All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (22 page)

“Which bagel?” asks Samantha.

Calliope looks at her with a combination of irritation and affection. “Um, do you know me?” (As in:
How many times have I eaten bagels with you? Hello?
)

Samantha rolls her eyes, grabs one, begins to slice.

The family began calling Calliope “Alpha,” as in “Alpha girl,” when she was still in high school and was, to put it mildly, very certain about what she wanted. Throughout this brunch, I will hear all sorts of stories about her formidableness. “Calliope would ask for things,” says her brother Wesley, lanky and sixteen and mellow as tea, as he strolls in from the living room, “and
get
what she asked for.” He’s got his guitar with him and begins to strum. He plays guitar and piano and drums with equal dexterity.

“That’s not true!” says Calliope, half-laughing, half-appalled.

“Calliope, you just sorta
dominated
the house for a while.”

“
I
dominated the house?
Mom
dominated the house.”

Perhaps because they both have forceful personalities, mother and daughter clashed a lot while Calliope was still living at home. When I first met her at Deirdre’s house, Samantha had recounted one particularly harrowing fight between the two of them, though she never mentioned what started it. So today I ask. Samantha isn’t even certain she remembers. Wesley does, and leaps right in. “Well, Calliope had a high school essay due the next day, and a college essay due in a month. So you”—he looks at his mother—“wanted her to work on the college essay, but you”—now he looks at his sister—“wanted to work on the essay due the next day. So you basically said, ‘Mom, back off, I need to do this essay tonight.’ ” He recounts this story with admirable even-handedness. “And you”—Wesley looks at his mother again—“were trying to emphasize your point that the college essay needed to be done.”

Samantha waits. But that’s it, apparently.

“You just went back and forth like that for a long time,” says Wesley. “And then Dad stepped in.”

Samantha looks puzzled. “That’s so stupid. Why would I not want her to do her essay for the next day?”

Wesley again responds with tact. “Well,” he says, “in hindsight, you can understand her perspective. But at the time, you wanted to be heard. Which is why the argument continued.”

This argument, like so many arguments, wasn’t about much. It was what roiled beneath the surface that clearly upset Samantha. She had ideas about her daughter’s priorities, but her daughter had different ideas, and Samantha could feel her authority slipping away. She could even detect a hint of mockery in Calliope’s responses to her suggestions. Samantha hates it when she’s being mocked.

“The cursing doesn’t bother me,” she says a bit later on in the discussion, trying to describe what she experiences when her kids swear at her. “It’s the
tone.
”

“Or when we say ‘relax,’ ” says Calliope. “Or ‘chill.’ ”

Samantha springs up from her chair as if released from a slingshot. “Yes!
Oh my God.
” She starts pacing. “It’s so minimizing. Like, ‘You’re not important.’ ”

“Well, you
are
really wound up sometimes,” says Wesley, mildly. “Like when you remind us for the tenth time the cleaning lady’s coming—”

Samantha cuts him off. “That’s because I say, ‘Remember, she’s coming tomorrow,’ and you say”—she switches to the lower register of an aggrieved fifteen-year-old boy—“
Relax, Mom, I know what day it is. What the fuck!
” Everyone, including her, is laughing now. “That’s what
I
hear.”

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ABOUT
adolescence is that it’s a repeat of the toddler years, dominated by a cranky, hungry, rapidly growing child who’s precocious and selfish by turns. But in many ways the struggles that mothers and fathers face when their children hit puberty are the very opposite. Back when their children were small, parents craved time and space for themselves; now they find themselves wishing their children liked their company more and would at least treat them with respect, if adoration is too much to ask. It seems like only yesterday that the kids wouldn’t leave them
alone.
Now it’s almost impossible to get their attention.

I ran across a remarkably meticulous study from 1996 that managed to quantify the decline in time adolescents spend with their families. It followed 220 working- and middle-class children from the Chicago suburbs, once when they were in grades 5 through 8, and again when they were in grades 9 through 12. At each interval, the researchers spent a week paging these kids at random, asking them to identify what they were doing, with whom, and whether they were having fun. What they found, 16,477 beeps later, was that between fifth and twelfth grades, the proportion of waking hours that children spent with their families dropped from 35 to 14 percent.

