"It's like being bitten to death by ducks." That's how one mother described her constant s

quabbles with her eleven-year-old daughter. And she's hardly alone in the experience. The arguments almost always involve mundane matters—taking out the garbage, coming home on time, cleaning up the bedroom. But despite its banality, this relentless bickering takes its adolescents—particularly mothers—report lower levels of life satisfaction, less marital happiness, and more general distress than parents of younger children. Is this continual arguing necessary？

For the past two years, my students and I have been examining the day-to-day relation-ships of parents and young teenagers to learn how and why family ties change during the transition from childhood into adolescence. Repeatedly, I am struck by the fact that, despite considerable love between most teens and their parents, they can't help sparring. Even in the closest of families, parents and teenagers squabble and bicker surprisingly often—so often, in fact, that we hear impassioned recountings of these arguments in virtually every discussion we have with parents or teenagers. One of the most frequently heard phrases on our interview tapes is, "We usually get along but..."

As psychologist Anne Petersen notes, the subject of parent-adolescent conflict has generated considerable controversy among researchers and clinicians. Until about twenty years ago, our views of such conflict were shaped by psychoanalytic clinicians and theorists, who argued that spite and revenge, passive aggressiveness and rebelliousness toward parents are all normal, even healthy, aspects of adolescence. But studies conducted during the 1970s on samples of average teenagers and their parents (rather than those who spent Wednesday afternoons on analysts' couches) challenged the view that family storm and stress was inevitable or pervasive. These surveys consistently showed that three-fourths of all teenagers and parents, here and abroad, feel quite close to each other and report getting along very well. Family relations appeared far more pacific than professionals and the public had believed.

According to the passage, parents and teenagers are always at loggerheads with each other over ______.

A．the careless attitude of teenagers toward their parents' work pressure

B．who should take the lion's share of the housework

C．the finger-pointing attitude of the parents toward their children

D．disagreements on each other's behavioral patterns