Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Magical Child, discusses the teenage years in this Common Ground interview.

One of the ideas that I will want to share with them, that I am talking about everywhere, is the fact that teenagers are driven by three factors that we never give them credit for.
One is a high sense of idealism. They become very idealistic as early as 11 or 12. That’s part of the great brain change that takes place following the shift between concrete and formal operational thinking. They become very idealistic and look for models of this new idealism in their culture and when you get to thinking about the kinds of models we’re giving them, you shudder.
The second factor is the sense of hidden greatness. They’re convinced that deep within they have a core of themselves that is very great and that if people just realized how great they were they would respect them. Of course, all we do is try to capitalize on that and make them jump through our hoops to achieve success. But, they’re really talking about their own transcendence that’s involved in that big shift of the brain that occurs in adolescence.
Finally there’s a sense of great expectation, that something tremendous is supposed to happen, and they wait for it right around the next corner or the next hill moment by moment. They always gesture to the heart when they’re talking about this because, literally, their next stage of evolutionary development is in the offing.