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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
The Road to
Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the
Crisis of Adolescence
by Elliot Currie
Metropolitan Books,
Henry Holt and Company - February
2005
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.
Copyright © 2004
by Elliott Currie and reproduced
with permission.
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