All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (24 page)

WE ALSO SHOULDN’T UNDERESTIMATE
the effect that adolescents can have on relationships simply because they introduce new subjects over which to disagree. Before their children are born, parents don’t tend to discuss what their policies will be toward, say, dating, or wearing short skirts, or staying out late. “At least there are coaches for breast-feeding and sleeping,” says Susan McHale, a developmental psychologist at Penn State. “But then along comes adolescence, and you don’t know what to expect or how to handle it.”

Especially if the child screws up. “One parent is the softie, and the other’s the disciplinarian,” says Christensen. “That comes up a lot, and it’s a very big challenge. Dad sharing his recollections with drugs and alcohol, but Mom remembering something bad happening. And then they divide over it.”

This is the kind of argument that Kate and Lee seem to have a good deal. At their son’s soccer game, they finally tell me about the fight they had when their daughter, Nina, attempted to shoplift a skirt, a little experiment for which the family paid a steep fine. Both agree that the circumstances driving their daughter to such an act were unusual, and that her behavior was atypical—it was summer, she had just graduated from high school, and she was living in a strange city, where she knew virtually no one. But their reactions at the time were very different. Kate was so angry that she refused to pick up the phone when her daughter called to discuss it. Whereas Lee went out of his way to console her.

“As usual,” says Lee, “I didn’t lay into her with fire and brimstone. I could hear how terrible she felt. Rather than reacting to the deed, I was hearing
her.
”

“But my problem with it,” explains Kate, “was the same as the term paper.” She’s referring to the paper Lee edited that still contained traces of his editing suggestions when her daughter handed it in to her professor. “When you do it on a certain level and you get caught,” she says, “it becomes a crime that can affect your
life.
They have to really, really know that it’s really, really serious.”

“But it wasn’t plagiarism.”

“Yes, but he was
accusing
her of plagiarism, and just accusing her could have cost her her scholarship.”

“Well, okay, fine, but, whatever—”

“
No,
” says Kate. “Not ‘okay, fine.’ That’s $20,000 a year. So. No.”

Or consider this exchange, from Deirdre’s table:

KATE:
I’m really,
really
strict with the kids, and he knows that I am, so he’s totally not. We just had a fight about it today. They’ll go to him to tell him stuff they’re afraid to tell me. And he’ll say it’s okay and tell a funny anecdote.

SAMANTHA:
That’s my complaint about my husband too. He minimizes stuff.

BETH:
Same here. I make the rules, and he’s the friend.

This idea seems to be suggested by data too—particularly in a large, renowned longitudinal study by the University of Michigan, parts of which have been ongoing since 1968. In a fairly recent sample of nearly 3,200 parents of ten- to eighteen-year-olds, a disproportionate share of mothers said that the task of discipline fell to them alone (31 percent, versus just 9 percent of the dads). Mothers also reported setting more limits for their adolescents: they were 10 percent more likely than dads to set limits on video and computer games; 11 percent more likely to set limits on what types of activities they did online; and 5 percent more likely to regulate how many hours of television their kids could watch per day.

For the last decade or so, says Nancy Darling, research—including her own—has shown pretty consistently that adolescent girls and boys
both
direct more verbal abuse at their mothers than at their fathers, and they make more physical threats against their mothers too (though both boys and girls are more likely to enact their aggressive impulses against their fathers). According to Steinberg’s research, mothers are also more likely than fathers to quarrel with their adolescent children, and (perhaps as a result of this high-frequency conflict) to bring more family stress into their workplaces.

These complicated dynamics may explain why mothers, contrary to conventional wisdom, tend to suffer less than fathers once their children have left the home. Kate readily admits her relationship with Nina improved considerably once she went off to college. As Steinberg concisely puts it: “Women’s personal crises at midlife do not come from launching their adolescents but from living with them.” Mothers are more attuned to their children’s separation process all along—quarreling with them more, being on the receiving end of more scorn and slights. Whereas to fathers, their children’s departures from home feel more abrupt and occasion more questions and regrets.

the adolescent brain

As Wesley was assessing the conflicts between his sister and his mother, I thought I could clearly discern his self-appointed role within the family. He was the peacemaker and the diplomat, the kid who made a scrupulous point of not being difficult and not making waves. That’s what you do with a strong mother and older sister: keep your head down and your hat brim pulled low.

