In "The Crisis in Education", Hannah Arendt had already posed the need to reflect on the authority of the adult and the place of the teenagers freed themselves. We intend to outline and trace here, between two banks – Brazil and Spain – the words, acts and staging of adolescence confined in our cities – especially at this time of pandemic. Our goal is to be able to ask new questions, in times of excessive responses, about denialisms, abandonments, protection, the absence and presence of adults in adolescent lives, the role of public education and clinical care. To do this, we try, in the context of an ongoing research, to give the floor to adolescents in different social situations, overcome by the crosses of social care, educational care and / or clinical care. We suspect that the present moment in which we live did not necessarily invent the condition of an adolescence left to their own resources or abandoned to its own fate – which is historical at this stage of existence – but, perhaps, it has exponentially elevated this condition to levels never before seen. Many adults today cannot keep their responsibility to accompany their teens, abandoning them or leaving them adrift. We do not ignore that several of these adults are in the same way – adrift – and they cannot help the young ones much on their hard journeys to achieve, as well as to conquer their social standing. The best thing adults could do would be to "survive; to survive unscathed, without abandoning any important principle" (Winnicott, 1975). But we do not deny that this is a herculean task, that we live in exceedingly difficult times, in which authority – adult authority – has been severely questioned. Those who exercise the role of educational, religious, and political authority, typical of the adult world, do so only at the risk of being deposed. The fact is that, practically or theoretically, we are no longer able to know what authority really is or who can take it. In a way, it has disappeared from the world in which we live and two other supports for Western society have also disappeared: religion and tradition. These are worrying warnings from Arendt (1954), whose thesis we will discuss not without first trying to understand how certain teenagers see themselves in these pandemic times, giving us some empirical basis to encourage our reflections.

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