All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (23 page)

Steinberg has also found that parents of a child of the same sex weather the pubescent years far worse than parents of a child of the opposite sex. (The conflicts between mothers and daughters, he added, are especially intense—a finding that has been duplicated over and over again by researchers other than Steinberg.) He speculates that their difficulties may again be explained by an abrupt break in equilibrium: before adolescence, parents tend to be much
closer
to their child of the same sex, which makes that child’s efforts to separate all the more painful.

There is, however, another possible explanation for this phenomenon, one I ran across not infrequently in interviews: having a child of the same sex opens up an uncomfortable opportunity for identification. The child, now older, reminds the parent of himself or herself, or who he or she was in high school. “I think it’s a lot easier to parent a child before their struggles start to reflect your struggles,” says Brené Brown, a researcher at the University of Houston who specializes in thinking about shame. “The first time our kids don’t get a seat at the cool table, or they don’t get asked out, or they get stood up—that is such a shame trigger.”

Even more complicated, the child can represent threatening teenagers from their parents’ own youth. Samantha brought this up at Deirdre’s house when she was talking about how intimidating she sometimes found Calliope. “Sometimes I look at my child,” she told the group, “and I’m so frightened of her because of who that person was in high school. You go back to who you
were
in high school. You have to remind yourself:
Wait a second. I’m the parent here.
”

In addition, Steinberg has found that adolescence is especially rough on parents who don’t have an outside interest, whether it be work or a hobby, to absorb their interests as their child is pulling away. In his sample, this was true, strangely, whether the parent was an involved parent or a disengaged one, a helicopter or a remote-controlled drone. “The critical protective variable was not, as some might expect, whether or not an individual invested a great deal in parenting,” he writes. “It was the
absence
of non-parental investment.” Mothers who’d made the choice to stay home were especially vulnerable to a decline in mental health. But so were parents without hobbies, and so were parents who didn’t find fulfillment in their jobs and viewed them more as a source of pay than a source of pride. It was as if the child, by leaving center stage, redirected the spotlight onto the parent’s own life, exposing what was fulfilling about it and what was not.

This is nowhere more evident to me than when I sit down to talk to Beth, the public school teacher who complained at Deirdre’s house that her fifteen-year-old was “using his intelligence for evil.” She already has one daughter in college. And that daughter? Amazing. Her adolescence passed without much drama; Beth is plainly awed by her. But her son Carl . . . his passage to adolescence was another story entirely. The porn she could handle (what teenage boy isn’t curious about sex?), but the defiance, the cursing her out, the endless hours he sank into
StarCraft
—all of that wore her down in a terrible way. She found it worse than wearying, actually: it was confidence-killing, as if she were doing things all wrong. He was a bright kid, testing into a competitive public middle school and high school, but she could see he was struggling academically, and struggling more generally with issues of motivation and initiative. Everything became a tiresome contest of wills; everything devolved into a fight. “It seemed like whenever we left to go anywhere,” she says, “to get him out of bed, there’d always be a huge argument.” Her moods became tethered to his. On a week when their relations were warm, she’d feel better; if he pulled away, even though there’d be less arguing, “I’d get depressed.”

And then came the summer between his freshman and sophomore years, when he got so slothful he began to sleep on a bare mattress. “I’d say to him, ‘Carl, just get up and put a sheet on your bed.’ And he’d say, ‘Get out of here. You’ve failed as a mother.’ ”

In late August, she gave him an ultimatum: respect the rules of the house, or go live with Dad. So he left. Before that, he’d spent almost all his evenings, all his weekends, all his
life
practically, with her.

“And it was kind of like,
What’s my purpose?
” she says. “I never thought about my job or career as something I was
devoted
to. My kids had always been my number one.”

Now, with Carl at her ex-husband’s house and her daughter headed back off to college, she realized she wasn’t looking forward to the new school year at all. “If all I had was my job,” she says, “I wanted something else.”

But she had a constructive response to this distress. She wrote a letter to Carl, and one to her ex-husband, too, trying to relate, trying to empathize, trying to accept the blame that was hers. She took Carl to a psychiatrist and got him a proper evaluation, which yielded, in the end, a common enough diagnosis—ADHD—for which there was a common enough treatment—medication. His grades went up by one or two letters each. After visits with her, he started leaving her voice-mail messages like this one:

Hey, Mom, it’s Carl. I just wanted to say I had a really great time today and thank you a lot. I know that I was like, uh, you know, I was, um, very irresponsible with the laptop . . . overall, throughout life. I was, you know, I was a very hard child. I just want to say I’m very sorry, and thank you for putting your faith in me once again, even though we’ve had so much trouble in the past. I really love you. . . .

He left that one six months before we sat down to talk. “I’m saving it
forever,
” she says, after playing it for me.

She didn’t pressure Carl to come home and live with her. And he didn’t. Their relationship remained tenuous, easily capsized. But Beth began to detect a subtle shift in her attitude toward her job. By winter, she realized: she really
liked
her students. There were a couple in particular who really moved her and who got really attached to her—a boy who wanted her to come see him act in a play and a remarkably resilient girl whose mother had died. “I was getting from my students what I wasn’t getting from my son,” she says. “Appreciation, connection. But I had to get to the point where I could recognize that—realizing that I can’t get everything from my family, my kids.”

marital strain, part ii

“There was a recent issue where we strongly
, strongly
disagreed,” Kate is saying, “and I was right.”

Her husband Lee, a man in his midfifties with longish gray hair, gives her a baffled look. “I don’t even know what issue you’re referring to.”

“The party at Paul’s.”

Lee sucks in his breath. “But that’s where—”

“Let me talk, okay? I feel strongly about this.” Lee stifles his frustration. He yields the floor.

