When my older sister was about 14, I watched in awe as she transformed into an oh-so-daring jerk from a docile darling. For several tense months, she stopped calling my mother “Mom” and referred to her only as “Ma’am,” as if she was being court-marshaled. (“Yes, ma’am.” “No, ma’am.” “Please pass the kugel, ma’am.” “Ma’am, you are ruining my life.”)

I was impressed. It took a lot of will power to be so consistently obnoxious — or so I thought.

It turns out, maybe all it took was an overactive hormone receptor.

That’s what professor Sheryl Smith has spent the past week explaining to a country hanging on her every don’t-worry-it’s-not-your-fault-your-children-hate-you word. Her work with lab rats at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn seems to show that in the two years (or, in the case of lab rats, four days) it takes to go through puberty, the brain reacts to stress differently than it does in childhood or again in adulthood.

Stress usually causes the body to release a Valium-like hormone that calms. During puberty, that same hormone has the opposite effect: It makes the person (or at least the rat) more anxious, more moody, more ready to slam the bathroom door, lock oneself in, and hit one’s head on the toilet seat because one’s bangs are looking bad. (The rat behavior equivalent is cowering in the dark part of a maze, a colleague of Ms. Smith’s, James Celentano, explained.)

So did Ms. Smith choose to study this stage of life because she raged her way through it herself? Or because she’s raising little ragers of her own? Or does she just like pubescent rodents?

Well, she and her husband are raising two daughters of pretty much precisely puberty age, 11 and 13, but they’re busy with violin and Japanese and singing lessons. Suffice it to say, they do not spend a lot of time arguing that they “really” need sweatpants stamped “Booty call” on the butt.

As for Ms. Smith’s own adolescence: “I did have some fights with my mother,” she admitted. “But mostly it was just a much darker period of my life.”

If that doesn’t sound familiar, I’ll eat my collected works of Judy Blume.

Still, Ms. Smith said she enjoyed moving around the country — her father was in the Navy — and she made it to the College of William and Mary, so her grades must’ve stayed high, even if her spirits flagged. By the time she was in grad school at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, she was already studying puberty in girl rats. (So maybe she does like pubescent rodents after all.)

John Chapin, for his part, was studying boy rats.

Perhaps they were fated to meet.

“Oh, the Robo-Rat,” Mr. Chapin said when asked about hismost famous experiment. As a researcher who came to SUNY Downstate in 2000 with his wife, Mr. Chapin had his own moment in the limelight a few years back when he announced he had trained rats to obey remote commands. With tiny cameras strapped to their backs, they could be used to, say, search through post-explosion rubble for survivors or scurry through a building to find a bomb. Though the rats have yet to find steady work, a venture capitalist was calling Mr. Chapin this past week even as Katie Couric was sitting down with Ms. Smith for an on-air chat. When you’re hot, you’re hot.

Obviously, Ms. Smith’s research struck a nerve because puberty is such a challenging time — for parents. Teenagers “brood and worry and ruminate,” the director for the NYU Child Study Center’s Parenting Institute, Richard Gallagher, said. “It does seem they become a bit more reasonable about these things at about 16 or so, but early adolescence is when they’re more likely to be highly emotional.”

No kidding. One day, when my friend Carol’s daughter was 12, she came into Carol’s room and shut the door — “which is always scary,” Carol said. “She said, ‘Mom, we need to talk.’ And then she told me everything I did annoyed her.”

Carol’s cool. She knew this was a teachable moment. “I explained to her why she was finding me annoying, and I told her it was an important part of her becoming independent. And since I’m the ‘alpha female’ in her life, she’s going to decide which parts of me she wants to keep, and which parts to throw away, and then I saw that look on her face and I just said, ‘Am I annoying you right now?’ and she said, ‘Yes!’ And ran out of the room.”

That’s why we toast Ms. Smith today. Her work suggests that teenagers, especially the ones just coming into their own, don’t really hate their parents any more than their parents hate the little rats their children have become. Pubescent rats have a certain charm.

At least to some.