Another Brooklyn mother, whose circle of friends overlaps with some of the women at Deirdre’s table, likened her fifteen-year-old daughter to a race car driver. “I change all of her tires, polish up the car, and get out of the way,” she told me. “Then she peels out. I’m the pit crew.”

It takes a lot of ego strength to be in the pit crew. It means ceding some power to your children, for one thing—decisions that were once under your purview move to theirs—and it means receding somewhat, accepting that they’ve recast their lives without you, or your goals, at the center. Joanne Davila, a psychologist at SUNY Stonybrook, puts it this way: “During childhood, it’s about trying to help develop who your kid’s going to be. During adolescence, it’s about responding to who your kid
wants
to be.” And that’s the generous interpretation, told from the parent’s point of view. From the adolescent’s, it’s often a good deal less rosy. “The adolescent,” writes Adam Phillips in his book of essays,
On Balance,
“is somebody who is trying to get himself kidnapped from a cult.” Parents go from their kids’ protectors to their jailers and are then told repeatedly what a drag this is.

Indeed, one of the most striking—and concretely measurable—ways of seeing how critical kids are of their parents at this stage can be found in Ellen Galinsky’s
Ask the Children,
which, as I said in the previous chapter, is based on a survey of over one thousand kids in grades 3 through 12 and ranges over a wide variety of topics. At one point, Galinsky asked her interviewees to grade their parents. In almost every category, seventh- to twelfth-graders rated their parents considerably less favorably than did younger children. Fewer than half of the mothers and fathers were given an A by their older kids on “being involved in their children’s education, in being someone whom their children can turn to if they are upset, in spending time talking with their children, in establishing family routines and traditions, in knowing what’s going on in their children’s lives, and in controlling their tempers.” (In fairness, younger children assigned their parents equally bad grades for controlling their tempers.)

Ingratitude is already one of the biggest heartaches of child-rearing. (Shakespeare, famously, from
King Lear:
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”) During adolescence, that ingratitude is additionally seasoned with contempt. It’s a lot to handle, especially for a generation of parents who have made their children the center of their lives. Months after I met her at Deirdre’s, Gayle, Mae’s mother, mentioned that she could count on two hands the number of times she had left her daughters with a babysitter when they were young. Gayle and her sisters, on the other hand, were left with babysitters for two weeks at a clip when they were growing up. “And you know what?” she said. “We were
happy.
” But she wanted to be more involved as a mother. She wanted to be
present.
And so she was. Then adolescence hit, and her girls got old enough to use the New York City subway unaccompanied; Mae, her oldest, got prickly around her, and their conversations became increasingly fraught. Gayle’s intensive involvement with her children didn’t inoculate her from rejection, or from any of the pain.

CONTENDING WITH THE TENSION
of separation during adolescence is hard enough. What makes it even harder, in Steinberg’s estimation, is the contrast to the bonded, reasonably tranquil period preceding those years. A number of psychologists have pointed out that adolescence creates a dramatic discontinuity in the entire family system, destabilizing dynamics, rituals, and a well-maintained hierarchy that has been in place throughout most of elementary school. The
Blackwell Handbook of Adolescence
goes so far as to say that adolescence “is second only to infancy” in terms of the upheaval it generates. Power must be renegotiated. The family must realign. Rites must be reviewed. The “old script,” Steinberg writes in
Crossing Paths,
“no longer fits the new characters.”

In this way, the challenges of adolescence
are
a replay of the early years: first there was order; now there isn’t. And it’s not just the dramas of infancy that repeat themselves, but those of the toddler years too: once again, the child is struggling for autonomy, but this time with more reasoning skills and the physical means to carry out his or her plans. Steinberg floats a hypothesis in
Crossing Paths
that is both subtle and daring: “I believe that we have underestimated the positive feelings parents derive merely from being able to physically control their children when they are younger. I do not mean this in a negative sense. The physical power they hold over their children reaffirms parents’ sense of control and importance.”

