All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (26 page)

Before social media, both the telephone and the television were semipublic utilities in the house. Even if children locked themselves in their bedrooms with the family telephone, their parents knew they were in there, talking to someone; with a couple of artful questions, they could even find out who without appearing too meddling. The same went for the television: even if parents hated the shows their kids were watching, they could know, simply by breezing through the den, what those shows were, when they would be over, and whether another one was starting.

“What’s interesting about cell phones and Facebook,” says Darling, “is that there’s no way to passively monitor them.”

And that’s the crucial word, as far as Darling is concerned: “passively.” “You have to accept,” she says, “that looking at these things is an invasion of privacy. It’s
active.
You have to do something that’s nosy, and that feels like spying.”

For some parents, that’s a tough line to cross. It means giving themselves license to snoop when they know (and remember, having once been teenagers too) the value of privacy. In some ways, they probably have more sacred notions about privacy than their children do. Parents have always snooped, of course. There have always been mothers leafing through their daughters’ diaries and fathers poking around their sons’ rooms for hidden cigarettes. But snooping now feels obligatory, rather than desultory, and therefore extra-intrusive; it’s also
work.
There’s usually more than one device or platform to consider monitoring (Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, phone texts, phone photos, Twitter feeds, Xbox hours), and almost all require a touch of savvy to do it. The women at Deirdre’s went around and around about this question, debating the ethics of surveillance (or “creeping,” as kids call it). One woman said she promised her daughter that she’d never read her Facebook page and stuck to it; another said that she never made such a promise and spied all the time. But it wasn’t until Deirdre spoke that a larger emotional truth seemed to crystallize for all of them: the challenge, they realized, wasn’t just about giving themselves license to snoop, but about accepting what they’d find.

“One time,” said Deirdre, “I got all whipped up about something I found in my spying. And my husband was like, ‘Deirdre, maybe you don’t need to be looking. It’s just upsetting
you.
’ ”

“Exactly,” said Beth. “Sometimes I would rather not know.”

Because knowing means running the risk of seeing difficult stuff. Pictures of your drunk kid at a party, because someone posted them on his or her Facebook wall. Naked pictures of your daughter on her cell phone—still unforwarded, as best as you can make out—so why are they there? To send to someone later? Or were they just taken as an experiment, to see what she might look like? (Beth had this experience.) Kate, spying once, saw that her son was making plans to get high. “Do I want to see things I don’t want to see,” she rhetorically asked, “and try to deal with things I’m not supposed to know about?”

“While we were growing up,” says Shirky, “we were clearly experimenting with liquor, but if we didn’t come home reeking of gin, there was some meeting place about it”—meaning a tacit agreement it wouldn’t be discussed. “And movie theaters were the culturally approved place for teenagers to experiment with kissing each other. We had some set of bargains the parents understood but
didn’t talk about.
And that’s all broken now.”

It’s renegotiating those bargains and figuring out ways to cope with new potential modes of transparency that have everyone improvising and scrambling. In this transitional era, there are no norms. And that makes life for mothers and fathers more confusing. Sometimes the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is easier than grappling with the possibilities of full disclosure.

But for parents who embrace it, this technology can spell good news too. The online world is so seductive that kids now often commit their indiscretions from the safety of their own bedrooms rather than in the real world, where the physical harms truly lurk. “The electronic stuff makes it easier in some ways,” Beth told the group at Deirdre’s, “because they’re doing their naughty stuff online. They’re not
out
like I was.”

“I know,” agreed Gayle. “I always wanted to be out. But they’ll come home if they’re bored.”

Texting also allows children a fast and easy means to communicate frequently and discreetly with their parents—if they’re at a party where everyone’s too drunk to drive, for instance. And parents can do the same, keeping tabs on their children at moments when they otherwise would have been unreachable, and sending them quick notes to say hello if a phone call seems too imposing.