Yet it was Wesley, sensitive Wesley, so self-controlled and empathetic in every way I could see, and so talented in ways that would make any parent flush with pride, who got dragged home by the police at 4:00
A.M
. Calliope was about to graduate; the family was expecting Samantha’s mother-in-law the following day; they already had a guest in the spare room. Into this picture entered Wesley, tucked into the back of a squad car. He and his friend had been out “egging”—tossing eggs at windows of homes in the neighborhood.

“We hadn’t considered the fact that it was a misdemeanor,” says Wesley as we’re finishing up our bagels. He’s calm as he describes the incident. “We just did it because it was fun.”

That is not, needless to say, how his mother views it. “One of those houses had a kid who Wesley played baseball with,” says Samantha. “He didn’t know.”

Wesley exchanges a discreet glance with his sister. He knew.

There were other things Samantha hadn’t known either, apparently, until we had this conversation. Like how Wesley got out without her knowledge. He’d wait until his parents were sleeping and the fans were running loudly. Then he’d tiptoe downstairs. After a while, his methods became even more advanced. “I started to hop off the roof,” he explains to her, with serene matter-of-factness. “And then it was impossible for you to track me.”

“Wait.” Samantha does a classic double take. “What roof?”

“The roof.
I would climb out my window and hop off the roof. And then climb back up when I got home.”

Samantha stares at him, saying nothing. Then: “How did you get back in?”

“I’d climb,” he says. “There’s a big thing on the railing I could step on. I didn’t think I could do it until I tried. That made everything a lot easier. Before, it was a lot of work for me.”

TEENAGERS MAY STRIKE US
as precocious grown-ups one minute, but only one minute later we realize that they are not. Their forays into independence can tip easily into baffling excess, as if they’re experimenting not just with notions of autonomy and self-determination but with their own mortality—and along the way, the mercy and forgiveness of the law.

As with the mysterious behaviors of toddlers, this conduct has distinct neuronal underpinnings. As recently as twenty years ago, researchers hadn’t given much thought to the teen brain, assuming that adolescents were essentially adults with rotten judgment. But recently, with the advent of magnetic resonance imaging to more closely examine brain topography and function, researchers have discovered that adolescents do not walk around with a defect that prevents them from properly assessing risk. B. J. Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, notes that it’s just the opposite: adolescents
overestimate
risk, at least when it comes to situations involving their own mortality. The real problem is that they assign a greater value to the
reward
they will get from taking that risk than adults do. It turns out that dopamine, the hormone that signals pleasure, is never so explosively active in human beings as it is during puberty. Never over the course of our lives will we feel anything quite so intensely, or quite so exultantly, again.

Making matters worse, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs so much of our higher executive function—the ability to plan and to reason, the ability to control impulses and to self-reflect—is still undergoing crucial structural changes during adolescence and continues to do so until human beings are in their mid- or even late twenties.

This is not to say that teenagers lack the tools to reason. Just before puberty, the prefrontal cortex undergoes a huge flurry of activity, enabling kids to better grasp abstractions and understand other points of view. (In Darling’s estimation, these new capabilities are why adolescents seem so fond of arguing—they can actually
do
it, and not half-badly, for the first time.) But their prefrontal cortexes are still adding myelin, the fatty white substance that speeds up neural transmissions and improves neural connections, which means that adolescents still can’t grasp long-term consequences or think through complicated choices like adults can. Their prefrontal cortexes are also still forming and consolidating connections with the more primitive, emotional parts of the brain—known collectively as the limbic system—which means that adolescents don’t yet have the level of self-control that adults do. And they lack wisdom and experience, which means they often spend a lot of time passionately arguing on behalf of ideas that more seasoned adults find inane. “They’re kind of flying by the seat of their pants,” says Casey. “If they’ve had only one experience that’s pretty intense, but they haven’t had any other experiences in this domain, it’s going to drive their behavior.”

