a problem for him and he’d drift between there & home. He did finally graduate, around the same time I graduated high school; he’s 10 years older the I. He came home one more time to look for work, didn’t find any, then shuttled among other siblings.
He disappeared some time prior to our parents’ 50th anniversary, leading everyone at the party to wonder if he finally mouthed off to the wrong guy. He turned up years later, back in California, and aksed for stuff that he left with one of our sisters.
My mom’s half-brother was a bad kid. Drinking, drugs, dropped out of school, ended up in jail. Once his sentence was over, he joined the Army and shaped up in a hurry. He was a helicopter mechanic of some kind while he was in the service, and learned a trade so he could get a good job when his stint with the Army was over. He got married, had a kid, and settled down to a nice, middle-class existence.
My aunt’s ex-husband was a similar bad kid, but he grew up to be a bad adult. Washed out of the Army, several overdoses/suicide attempts, took his four-year-old daughter with him on drug deals, now lives in a trailer park with his equally upstanding girlfriend, with whom he was cheating during his entire marriage to my aunt. We still have to deal with him occasionally because he’s my cousins’ father (they’re still kids), but we all wish he would hurry up and have a fatal overdose or something because all he does is bring chaos and misery to everyone he knows.
So you never know how someone will turn out.