Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (16 page)

The second topic is adulthood. While young people become legal adults at age eighteen in both countries, many middle-class youth remain financially tied to their parents for years thereafter. In both countries par- ents name independence as a criterion for adulthood. However, how they measure independence is quite different. American parents from across the political spectrum tend to agree that becoming an adult requires attaining economic and emotional self-sufficiency—which is measured by the abil- ity to have made one’s parents superfluous. Moving away from home is an important step in attaining such self-sufficiency. By contrast, Dutch parents do not conceptualize adulthood in terms of financial and emotional self- sufficiency or their own redundancy. Moving out of the home, while ex-

pected, is also not viewed as a radical break.
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Instead, Dutch parents mea- sure adulthood by the capacity for financial and emotional self-regulation and by the ability to hold one’s own and express oneself
within
a sociality.

The exercise of authority is a third gray area. Since fostering autonomy involves granting teenagers increasing self-determination, and yet full au- tonomy is neither possible nor desirable for sixteen- or seventeen-year-old children, parents in both countries must occasionally exert their power as parents to keep their children on the right track. Doing so can cause con- flict, especially since neither set of parents thinks unquestioning obedience is desirable, or even healthy, in adolescents. Parents reconcile respect for their children’s growing autonomy with their need to use authority in dif- ferent ways. The American parents describe “letting go” of the small things but “winning” the big battles, thereby validating overt conflict and power more than most of their Dutch peers, many of whom describe a process of what I call “continuous consultation” to reach “agreements” even on matters American parents do not describe as in need of regulation, such as eating.

American adversarial individualism Dutch interdependent individualism

Alcohol Impulse-driven teenager requires

external control

Adulthood Requires financial and emotional self-sufficiency

Authority Winning important battles, letting

go of small things

Socially embedded teenager develops internal control

Requires financial and emotional self-regulation

Continuous consultation to reach mutual agreements

In considering the cultural processes that American and Dutch parents bring to bear on these three dilemmas of the middle-class “adolescent- parenting project,” it is important to recognize how these processes in- teract with the legal and economic opportunities and constraints young people and their parents encounter in the two countries. The consumption of alcohol, for instance, is more dangerous in the United States than it is in the Netherlands. Drinking beer and wine—but not harder liquors—is legal for Dutch sixteen-year-olds and illegal for their American peers. When youth drink outside the home in the Netherlands, they typically do so in established settings, like cafés and clubs to which they commute by bicy- cle, while in the United States, youth are relegated to illicit, age-segregated spaces to which they commute by car. Parents, moreover, can be charged for serving alcohol to teenagers.
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Achieving independence, like drinking alcohol, takes place in the con- text of a particular set of political and economic conditions and opportu- nities. Government supports for families and youth shape the process of attaining middle-class adulthood. For instance, all Dutch college students receive a modest government stipend to help pay for living expenses, and, if they chose, for housing away from the parental home.
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American college students receive no such guaranteed grants. Moreover, those American stu- dents who attend private academic institutions face much greater expenses than do their Dutch counterparts. They remain more directly financially dependent on their parents than are Dutch young adults.
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American par- ents who support their children through college have a financial leverage to “win” the battles they deem important. Adult autonomy
is
thus more contingent on financial self-reliance in the United States than it is in the Netherlands.

The vast majority of Americans believe sixteen-year-olds are not ready to drink, other than at special family occasions, such as Thanksgiving.
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They describe the adolescent self as operating without the capacity for self- restraint, leaving it at the mercy of strong internal and external impulses. Sixteen-year-olds are not ready, knows Jennifer Reed: “There are enough things that impair their judgment—their peers, their zest for life—that they don’t need another thing [to do that].” Sixteen-year-olds lack the “brains” to control alcohol, Jany Kippen explains: “Too often young people don’t have the ability and they don’t think of the consequences of anything be- cause they’re immortal. They have this protective shell around them, and it’s impenetrable, and there’s nothing that is going to harm them.” In Rhonda Fursman’s words:

[Teenagers] are living close enough to the surface of their skin emotionally that adding alcohol to it is like throwing gasoline on a bonfire. I don’t think they can handle the mental and physical changes that alcohol produces at that stage. I see the normal, kind of, the stupid things they do when they are not drunk and I can only imagine that that would go to a power of ten if they are drunk.

The image of the reckless, drunken youth is thus at the forefront of American parents’ imagination when they discuss alcohol use among teen- agers.
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They recount stories of alcohol-related (near) disasters among teen-

agers, not unlike the tales of doom they tell about out-of-control teenage sex. Deborah Langer learned about alcohol “the hard way.” She wonders why “some of us choose to go through these silly things with alcohol. I’m glad I went through it and got on with it. I hope my kids don’t. It’s not something I want for them.” But not everyone “gets on with it,” Brad Fagan knows:

There was a girl at our high-school class who started out drinking and then she smoked a little marijuana, pretty soon she was on cocaine. Ultimately her life ended as a prostitute in San Francisco and she got run over by a truck. [By then] her family had basically—tough love sort of—divorced her. They couldn’t deal with her. She was burned out. Her brain was fried from various drugs. This girl was cute, perky, smart, and was on the rally squad. She was one of us.

