Parenting & Family Quote by Louise J. Kaplan

Adolescence gets framed as a storm, a slump, a problem to be managed. Kaplan flips that reflex by giving it a grammatical job: it’s the conjugator, the engine that makes tense, person, and mood legible. Childhood is the raw vocabulary of attachment, play, dependence; adulthood is the polished sentence society expects you to deliver on demand. Adolescence is where the subject learns to say “I” in new ways and test whether that “I” holds up under pressure.

The verb metaphor matters because it implies activity and rules, not just hormones and chaos. To conjugate is to take an abstract infinitive and make it usable: I love, you love, we love. In Kaplan’s psychoanalytic context, that’s identity formation under real constraints - sexuality arriving with consequences, authority becoming negotiable, the body rewriting the terms of selfhood. The subtext is almost political: adolescents aren’t simply “between” stages; they are doing labor, translating the private language of family into the public language of peers, institutions, and desire.

There’s also an edge of inevitability here. Conjugation can be awkward; you get forms wrong before you get them right. Kaplan’s line quietly defends experimentation, mood swings, and contradictions as developmental syntax errors - not moral failures. It’s an argument against pathologizing teenage volatility and for reading it as meaning-making: the mind trying on different tenses of the self until one can function in the adult world without erasing the child who started the sentence.