Yet parents of adolescents have to learn, by stages, to give up the physical control and comfort that was once theirs. In the end, they are left only with words. This transition is almost a certain recipe for conflict. There’s so much yelling, suddenly, and so much (seemingly) gratuitous defiance; simple requests to do work or pick up clothes “lead into temper tantrums,” as another Brooklyn mother, a government lawyer, put it. “Ask him, and my son just flies off the handle.” While not all researchers agree that adolescents fight
more
than younger children, almost all concur that they fight with more vehemence and skill, arguing most intensely with their parents between eighth and tenth grades. (This is, in fact, precisely the conclusion of a 1998 meta-study that took into account thirty-seven different surveys of conflict between parents and adolescents.) Children at this stage are better able to reason too, and to turn their parents’ own logic against them in potentially ugly ways; as any parent of a teenager will tell you, an adolescent knows just what hurts.

“I remember finding out very quickly in high school the few things I could say that would really get to my mom,” Calliope confesses at one point.

Samantha shoots her an incredulous look: “Did you? That’s so
mean
—”

In her work, Nancy Darling offers a nuanced analysis of what, precisely, makes the adolescent struggle for autonomy so contentious. Most kids, she notes, have no objections when their parents try to enforce moral standards or societal conventions.
Don’t hit, be kind, clean up, ask to be excused
—all this is considered fair game. The same goes for issues of safety: kids don’t consider it a boundary violation if they’re told to wear seat belts. What children object to are attempts to regulate more personal preferences, matters of taste: the music they listen to, the entertainments they pursue, the company they keep. When children are young, these personal preferences don’t tend to cause parents too much anxiety because they’re benign in most cases. Barney? Annoying, but unobjectionable. That little boy across the way? A little rowdy, but a decent kid. The Jonas Brothers? Cloying, but a little syrup never hurt anyone.

The problem, says Darling, is that during adolescence questions of preference start to bleed into questions of morality and safety, and it often becomes impossible to discern where the line is:
That kid you’re hanging out with? I don’t like how he drives or the stuff he’s introducing you to. Those games you’re playing? I don’t like all the violence and disgusting messages they’re sending about women.
Even an issue as banal as wearing jeans to church, Darling writes in one of her blog posts on this subject, is a humdinger. Is that a matter of personal expression? Or an outrageous violation of social custom?

And it’s often the banal issues of taste that become the most explosive. At her kitchen table, Samantha tells me about a tiff she’s recently had with Calliope over the merits of Beyoncé. Or perhaps, more accurately, one should call it a
misunderstanding
over the merits of Beyoncé. Samantha mistakenly thought the pop singer and actress was someone else who was much more down-market. She mentioned to Calliope that she couldn’t fathom why Calliope adored such an unrefined human being.

This snooty (and, it would turn out, misinformed) point of view seriously annoyed Calliope, making her wonder what particular type of bee had crawled into her mother’s bonnet. Who she listened to was her business, her prerogative. But to Samantha, this was a quasi-moral issue: she thought that Beyoncé represented the wrong kinds of values, and she was dismayed, in her heart of hearts, that her kid admired this person.

Then, as they were talking, Samantha discovered that she wasn’t even thinking of the right woman. Her daughter showed her a picture of Beyoncé online, and Samantha immediately realized she was confusing her with someone else. This just made the argument doubly maddening to her daughter, and doubly mortifying to Samantha—and doubly moot.

IN HIS RESEARCH, STEINBERG
finds that parents’ experience of their children’s adolescence can be exacerbated by any number of factors. One is being divorced: there is a big mental health differential between married parents and divorced ones as their kids enter puberty. Steinberg suspects one of the reasons is that the relationship between a divorced parent—a mother in particular—and her child can be so intense that it’s hurtful when the child starts to separate.