Q. Can you explain the role of power in the life of a teenager to help me understand my son and daughter?

A. Let’s begin with a definition. Power is the ability to control others, to control our circumstances and, especially, to control ourselves. The lust for it lies deep within the human spirit. We all want to be the boss, and that impulse begins very early in life. Studies show that 1-day-old infants actually reach for control of the adults around them. Even at that tender age, they behave in ways designed to get their guardians to meet their needs.

The desire for power is evident when a toddler runs from his mother in a supermarket or when a 10-year-old refuses to do his homework or when a husband and wife fight over money. We see it when an elderly woman refuses to move to a nursing home. The common thread between these and a thousand other examples is the passion to run our own lives — and everything else, if given the chance. People vary in the intensity of this urge, but it seems to motivate all of us to one degree or another.

Now, what about your sons and daughters? Have you wondered why they come home from school in such a terrible mood? Have you asked them why they are so jumpy and irritable through the evening? Perhaps they are unable to describe their feelings to you, but they may have engaged in a form of combat all day. Even if they haven’t had to fight with their fists, it is likely that they are embroiled in a highly competitive, openly hostile environment where emotional danger lurks on every side. Am I overstating the case? Yes, for the kid who is coping well. But for the powerless young man and woman, I haven’t begun to tell their stories.

That’s why they are nervous wrecks on the first day of school or before the team plays its initial game or any other time when their power base is on the line. The raw nerve, you see, is not dominance but self-worth. One’s sense of value is dependent on peer acceptance at that age, and that is why the group holds such enormous influence over the individual. If she is mocked, disrespected, ridiculed and excluded — in other words, if that individual is stripped of power — she feels it deeply.

— Dr. James Dobson