All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (25 page)

Without romanticizing or overstating the advantages of the past, it is worth noting that there once were more purposeful outlets for adolescents’ restless energies. At the beginning of our republic, writes Steven Mintz
,
“behavior that we would consider precocious was commonplace.” He mentions Eli Whitney, who opened his own nail factory before going to Yale at sixteen, and Herman Melville, who dropped out of school at twelve to work “in his uncle’s bank, as a clerk in a hat store, as a teacher, a farm laborer, and a cabin boy on a whaling ship—all before the age of twenty.” George Washington became an official surveyor for Culpepper County at seventeen and a commissioned major in the militia at twenty; Thomas Jefferson lost both parents by the age of fourteen and entered college at sixteen. “The mid-eighteenth century,” Mintz writes, “provided many opportunities for teenagers of ambition and talent to leave a mark on the world.”

But by the twentieth century, with improvements in mortality rates, more parents survived to shelter their children, and more children survived infancy. Families got smaller. The Progressive era ushered in a much more humane brand of politics, and laws were passed that forbade many forms of child labor and made public school mandatory and universal. (Between 1880 and 1900, the number of public schools in the United States increased by 750 percent.) These were all positive developments; no humane person pines for the Dickensian child-labor practices of years past. But even at the time, there were liberal social critics who wondered whether these new laws would inadvertently rob children of their courage and independence. In the December 1924 issue of
Woman Citizen,
a writer dared ask whether “Lincoln’s character could ever have been developed under a system that forced him to do nothing more of drudgery than is necessitated by playing on a ball team after school hours.” And
Woman Citizen
was not a publication that harbored hostility to the Progressive cause. It published an essay version of Margaret Sanger’s “The Case for Birth Control” that same year.

No matter. After World War II, older children no longer played a central role in the workforce. The divergent paths to American adulthood converged into a single superhighway, with almost all kids zooming at the same speed through the same program: public school, kindergarten through grade 12.

One could argue that school provides an opportunity for adolescents to take risks, but it’d be a stretch. (If anything, it’s easier to make that case about after-school activities—sports, say, or musical theater—than about school itself.) Not all kids are good at school; students excel at different rates and in different subjects; American schools, with their teach-to-the-test mania and standardized curricula, don’t accommodate differences particularly well. Today schooling is so rigidly structured, and so painfully regimented, that there’s almost no room for flexibility—much less risk-taking—at all.

One could more credibly argue the opposite point: that the vanishing of the “as-if” period explains the sudden emergence of what sociologists now call “emerging adulthood”—that late-blooming time when young college graduates live in shared quarters and surf from one low-paying job to another, figuring out where they want to live and what they want to do. This phase has become the new as-if period, the new time of safe experimentation. Some critics call this period “extended adolescence.” But that’s really not what it is at all, if you think about it: this so-called “emerging adulthood” is really adolescence in earnest, the first time children have a chance to experiment and find themselves, which they once did far earlier as a simple matter of custom, a matter of course.

SOMETHING ELSE BEGAN TO
happen once children were synchronized and sequestered. They started to develop a culture of their own. This culture was only made more powerful by mass media and the advertising age, which also started to boom after World War II. A commercial market exploded around teens, who began to drive trends in popular culture. It’s not a coincidence that the word “teenager” emerged in the American lexicon during the forties, and made its first print appearance in 1941, in both
Popular Science Monthly
and
Life.
(“They live in a jolly world of gangs, games, movies, and music,” proclaimed the latter.) This was the same moment that both modern childhood and mass media were born. “Teens, for the first time, shared a common experience and could create an autonomous culture,” Mintz writes, “free from adult oversight.” High schools themselves became the focus of sociological scrutiny.
The Adolescent Society,
a portrait of high school culture in the Midwest, became a classic of sociology in 1961.

As the twentieth century progressed, in short, a paradox evolved. The more time children spent in each other’s company, the more powerful their independent culture became; the more powerful that culture became, the less amenable adolescents were to the influence of their parents. Yet even as adolescents were leading increasingly separate lives, and even as they were chafing under their parents’ influence, they found themselves increasingly dependent on their parents for resources (cars, money), emotional support, and connections in an increasingly complicated world.

