FSB Author Article
Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book The Road to Whatever:
Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence
by Elliott Currie
Published by Metropolitan Books; January; $26.00US; 0-8050-6763-9
Copyright
© 2004 by Elliott Currie
The belief that teenagers are adrift because something has gone
wrong with the traditional family has been prominent in the popular
discussion of youth problems for generations. But in recent years
the lament about the "breakdown" of the family has increasingly
centered on the idea that parents have lost the upper hand--that we
have become a society that is too lenient and indulgent with children.
We are far too tolerant when they break the rules, far too forgiving of
their "bad choices." As a recent bestselling book on raising children
in "an indulgent age" puts it, "Parents give their children too much
and expect too little." To drive home its point that parents are
besieged today by "an overall sense of entitlement" among their
children, the book's cover features a picture of a bratty child making
a face at the reader. The idea that youthful entitlement and a lack of
discipline are at the root of the problems of American families has
stimulated a host of self-consciously "tough" social policies in recent
years, from "zero tolerance" of student misbehavior in the public
schools to the growing use of adult courts to sentence juvenile
offenders, and it has become the mantra of a nationwide movement for
"parents' rights." Dale's mother's enthusiastic support of "the
tough-love thing," for example, is widely shared: the International
Tough Love organization, which claims more than five hundred "support
groups" in the United States (as well as Canada, Britain, New Zealand,
and South Africa), is based on the "core belief" that "parents have
rights too"--among them the right to "stop helping your child and start
taking care of yourself."
But the idea that teenagers get into trouble because they feel too
entitled and their families too solicitous fits badly, as Dale's story
suggests, with the real-world experience of many American teenagers,
including those in this book. Far from being lenient or indulgent,
their parents were often simultaneously punitive and heedless. The
inner culture of their families embodied a harsh and neglectful
individualism that worked in multiple ways to breed the problems that
ultimately overwhelmed them. Their homes were not places where they
could feel progressively more competent and self-assured but arenas
where they came to feel progressively worse about themselves and less
certain that they were, at bottom, worth very much.
Typically, my interviewees grew up in families in which it was easy to
fail and difficult to find either sustained attention or consistent
approval. To an unusual degree, moreover, they were left on their own
to deal with life's uncertainties and attend to their emotional (and
sometimes even practical) needs. Many grew up within what we could call
a high-demand, low-support environment. At worst, their parents'
approval was contingent on their meeting rigid standards of competitive
performance that were hard, if not impossible, to meet--all the more so
because these parents often did little to help their children develop
the emotional or intellectual tools that would have enabled them to
perform on the level expected of them.
In these families, too, children's behavior was often viewed in stark
black and white. children were quickly defined as either "in" or
"out"--either basically OK or, in some fundamental sense, damaged
goods. These families, in other words, tended to be remarkably
intolerant of deviance on the part of their children--even if the
parents themselves struggled with serious problems of their own, such
as heavy drinking or drug abuse. They were also highly punitive
families, in which the rules of acceptable behavior were narrowly drawn
and the reaction to breaking them unusually severe or rejecting. In
most of these families, it was easy for children to "mess up" but hard
for them to get help when they did. And when, as often happened, they
began to get into more serious trouble as a result, the family's
response frequently set in motion a downward spiral. Further evidence
of failure or bad character was met with still more punishment and
rejection, which, in turn, plunged ado- lescents deeper into a sense of
failure and alienation and confirmed their sense of themselves as
flawed and unworthy people. As the cycle progressed, they were pushed
farther away, emotionally and sometimes physically, from the family,
and they slid or stumbled more and more definitively into a world
mainly populated by others in the same boat--kids who had begun to be
defined, and to define themselves, as outsiders or "screwups."
In these families, adolescents were not reliably contained, cared for,
and guided through the trials of growing up: they were forced to sink
or swim on their own and punished or abandoned if they sank. Many of
them swam--and their resilience is both impressive and encouraging. But
many sank, and they sank in ways that put them in grave danger. Their
families, in short, reflected a broader culture of neglectful and
punitive individualism--a modern social Darwinism in which those who
are able to do well on their own, meet expectations, play by the rules,
and play successfully are generally able to get along and even to
prosper, while those who cannot do so face what is often an escalating
process of abandonment, punishment, and exclusion. It is that
culture--not "indulgence" or entitlement-that helped to propel these
teenagers into the perilous state of not caring very much about what
happened to them.
Four themes are especially important in understanding the character of
this culture and its fateful impact on children and adolescents in
America. I call them the inversion of responsibility, the problem of
contingent worth, the intolerance of transgression, and the rejection
of nurturance. In the real world, these themes are rarely found in
isolation. I've teased them apart here, somewhat artificially, to show
how each contributes to an environment that makes growing up unduly
difficult for teenagers in the American mainstream. They represent a
kind of mosaic, a pattern that, in one combination or another, turns up
repeatedly in the lives of troubled adolescents.
