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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Teens have been in a state of "crisis" ever since the first parenting handbook was written. Issues of immaturity, and the straightforward fallout of adolescence, are often at the root of teenagers' inappropriate behavior. Says Woodbury of the original gestalt behind specialty schools, "The concept was that most of the children doing drugs, flunking out of school, rebelling against their parents, etc. were immature, not pathological. They needed help growing up. A typical child would be age 16, demanding adult privileges such as freedom to do what they want, sex, drink, etc., operating at the emotional age and sense of responsibility of a 4-year-old. Thus, the schools' goal was to help the students grow up!"
This idea -- that defiant behavior is not pathological but a reflection of immaturity -- underscores the current consensus among adolescent specialists that teens have not changed much over the years, that, in short, it may be parents who need to "grow up" as much as their kids. While teen clinical pathologies do exist and require serious treatment, basic teen risk-taking behavior has not changed over the decades. Parenting, on the other hand, is a different story.
Says Lynn Hamilton, an educational consultant in Santa Barbara, Calif., who often "trails" teens throughout their intervention, "What I'm finding is that there are many parents out there who are overly child centered. Some of them are flower children parents, boomer parents. Many of these parents don't set limits. Fathers are unavailable. Mothers are too enabling or overprotective, creating entitled children. As parents they're relatively clueless. They want to be friends with their children."
Ponton shares this view. "Many of these parents want to be their kid's friend," she says emphatically. "Well, you are not their friend. You are their parent."
The fuzzy line between being a child's parent and his or her peer is a common thread in the fabric of parental dysfunction among boomer parents and, according to many specialists, begins at the earliest stages in a child's development. Patricia Doyle is executive director of the Southwest Region of CEDU, one of the country's oldest and most well-established networks of emotional growth boarding schools and other programs. Pondering the proliferation of specialty schools, Doyle says: "There is clearly a cultural mandate that suggests that many parents have lost the key to parenting. Many of them are involved in delayed parenting; they want to treat their child as their friend, as someone they can reason with.
"Often it's well-intentioned, but parents get too enmeshed in their children's lives," adds Doyle. "They become child advocates and don't want their children to experience any struggle. But children grow through struggle. Struggles are what make us healthy. In the past, parents were more able to separate their needs from their kids' needs. Now it's the other way around. Parents have a hard time separating their own needs from their kids' needs."
Why parents in the past were better able to separate their needs from their kids' needs is a source of debate. Some, like Woodbury, suggest that today's parents are afraid of their teens. "I know of one guy -- a therapist! -- who had a seriously out-of-control 12-year-old," says Woodbury. "He was unable to lay down the law because his child would threaten to report him to Child Protective Services."
Woodbury, a father of four, also implies that well-intentioned but overly child-centered thinking has given too much benefit of the doubt to children, imbuing them with wisdom beyond their years and usurping parental authority. "I am against parent-bashing," he says, "but our society has forgotten certain fundamental things about kids. For example, there are people who believe that children don't lie. But of course children lie! Every child is capable of manipulation. If your philosophy is that a child won't lie, where is a parent's authority?"
Parents who give their child too much authority are only part of the problem. Smoking pot with your child, not setting boundaries or imposing structure, swapping designer clothes, passing off your platinum card to keep your kid busy, having too much family democracy (where everyone, and thus no one, is the decision maker) -- the line between parent and child is progressively blurred, and a growing body of literature suggests that parents are increasingly removed from the realities of childhood and parenting.
Experts in education and adolescent psychology speculate that in the past 30 years our culture has put less emphasis on individual responsibility and too much on individual satisfaction, creating a culture of adult children who don't know about delayed gratification.
Diane Ehrensaft -- a developmental and clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif., and author of two books -- was moved to write her second book when she realized "that something profound was occurring in our culture that needed explanation." In "Spoiling Childhood: How Well-Meaning Parents Are Giving Their Children Too Much -- But Not What They Need," Ehrensaft explores the many contradictions that define today's parents.
"How could this same group of parents be simultaneously accused of being the most self-centered and self-indulgent, and also the most child-centered and overly indulgent, generation of parents in modern history?" she asks. "Can it be both ways?"