How teenagers use new technology more or less embodies the paradox of modern adolescence: they are doing things you don’t know about, but they’re doing them under your very own roof, on a computer you purchased. They’re using their cell phones to lie about where they’re spending the night, and they’re using them to text you from college to tell you about their new roommates. (According to Barbara Hofer, a Middlebury psychology professor, first-semester college freshmen are in touch with their parents 10.4 times per week.) The technology of today intensifies an adolescent’s dual existence. They are hyperconnected to their families. But they also lead lives quite separate and apart.

whose excesses?

We’re still talking about Wesley’s egging. I ask Samantha how she reacted to the episode that night.

“I had a freak-out,” she answers.

“To this day,” says Wesley, staring straight ahead. “Still.”

What does her version of a freak-out look like?

“Me screaming like a hysterical person in this kitchen.”

Was it worsened by feelings of self-doubt? I ask. Did she wonder if she’d done anything wrong?

“No,” she answers. “I was blaming the other kid. I don’t think Wesley would have thought of egging on his own. Maybe I’m wrong, but . . .”

Wesley cuts her off. “I initiated it completely.” He looks her dead in the eye.

“Interesting.” Samantha keeps her cool this time. What’s so intriguing is where her mind goes. She looks over at me. “You know, I did feel a
little
responsible,” she says, “because we used to keep acorns in the car, and when someone did something stupid, we used to toss an acorn. And I used to wish I had eggs, but I never
threw
an egg at someone.” She looks uncertainly over at her son. “So I did think maybe he did get that a little from me.”

I doubt he did. But that isn’t what matters. What matters is that she can identify with his impulses. She’s had them herself.

THE EXCESSES OF ADOLESCENCE
are terribly frightening to parents. But the reason, if you read what psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has to say on this subject, is not because these excesses are foreign. Rather, it’s because they’re so familiar. Parents can identify with them all too well.

Adults are plenty familiar, for instance, with the wish to throw tantrums. (As I noted earlier
,
kids gave their parents their rock-bottom lowest marks for the ability to control their tempers in Ellen Galinsky’s
Ask the Children.
) Adults are plenty familiar with the siren calls of email, video games, Facebook, Internet porn, texting, sexting. Adults are plenty familiar with the urge to drink too much, to have sex in wildly impermissible contexts, and to throw punches at their boss or slam eggs at a nosy neighbor’s window. At one point in Deirdre’s kitchen, Samantha blurted out what seemed like a non sequitur: “Once I ran away from home for two days.”

“I did that all the time,” said Beth, reassuringly.

“As an
adult,
Beth!” she answered. “As a
parent.
I left home.”

“Adults,” Phillips writes, “are not less excessive in their behavior than adolescents. Concentration camps were not run by adolescents; adolescents are not mostly alcoholics or millionaires.”

The sole difference, in Phillips’s view, is that adults have spent a longer time living with these impulses and therefore, with any luck, have learned to tolerate them rather than act on them. Alas, that’s what adulthood is supposed to be about: “an overcoming” or (better yet) “a disciplining of a developmentally appropriate insanity.” Adolescents are just a reminder that this insanity remains holed up somewhere within us, waiting to wriggle to the surface.

We may envy that insanity as much as we fear it. But as adults, the most we’re allowed to do is sublimate our chaotic feelings. We’re forbidden to act on them directly. “Adolescents, and their parents who were once adolescents, are simply experiencing two kinds of helplessness,” Phillips observes. “The helplessness born of experience, and the helplessness born of lack of experience.”

Mintz notes that although grown-ups like to treat teen problems as if they’re strange and distinct, they in fact rise and fall in tandem with adult problems. If you survey the data of the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century, trends in smoking, drinking, drug use, out-of-wedlock births, and violence tended to follow the same-shaped curve for both groups. It’s just that adults like to project their anxieties downward, on a generation they believe they can control.

Or not. Beth’s ex-husband, Michael, is a recovering addict. He started abusing drugs and alcohol in his late teens, and he didn’t stop until his late twenties. To this day—he’s fifty now, a project and installation manager of security systems, and remarried to a lawyer—he suspects that he spends too much time behaving like a kid around his teenage son and stepson. “I probably stoop too much down to their level,” he told me over coffee, “messing around with them too much.”

