Being a teenager rarely seems to be easy. One metaphor I like to use is that teenagers are like a cake baking. They enter the oven of adolescence as a sticky mass of mixed up ingredients. In the oven they experience heat and this pressure causes the component parts to gyrate wildly, molecules vibrate and collide with each other and the internal workings of the mixture seems to be a disorganised jumble of confusion. And yet, as time passes, the cake begins to take shape, it rises and sets and takes a recognisable form. It emerges from the oven bigger and brighter and more solid than when it went in.

Here we may also consider that the ease with which the cake rises, often relates directly to the preparation we, as adults gave.