It is not that all abandon is wrong. But as is true for sex, there is a time and a place for drinking. That time and place, says Helen Mast, is after turning twenty-one and moving out: “You go through that phase where you have to be wild and reckless and do whatever you want to just because you need to experience it and you’re told so many times by your parents, ‘Don’t do that.’ And so you go, ‘Now I can do it because I’m old enough to do it and they’re not around to tell me ”No” because I live by myself and now I can do it and get away with it.’” After that period, Helen explains, fol- lows one in which a person attains a balance between letting go and being in charge:

You can still be crazy and everything else but you don’t let it rule you. At that time, sometimes the alcohol rules you for a while. You have to be so cool, so you have to get smashed every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night at the bar, but after that you reach [a point] that you go, “Oh, that’s dumb. Been there, done that. Let’s move on to something better.”

But during the high-school years, drinking alcohol is wrong. Parents say they would have strong reactions if they found out their children were drinking, even though many did so themselves. Calvin Brumfield, who ex- perimented with drugs as a teenager himself, has told his son, “No drink- ing, no drugs, no smoking.” Jany Kippen drank as a teenager, but if her sons were to do so, “they’re probably going to get grounded because I still think they need to know that that’s not acceptable. It wasn’t acceptable for me, it’s not acceptable for them.” If his fifteen-year-old daughter Lisa were

to come home and say, “I had a couple of beers at a party,” Brad Fagan would take radical action:

Her life would be rearranged rapidly. . . . She would lose some of her in- dependence. Depending on why—and that’s sort of in the category of let- ting her make mistakes. Depending on what came out of that, if that was a one-shot-deal, maybe not a lot. But if it was like, “Yeah, I like that and I might do that again,” major things would start happening, maybe with counselors, family counseling. . . .

But rules, punishments, and counseling are not the whole story. Many American parents employ an additional, “secondary” approach to alcohol which is more lenient.

In Jennifer Reed’s household, the “party line” has been “don’t [drink] under any circumstances.” At the same time, she is not “naïve enough to think that they’re not going to have any experience with alcohol until they are twenty-one.” She went to parties, “So I probably wouldn’t have a con- niption fit as long as I knew that they weren’t putting themselves or some- one else at risk.” Jennifer does not, however, tell her sons about her experi- ences. “I would be worried that they would take that as the green light,” particularly right now. “I mean if they want to enjoy alcohol later in life that’s fine. I just think it’s just a little too risky right now.” Instead, she has told them:

If they’re ever in a situation that they need to get out of, and they don’t want to tell us why—if it’s drugs or alcohol or they’re just uncomfortable—they’re always free to make the phone call and say, “Come get me,” especially when they can’t drive, and we won’t ask. We’ll just let it go by.

Rather than provide an unofficial escape clause to the official no- drinking rule, other American parents openly permit some drinking under their direct supervision. Even as they firmly oppose teenagers’ drinking on their own, such parents believe in letting their children try alcohol in “con- trolled situations.” Alicia Groto permits her sons to drink on special occa- sions, though they are not allowed to do so “independently.” But as Henry Martin illustrates, parents who permit alcohol in certain circumstances must be very careful, given that drinking before age twenty-one is illegal, while driving is legal at age sixteen. Hence, American teenagers who drink are at serious physical and legal risk:

When we go to the beach or something, I’ve given [my sons] a beer. . . . When we go out, they like to have a drink of my drink just to see what it’s like. But I don’t want them being social drinkers. Number one, it’s illegal and, if they get caught with a DUI, it will really affect their lives. I want them to know what alcohol is about, but I don’t want them to use it as something social.

The majority of Dutch parents say sixteen-year-olds are ready to drink in moderation, either at home or in the cafés and discos they frequent on the weekends.

Helen de Beer, for instance, believes her sixteen-year-old daughter Lorena is ready to drink “in moderation.” After all, alcohol is “part of life, it is a part of
gezelligheid
.” There are few words with more of an unequivo- cally positive cultural connotation than the word
gezelligheid
in the Dutch language. Literally translated as “togetherness,” “sociability,” or “convivial- ity,”
gezelligheid
has no comparable counterpart in English. Used to describe moments of pleasant togetherness with family, friends, or colleagues—mo- ments which can range from the everyday and ordinary to the specifically festive—
gezelligheid
for the Dutch connotes one of the most treasured states of existence.