He was perfectly upbeat as he said this. I got the sense that one of the not-so-secret pleasures of having teenage boys around, at least for him, was the chance to play roller hockey and indulge in all-around horseplay. But at the same time, he was sober now, in all senses of the word, and knew what a mature adult life required. “You have to build a family,” he solemnly told me, “out of sand and stone.”

memories, dreams, and reflections

Perhaps this is what’s so powerful about adolescence for parents: we’re now contemplating ourselves as much as we’re contemplating our own children. Toddlers and elementary school children may cause us to take stock of our choices, and they may even awaken feelings of regret. But it’s adolescents, usually, who stir up our most self-critical feelings. It’s adolescents who make us wonder who we’ll be and what we’ll do with ourselves once they don’t need us. It’s adolescents who reflect back at us, in proto-adult form, the sum total of our parenting decisions and make us wonder whether we’ve done things right (whereas young children are still unformed, still works in progress; there’s still time to change course if need be).

As part of his study of the parents of adolescents, Laurence Steinberg asked his participants to fill out a “mid-life rumination scale,” which included this item: “I find myself wishing I had the opportunity to start afresh and do things over, knowing what I do now.” Nearly two-thirds of the women reported frequently feeling this way. So did more than half the men.

When he wrote up the results for
Crossing Paths,
Steinberg made a crucial distinction about this question. He noted that the survey item didn’t ask participants whether they wanted to be
teenagers
again. That’s the clichéd wisdom—that what adults truly crave in midlife is the raucousness and freedom of their youth (thus the clichés about men purchasing red sports cars and women running off with their tennis instructors). What Steinberg realized, in follow-up interviews with his subjects, was that they didn’t want a second adolescence at all. “What they want,” Steinberg writes, “is a second
adulthood
[emphasis mine].” Their children’s adolescence, he found, was often cause for extensive inventory-taking, if not a full-scale review of their life choices. “Filled with misgivings about their choice of career, spouse, or lifestyle,” he writes, “they want a chance at another life.”

This inventory-taking is precisely what Gayle does when I sit with her in her sunny kitchen on a Sunday morning as her three adolescent daughters, ages fourteen, seventeen, and twenty, slowly start to stir. She relates a counterfactual history of herself. But she doesn’t rewind the tape to the very beginning. She rewinds it to the moment when she left home. “If I had chosen to spend more time on studying in high school,” she says, “I could have gone to a different college, finished sooner, and maybe been in a different career earlier, which would have sent me on a different path. And maybe in the scheme of my life, that would have been a better choice.”

Gayle’s choice was to be a stay-at-home mother. When she made her decision, it made perfect emotional sense. “I quit working because I couldn’t stand being away from my children,” she says as her girls yo-yo in and out of the kitchen. “To be away for an hour, to go to the bank, just
hurt
me.” She never once thought less of her friends who continued to work and found alternative child care arrangements. It just wasn’t something she could get motivated to do herself. “And now I think,
What kind of role model was I?
” she asks. “I have three
girls
and I
quit my job?
I went to college and grad school!” She shakes her head. “If they’d been boys, maybe that wouldn’t have bothered me so much.”

Her kids have noticed her choices. “I know for sure Lena”—her middle child, seventeen—“has said to me, ‘Why didn’t you work more?’ And I say, ‘I wanted to be with you.’ ”

And how does Lena respond to that?

“She’s polite. She’s not going to say, ‘I don’t really need you.’ But I stayed home too long. I know that now.”

When her children hit adolescence, Gayle tried to reverse course. For a while now, she’s been looking for work as a public school teacher, the field in which she was originally trained. But trying to find a job in a sector that’s suffering terrible cutbacks—at the age of fifty-three, no less—is not easy, and the process has not exactly boosted her morale. “If you look at any school review,” she says, “you see, ‘The teachers are young and energetic.’ Which sounds great. But for me, it’s a little blow. I think I’m energetic. But not young.”