On Their Own: The Inversion of Responsibility
One of the most common laments among troubled middle-class youth is
that they were saddled with too much responsibility for managing their
lives as they were growing up. They experienced childhood and
adolescence not as a time when they were "brought up" in any meaningful
sense by competent and admirable adults but as one when they had to
figure out how to navigate life on their own. Often, they will say
that, even when they were small children, they "had to be the adult"
because no one else was. This is a problem with many shades: the degree
of parental abdication ranges from the subtle to the glaring. Some
describe their parents as having been basically AWOL--as having, for
all practical purposes, abandoned (or never taken on) anything
resembling an authoritative and nurturing role in their lives. They
speak of parents almost wholly absorbed in their own "issues" or, at
the extreme, in a state of something like serial collapse. In these
circumstances, some teenagers wind up having, literally, to take care
of their parents; at the very least, they are forced to conclude, early
on, that if they do not learn to take care of themselves, it is not
certain that anyone will take care of them at all. At worst, they may
be essentially discarded by their parents--something we once assumed
happened only in lower-class families.
Sometimes, their parents seem simply overwhelmed and unable to
cope--and, as I'll suggest later, the social and economic situation of
the middle class today has made this a disturbingly common condition.
But there is often more involved. For many of these parents, this
inversion of responsibility is not simply a reaction forced on them by
external pressures: it is what they believe is right. It reflects their
broader views about responsibility and mutuality, and they justify it
in a variety of ways. On the simplest level, parents may explain their
willingness to abandon the parental role on the ground that the child
is just too much trouble for them to handle-even the cause of the
family's problems. The parents may complain that they are too fragile
to deal with a child who is so burdensome. More frequently, the
justifications draw on deeper cultural themes-ideologies about the
proper role of parents and, beyond that, the proper place of "help" and
support in general. The withdrawal from commitment to their children is
rooted in a thin and ultimately self-serving individualism: they
believe that children need to learn to "make good choices," and making
good choices is not something that anyone else can do for them.
They believe that it is bad for children (as for adults) to be given
too much help in dealing with life, and they often complain that their
own children make demands for nurturance and tolerance at a level that,
in their view, parents should not have to provide.
The inversion of responsibility is linked to adolescents' descent into
serious trouble in several overlapping ways. Part of the problem is
practical: the parents' abdication exposes children to the multiple
perils of an increasingly risky world, without the reliable supervision
or assistance that could help them navigate it safely. Since they are
not provided with clear norms or expectations to guide them or with
strong models of adults who themselves navigate their worlds honorably
and competently, teenagers must construct working guidelines on their
own, which necessarily involves a good deal of trial and error. But
relying on trial and error in a dangerous world can get you in trouble
very quickly. The problem with having to take care of yourself as a
child, in other words, is that you probably can't, at least not without
running some very serious risks and enduring some very hard landings.
Often, children in these AWOL families are physically on their own at
some point because their parents have put them somewhere
else to live--anywhere from grandparents to neighbors to the street.
They wind up living all over the place, partly because their families
tend to move a lot and partly because their parents tend to shunt them
off if they become problematic--which can be often, given how easily
these parents define their children as too much to handle. This can
sometimes be mistaken for leniency but is better understood as a kind
of neglect.
The parental abdication may also be combined with the message that the
child, not the parent, is the problem; the child is responsible not
only for his or her own troubles but for the family's as a whole. It is
all too easy, in that situation, for children to internalize that
message, to come to think of themselves as unworthy, even fundamentally
bad, and to feel guilty over the damage they have done. And if that is
how you think of yourself, at least some of the time, you will be less
inclined to shrink from doing things that the world defines as bad: you
are already bad, and so you have little to lose.
There is another side to this. For some adolescents, the experience of
being attended--or largely unattended--by self-absorbed or
dysfunctional parents leaves them with a certain strength that, though
unsolicited, turns out to be of great help later on, as they try to
forge a more centered and productive life on their own. Some of them
say that this kind of upbringing either kills you or makes you
stronger; if you survive it, you come out having learned much that is
of value in coping with life. We will come back to this phenomenon in
looking at how some troubled adolescents manage to turn their lives
around after a period of crisis. Suffice it for now to note that the
experience of parental fragility or withdrawal often has a dual effect:
it loads adolescents with a great deal of troublesome baggage that can
help to precipitate serious problems, but it can also give them a
capacity to handle themselves in difficult situations, to find inner
resources when they are most needed, and to arrive at a sense of
themselves as unusually capable and resilient people.