Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (23 page)

It feels almost like they aren’t listening to me even though I know they are listening to what I say, but they don’t care. That is basically what it comes down to. . . . I think it’s reasonable [that I am not allowed to go out] but at the same time . . . I would like to go out with my friends and just go find something to do.

The desire to “just go out and find something to do” away from one’s parents is fueled by learning to drive, as most American teenagers do when

they first turn sixteen. A rite of passage is getting one’s own driver’s license and sometimes one’s own car. Whether they were strictly supervised or given a great deal of latitude to begin with, both girls and boys see driving as their ticket to greater freedom from parental oversight. It is great to be sixteen, says Daniel: “You get a driver’s license, a little more freedom from your par- ents. You can go places, hang out with your friends, your mom’s not always following you around.” Paula has also loved “getting to drive, getting the chance to get out and be by myself, and having my parents back off me.” Having gained new mobility and freedom, Paula knows her final departure from her childhood and home is not far off: “I’ll be gone in two years. . . . They’re more lenient now that I am sixteen. And [it is good] having them understand that I am growing up and that I am going to be gone.”

It is not just driving itself that takes teenagers out of their parents’ pur- view. Many teenagers start working in paid jobs, sometimes up to twenty hours a week, in order to pay for the gas, insurance, and the other costs that are involved in maintaining a car. Though parents may grumble about the long hours, they usually permit their children to work as many hours as they want and are able to without having their schoolwork suffer. What that means is that from age sixteen on, between academic classes, rigor- ous sports training for some, and long working hours for others, teenagers often spend little time in their parents’ company—sometimes not eating dinner together more than a couple of nights a week. Being able to drive also makes it easier for teenagers to spend weekend nights at their friends’ houses, as many with active social lives do. All of this distance facilitates an important ritual of American adolescence: “sneaking around.”

Although many start their teens as “rule followers,” few teenagers leave high school without having learned to creatively interpret the rules and sneak around them. And how could it be otherwise if, to paraphrase Kim- berley, “you want to be like an independent kid”? Boys and girls both as- sume that at some point one must break the rules and experiment with forbidden pleasures in order to become one’s “own person.” Even the most strictly monitored and penalized boys find gray areas in which to hide, so that they appear to be following the rules while getting away with working around them. And even the best of good girls venture into territory that is “bad”: they might have friends who experiment with drinking and drugs, they may attend parties themselves, they may meet with boys in secret, or obscure the romantic component of a friendship.

One way to work around the rules is to remain in the dark about their details. Isaac, who says his socially conservative parents have shaken their fist at him as they preached abstinence, has to admit he is not entirely cer- tain whether being abstinent means refraining from vaginal intercourse only or from all sexual intimacy. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve always won- dered that. I don’t know what’s okay. My parents know that I kiss girls. I don’t tell them anything other than that because I will never be com- fortable talking with my parents about my relationships with people.” Al- though he is uncertain what is and what is not morally acceptable, Isaac prefers the silence and ambiguity over the alternative: “I don’t really want to know. I have never known the answer to that question [of whether it is acceptable to engage in any kind of sexual act] because then I’ll feel bad if I’ve done something wrong, so I just stick with the ‘I don’t know’ thing. It works for me.”

Another way to work around the rules is to leave out important details. Daniel, for instance, declined to tell his mother that an opposite-sex friend is, in fact, his steady girlfriend: “I don’t even tell her I have a girlfriend. I’m just like, ‘She’s just my friend.’ She’ll always just be following me around and stuff, so I don’t even tell her that she’s my girlfriend.” Marc says that when it comes to dating and sex, if it were up to his mother, “I would probably be in a room, a padded room, for the rest of my life.” What he means is that “she’d probably lock me up somewhere if she had the choice, but she doesn’t.” He once kept the fact that he had a girlfriend from her for three months. “She got mad. It turned out that she actually liked my girlfriend.” Similarly, Katy told her mother she was going over to “a friend’s house” without adding that “the friend” in question was her boyfriend, whom she was not allowed to see unless her mother has phoned his mother.

