The thing about youthful offenders is that no one seems to care about them. Most people don't like adolescents - even the good ones can be snarky and unpleasant. Combine the antipathy we feel toward the average teenager with the fear inspired by youth violence and you have a population that no one wants to deal with.

It's every teenager's dream to be in a band tour the world and be famous.

Few if any teenagers can relate to getting up for school and finding famous comics like Pryor and Williams hanging out in your living room after a hard night of partying. But that's Hollywood.

I don't feel I was ever a 'famous' child actor. I was just a working actor who happened to be a kid. I was never really in a hit show until I was a teenager with West Wing playing First Daughter Zoey Bartlet. In a way that was my saving grace - not being a star on a hit show. It kept me working and kept me grounded.

The most famous person in my phone is Lindsay Lohan. We starred in 'Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen' together in 2004 and we've stayed in touch.

I became very famous as a teenager and my name and photo were splashed in all the media. They made me larger than life so I wanted to live larger than life and the only way to do that was to be intoxicated.

We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy substance abuse and the failings of the family. Then we expect them to educate our children.

I bought a lot of rubbish things that kids buy: skateboards and clothes and typical teenage stuff. And as soon as I could I wasted a lot of money on cars - BMW's mostly - for myself and my family.

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.

If I could sell 500 million records every time it would be great. But I've also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager in a very kind of model version of it.