The result was the modern teenager, a class of human beings simultaneously excoriated for being too obstreperous and too helpless. They were likened, all at once, to wild horses and penned veal. The Austrian-born psychologist Bruno Bettelheim probably said it best in the 1970s: “We know so much better what makes them tick, and are so much less able to live with them.”

There are ways in which this gap has narrowed in recent years. As ferociously protected as American adolescents may be, their world is more diverse than their parents’ was, and more filled with nontraditional family arrangements. The Internet has introduced them to more sex, violence, and real-life horrors (celebrity sex tapes, dismembered corpses from terror attacks, the hanging of Saddam Hussein) than any preceding generation was exposed to, and today’s adolescents are more aware of the world’s financial instability, with fewer of them coming from the traditional middle class. For their part, parents, as aggressively protective as they’ve been, are more inclined toward openness than their parents were, being veterans of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll themselves. Though they may not be as fluent in consumer and pop culture as their kids, they’re surrounded by the same electron cloud: they’ve all read
The Hunger Games
and watched
Friday Night Lights.
“In other words,” writes Howard Chudacoff in his conclusion to
Children at Play,
“children’s ‘aspirational age’ has risen, while that of adults has fallen. An eleven-year-old no longer asks for a stuffed animal or fire truck and instead desires a Madden NFL football game, a cell phone, an iPod, or a Beyoncé Knowles CD, while a thirty-five-year-old may also indulge by buying a Madden football game, a cell phone, an iPod, or a Beyoncé Knowles CD.”

But there are also important ways in which the paradox of the adolescent’s existence—as both helpless dependent and impertinent rebel—has intensified.

Why? Because today’s adolescents, more than ever before, are full-time professional students in highly structured environments that keep them at home and dependent on the family purse, seemingly forever. And their parents, having waited so long to have them and having made them the center of their lives, spend more time protecting them and catering to their needs than previous generations. The combination conspires against their independence. “Both of us were more independent at their ages,” said Kate, as we watched her fifteen-year-old play soccer. She mentioned her oldest, still in college. “Nina, she’s always coming back to us for input about almost everything she does, which I
never
did with my mother.”

“Yeah, I didn’t check with them so much,” agreed Lee.

“It’s not even about checking in,” said Kate. “It’s about checking
what to do.
”

At the same time, adolescents are spending more time with their own cohort than at any other time in the last three centuries, and they’re doing so at a moment of furious technological change and mass media influence, which means they’re socialized—and socializing—in ways that many parents still find mysterious, even if they too use Facebook (or “Myface,” as Hillary Clinton said in a speech at Rutgers University, unintentionally summing up the problem). When I asked Gayle, Mae’s mother, what the single hardest thing was for her about raising teenagers, she answered immediately: “Not knowing, or not
really
knowing, what they do.” She recalled a time when her youngest, then in ninth grade, told her that she was staying at a friend’s house for the night. Her daughter called twice from her cell phone to check in and report that everything was fine. The next morning, Gayle got a call from a youth officer at the Port Authority, wanting to confirm that she’d given her daughter permission to spend the night in New Jersey. She had not. But a bunch of her daughter’s friends had wanted to go, and the cell phone made it easy to lie.

technology and transparency (the xbox factor)

Since the dawn of teen culture, adolescents have led lives apart, but recent advances in technology have given them a whole new mode of asserting their independence and prospecting on their own. “And it’s
freaking people out,
” says Clay Shirky, a new-media philosopher at New York University. “Because anything that
you
grew up with that you thought was normal, and your parents grew up with and thought was normal, doesn’t just seem like it was normal for two generations. It seems like God wrote it down. Like it was in Leviticus.”