Several American teenagers have been introduced to alcohol at home and at family celebrations. A few boys even have parents like Marc’s, who know he drinks occasionally and are “okay with it, sort of.” But many teen- agers know their parents do not want them to drink, especially not with their peers. Daniels’ parents would “have a cow.” And those teens who have drunk typically keep it to themselves. Jesse explains: “I don’t like to tell [my parents] I’m going over to my friend’s house and drink a little. . . . I don’t want to deal with the big old shit fit argument.” Kelly puts it more deli- cately: “I just don’t want to worry them. I don’t think they really need to know. . . . I don’t want to say it’s none of their business, because it doesn’t sound right.” She adds:

They don’t need to hear about me getting tipsy, especially my dad. I think my mom would understand, but I think my dad might freak out a little bit. I think he trusts me, but he doesn’t trust other people, is kind of the feeling I get. He still thinks of me as being ten sometimes or eight or five, and he thinks of me as his
little princess
. He doesn’t want anything to happen to me.

Lisa of Tremont is a “good girl” with a stellar academic record and a pre- carious place on the edge of “the popular crowd” at her high school. At all the parties she has recently attended, “there’s pot and there’s alcohol.” Lisa does not tell her parents the things her friends do at these parties “because I want them to like my friends and have them over.” When Lisa first started going to parties, she tried to test the waters to find out how her parents would respond if she were to tell them about what happens there. A friend of hers had volunteered the information to her parents and after the revela- tion they allowed her to go to the party anyway, saying that they trusted her. “It sounded reasonable at the time: ask your parents and tell them the truth and be straight up with them and have them trust you,” thought Lisa. So, she ran a hypothetical scenario by her own parents “because I thought that was how it could be. And they were like, ‘No, we would never let you go to a party where there was drinking.’ So I just shut my mouth.”

When boys and girls go beyond just happening upon parties where there is drinking and start drinking and smoking themselves, shutting one’s mouth is not enough. Andy would “lie and make up stories and try to get out of the house and go [drinking].” When Margaret first started to go out, “I wouldn’t want to tell [my mother] what I was doing, so I’d make up some [story]: ‘I’m going to a friend’s house. . . . I’m going to be there.’ I think I ended up, not necessarily lying
a lot
, but just not telling her anything about anything.” American teenagers often spend a great deal of the weekends at friends’ houses to avoid detection. Steve explains his strategy: “After a party, I either stay the night at my friend’s house because people smoke cigarettes around me and cigarette smoke gets on me, and, you know, pot smoke and alcohol could get spilled on me. I want to wash my clothes, you know, just to make it so it doesn’t seem like I was part of it.”

Melissa has never gotten into “big trouble” even though she goes to par- ties all the time because she usually sleeps at a friend’s house. She looks at her relationship with her parents as “pretty good,” but, she says, “I still have to lie. Well, I don’t really ever lie. . . . They always think I am . . . they don’t really figure [out what is going on].” Melissa thinks being a teenager or a parent of a teenager puts one in a catch-22: “I don’t want to be a parent.

It seems like a losing situation. Either your kid sneaks around you or you look like a really bad parent because you let the kid do everything.” Lack of closeness between parents and teenagers is inevitable, Melissa thinks, unless parents give up their authority or teens give up the stuff adolescence is made of:

You can have a good relationship with a parent and then they’re pretty much going to have to let you do whatever you want because otherwise you’re go- ing to have to sneak around or lie and that’s not a good relationship. I

don’t know how to have a really good relationship with your parents unless you don’t do anything.