It’s a tense moment. Kate and Lee have been together for twenty-two years, and their marriage is solid: they exercise together, shop together, and have all of their dinners together; they both work at home and have managed to keep the peace. But when their son and daughter entered adolescence—the kids are now fifteen and nineteen, respectively—Kate noticed a transformation in their marital dynamics. She said it outright, the night we were all sitting around Deirdre’s kitchen table: “There’s a lot more discord between us, having teenagers around. I’m just assuming that when they’re both out of the house, there’ll be a lot less.”

This morning, at their home just around the corner from Deirdre’s place, Kate and Lee are talking about that discord, or at least generously trying. It’s hard.

“If the kids go to a party at somebody’s house,” Kate resumes, “I want to know that there’s going to be a parent present. And if they can’t tell me, I will call and find out.” She means it. She’s done it. “And this time,” says Kate, “I let it slip a little bit, because we were dealing with a friend of Henry’s who we’ve felt was very trustworthy before.”

So her son went to the party, and the parents were away. “It was one of these things where the kid lied,” says Kate. “He told his parents he’d be sleeping at somebody’s house, but instead he invited everybody over in his grade, and the police showed up.” When the parents returned, they were mortified, sending emails of apology to all the families involved and making their son personally call everyone and say the same.

So what, I ask, was Kate and Lee’s argument about?

“Whether he should have been allowed to go,” says Kate. “Lee didn’t think it was as big a deal.”

“Which
remains
my view,” says Lee.

“It shouldn’t,” says Kate. “If
we
left the house, and there was a party, and the police came, and
our
house was trashed, that would have been a nightmare. I don’t want my kid to be party to that.”

IF ADOLESCENTS ARE MORE
combative, less amenable to direction, and underwhelmed by adult company, it stands to reason that the tension from these new developments would spill over into their parents’ marriages. But gauging the influence of teens on relationships is a tricky business. A lot of confounding factors—career dilemmas, health troubles, the routine difficulties of coping with aging parents—can sneak into the mix, making it hard to distinguish between the effects of adolescent children and other developments common to midlife; it’s also not uncommon for marital satisfaction to steadily decline over time from sheer habituation. (Certainly, sexual frequency in married couples declines over time.) But that hasn’t stopped some researchers from trying to measure the impact of adolescents anyway, and a number have concluded that marital satisfaction levels do indeed drop once a couple’s firstborn child enters puberty—on
top
of a more general decline in marital satisfaction.

In fact, many studies will go to elaborate lengths to show just how the onset of puberty and a decrease in marital happiness coincide. A 2007 survey published in the
Journal of Marriage and Family
went so far as to track the “growth spurt[s], growth of body hair, and skin changes” of the children of its 188 participating families—as well the voice changes in boys and the first menses in girls—in order to see if marital love and satisfaction levels dropped even more precipitously as these changes occurred. They did.

This strife is by no means preordained. There are couples who will tell you that they’ve reclaimed their evenings and resumed adult conversation since their children hit puberty, that they interact almost as they did before their kids came along. Thomas Bradbury, a marriage researcher at UCLA, likes to point out that if a couple has withstood their first child’s passage to adolescence, the parents are “survivors,” with a far more durable marriage than average: “They have weathered a lot of storms, and are settled into routines that work for them, more or less.” But overall, the evidence, both in research labs and in clinical settings, seems to be that relationship dynamics are stressed, rather than strengthened, by adolescence. Andrew Christensen, a UCLA professor who both does research on couples therapy and has a clinical practice—therefore experiencing family conflict daily,
in vivo,
and not just on paper—gives a perfect example of the kind of more subtle conflict he sees among parents of adolescents:

Inevitably, we see ourselves in our kids. And then we see our partner acting toward our child the way our partner acts toward
us.
Like, let’s say Mom is upset with Dad because he hasn’t been very ambitious—he’s a little lazy, hasn’t made it in the world the way he should have. And then she sees her adolescent son showing similar qualities of not taking initiative. She might be angry at the dad for not being a better role model for him, and fears he may be turning into a slacker too. But if you take Dad’s point of view, he sees Mom being critical of the son the way she’s critical of him, and he’s protective of the son.
That tends to be one of the worst-case scenarios of parenting conflict we see clinically
[emphasis mine].

Long gone are the days when the fights started with, “I got the baby
last
night,” or, “What were
you
doing all day?” Either directly or indirectly, the fights increasingly revolve around who the child is, or is becoming. Projection is now possible. Identification is now possible. Which means that competitiveness, envy, disgust—all are possible, all can rear their heads. These aren’t feelings evoked by younger children. They’re brought on by other
adults.

Mistaking teenagers for adults can be especially problematic in high-conflict relationships. As children mature and develop the capacity to reason and empathize, it’s increasingly tempting for their parents to recruit them in their arguments, which only aggravates those arguments.
Now you’re dragging Charlie into this?
(In one intriguing study, teenage girls felt more pressure to side with their mothers if their parents were still married, while teenage boys felt more pressure to do so if their parents were divorced—suggesting, perhaps, that teenage sons feel compelled to step in as their mothers’ protectors if their fathers are no longer at home.)

In
Crossing Paths,
Steinberg gives another example of how identifying with one’s adolescent can strain a marriage. I should say up front that I haven’t seen this finding replicated. (Then again, I’m not sure anyone’s bothered to try.) Steinberg noticed a substantial decline in the marital satisfaction of his male subjects when their teenagers began to date. “In fact,” he writes, “the more frequently the teenager dated, the more unhappily married the adolescent’s father became.” If his teenager was a son, Steinberg noticed, the effect was especially bad. He surmises it has to do with a combination of sexual jealousy and nostalgia for a lost era of open-ended possibilities. But he admits he didn’t quite think it was possible to put this question to his subjects directly.