Over time, researchers who look at the adolescent brain have therefore alighted on a variety of metaphors and analogies to describe their excesses. Casey prefers Star Trek: “Teenagers are more Kirk than Spock.” Steinberg likens teenagers to cars with powerful accelerators and weak brakes. “And then parents are going to get into tussles with their teenagers,” says Steinberg, “because they’re going to try to
be
the brakes.”

It’s a dicey business, being someone’s prefrontal cortex by proxy. But resisting the impulse to be a child’s prefrontal cortex takes a great deal of restraint. It means allowing that child to make his or her own mistakes. Only through experience can a teenager—or anyone, really—learn the painful art of self-control.

Complicating matters, adolescent brains are more susceptible to substance abuse and dependence than adult brains, because they’re making so many new synaptic connections and sloshing around with so much dopamine. Pretty much all quasi-vices to which human beings turn for relief and escape—drinking, drugs, video games, porn—have longer-lasting and more intense effects in teenagers. It makes acting out especially tempting to them, and it makes their habits especially hard to break. “I used to think that if I locked up my son until he was twenty-one, I’d be okay,” says Casey. “But the brain does not mature in isolation. Teenagers are learning from their experiences—the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

If it’s of any comfort, B. J. Casey and her colleagues speculate that there’s an evolutionary reason why Kirk rather than Spock so often emerges the victor in the quest for control over an adolescent’s mind. Human beings need incentives to leave the family nest. Leaving home is dangerous; leaving home is hard. It requires courage and learning lessons of independence. It may even require a purposeful recklessness.

In a piece he wrote for
National Geographic
about the teen brain in 2011, the science writer David Dobbs began with his own personal experience, recalling the time his oldest son, then seventeen, had been pulled over by the cops for driving 113 miles per hour. One of the strangest parts of the whole episode, he writes, was when he realized that his son didn’t accidentally drive like a maniac. He planned it out. He
wanted
to drive 113 miles per hour. He in fact found it maddening that the cops gave him a citation for reckless driving. “ ‘Reckless’ sounds like you’re not paying attention,” he told his father. “But I was.”

And when I asked Wesley why he was tossing eggs at his neighbors’ houses, he too responded just as matter-of-factly, and with a similar explanation.

“Because I wanted to do it,” he answered. “There’s no rhyme or reason.”

And why this particular activity?

He looked at me with some amusement. Only an adult requires logic in this situation. It’s the Vulcan’s prerogative, logic. Wesley didn’t have nearly as much use for it.

“Spontaneous,” he answered. “Impromptu. Throw an egg. That looks like fun.”

the useless adolescent

Here’s a historical point to consider: it’s possible—just possible—that adolescents would be less inclined to throw eggs at houses, drive 113 miles per hour on highways, and indulge in all other manners of silliness if they had more positive and interesting ways to express their risk-taking selves. That’s the theory of Alison Gopnik, the Berkeley psychologist and philosopher: that modern adolescence generates an awful lot of “weirdness” (her word) because our culture gives older children too few chances to take constructive, and tangibly relevant, risks.

She’s not the first to make this point. During the 1960s, Margaret Mead complained that the sheltered lives of modern adolescents were robbing them of an improvisational “as-if” period during which they could safely experiment with who they’d ultimately become; the result of this deprivation was a lot of acting out. Recently, in an interview on NPR, Jay Giedd, who researches the teen brain at the National Institute of Mental Health, put it very well: “These Stone Age tendencies are now interacting with modern marvels, [which] can sometimes not just be amusing anecdotes, but can really lead to more lasting effects.” Like driving motorcycles without helmets, standing on top of moving subway trains—all the horror stunts kids do because they think, rightly but tragically, that they’d be fun.