Most media revolutions tend to bring with them a squall of public fretting. Social scientists in the 1920s thought movies “fueled cravings for an easy life and wild parties and contributed significantly to juvenile delinquency,” according to Mintz. The reaction to comic books a few decades later was arguably worse. In 1954, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, author of a best-selling polemic against crime comics, told members of the Judiciary Committee: “If it were my task, Mr. Chairman, to teach children delinquency, to tell them how to rape and seduce girls, how to hurt people, how to break into stores, how to cheat, how to forge, how to do any known crime—if it were my task to do that, I would have to enlist the crime comic book industry.”

Perhaps the key difference today is that technological change is happening so rapidly it’s hard for parents to keep up—whereas their children, whose brains are still plastic and amenable, can adjust to these high-velocity changes in real time. Such adaptations translate into genuine differences of sensibility, which can utterly confound the dynamics of parents and teenagers, even if both sides have the best intentions at heart.

Teenagers, for instance, now have a different sense of time—and therefore planning etiquette—than we do. Fiona, another friend in Deirdre’s extended circle, explained it this way: “If my daughter says, ‘Oh, tomorrow I want to meet my friends downtown,’ and I say, ‘What time are you going to go?’
she just won’t know.
The plan hasn’t occurred yet. Their lives are much more fluid.”

I asked why this was a problem.

“Because I want to plan!” she exclaimed. “And they don’t know what time the movie is. Then they might meet for pizza, but they don’t know—they all have cell phones, they can see at the moment, it’ll depend. . . .”

Adults and teenagers may both carry cell phones, but teens use them as tracking devices, the way NASA once followed the space shuttle on a grid. Adolescents are always texting and monitoring each other’s whereabouts; they always have an ambient sense of where their peers are. This makes the need for them to plan things (never a teen strong suit to begin with) far less urgent; they can just make stuff up as they go. But their parents—who just happen to be the people responsible for their lives and safety—still have quaint notions about time, observing schedules and verbal agreements, and other concrete, articulated measures. “For older generations,” says Mimi Ito, the social media anthropologist, “you explicitly have to open a communication channel—usually with a phone call—in order to meet up face to face. And teens don’t do that. Their
default
is that they’re always connected. They always have their cells, which means lateness doesn’t matter as much anymore.”

This sensibility, this whole way of thinking about time and social interaction, is a source of bewilderment and frustration to parents trying to accommodate their adolescents’ needs for independence. They want to facilitate their children’s ability to have separate and fulfilling lives. But they can’t help feeling jerked around in the process. (“We may or may not be going out for pizza later, and we may be at Sam’s, but we may be at Jack’s.”)

The same time management issue rears its head, adds Ito, when kids play video games. These games are “really accessible,” she says—meaning on any device—“and they don’t tend to have beginnings and ends.” When parents spend forever trying to get their kids to stop playing video games and come down to dinner, they’re trying to impose artificial boundaries in time where no natural ones exist.

BUT PERHAPS MOST PROBLEMATIC
and confusing to parents is the inverted power structure created by their children’s technological fluency. The fourteen-year-old becomes the de facto chief technology officer of the house, with parents coming to him or her to ask where Pandora is on their new television or how to close all the windows on their iPhones. Mothers and fathers describe feeling powerless in the face of the new devices in their midst—including the ones they’re trying to regulate.

“Not only that,” says Shirky, “but parents live in a society that gives them a sense that
their kids
have to give
them
permission to do things. Like asking your child to friend you on Facebook.” Everyone talked about this at Deirdre’s house. Some women were friends with their kids, some weren’t, and some had limited access. Beth told the group she’d been friended and unfriended several times by her son, though her daughter always gave her full visibility into her life. Samantha said her daughter first told her she had a no-friending-adults policy; then it turned out that she was friends with Samantha’s first cousin, also in her fifties. Deirdre kept tabs on her kids through her husband, who was on Facebook, though she wasn’t. “Friending your child—that’s an anxiety-producing activity, no matter what the answer is,” says Shirky. If your child says yes, you may see things you hadn’t expected; if the answer is no, your feelings are hurt and you’re forever wondering whether dubious posts are accumulating on your child’s page. “And
that
problem,” says Shirky, “is new.”