One solution to the dilemma that Melissa articulates is for parents to knowingly and sometimes explicitly turn a blind eye on their children’s forbidden activities. Lisa is not allowed to date until her next birthday, but she hangs out with her boyfriend at home all the time. She knows that her parents know that he is her boyfriend, but they “just don’t re- ally say anything. They just let it slide, I guess.” When Phillip turned fif- teen, he says, his parents knew they did not want him “out partying with [his] friends at some huge party where the cops were eventually going to show up, almost definitely, and getting in a lot more trouble that way.” Phillip tells a story that illuminates how parents are themselves con- strained in their choices. They came up with a plan to keep Phillip
and
themselves out of trouble—he and a friend may drink at the family’s yearly camping trip:

They basically pretend like they don’t know what we’re doing, but they know we do it and they don’t mind as long as we’re going to be staying in the im- mediate area, not wandering off. . . . But they don’t want the responsibility, like, if we get caught, then it’s us who did it, not like they’re saying, “Yeah go ahead.”

As they sneak around, sometimes with their parents’ complicity, teenagers run the risk that some dread and others blatantly court, namely the risk of “getting caught.” “Sneaking around” and “getting caught” can seem a lot like a game of hide and seek, where part of the fun is relishing freedom temporarily gained, whether one gets caught or not. Jeff describes what it was like to go climbing out of the house at night to hang out with friends

in the park: “It’s kind of boring, but it’s fun. It gives you like a rush. . . . If you get caught it’s going to be scary, but it will be fun.” Katy’s sister “snuck out of the house the other night and my mom caught her and that wasn’t good.” Caroline has cut school a lot over the past year. “I lie to my parents like, you know, trying to cover up for reasons why I didn’t go to school or whatever.” But then she got caught: “It sort of builds up when they find out. When they look at my report card and they are like, ‘Oh my God.’” Caroline is now grounded, but she has few regrets. Before her parents dis- covered her transgressions, she says: “I had a lot of fun . . . [went to] lots of parties.”

Even when parents use advanced techniques to “catch” teenagers and impose heavy penalties if they do, the chase between cat and mouse can appear quite playful. Steve explains how his father has “ways of finding out stuff, like through my brother or sister. Or he just lies and tells me he knows and hopes he’ll get a good answer.” After Steve came back from parties, “He’d take me in the light and check my eyes to see if I was smok- ing pot or anything and see how I walk or talk or something like that.” When he gets caught, he gets grounded: “In seventh and eighth grade I was grounded for a long time because I snuck out with my friends and I got grounded for that for two years, a year each time.” His father is strict, says Steve: “The first time I snuck out, he really didn’t stick to the year thing. It was more like six months. The second time, he stuck to it.”

According to Melissa, “everyone” at Tremont High gets grounded, for in- stance, for throwing a party when parents are out of town, though Melissa doubts that parents really are surprised: “They have to know. I mean they can’t be that ignorant. . . . It’s like common sense that the high-school stu- dents get left alone and then throw a party. They always get punished but I don’t know if the parents really care that much.” Melissa’s parents do not punish: “I get lectures. . . . Whenever I do something bad and get caught . . . [my parents] talk to me and I feel bad because I made them disappointed.” She thinks her parents’ approach is better: “I never end up being mad at them at the end of the conversation like most of the kids because most of the kids never are sorry for what they did. They’re just sorry they got caught because their parents are always punishing them.”

Illustrative of the social control that prevails in small-town Tremont and the relative anonymity teenagers experience in Corona, Tremont’s party- girl Melissa believes that teenagers who throw parties when their parents are out of town usually get caught, while Laura thinks a lot of parents in Corona do
not
find out about parties. Laura recounts a party with a dra- matic finale in which the culprit almost manages not to get caught:

I’ll tell you, kids will do like the most drastic things. A friend of mine . . . his parents were gone, and he had a really big house and he was going to have a party. . . . He moved all of his furniture out of the house, into the upstairs.

. . . [But] so many people were there, the cops ended up coming. Then his sister came home. She was so mad. She was like: “Everybody, get out of my house.” And the cops were there and she would not let anyone leave out the back way, which kind of lets out in the woods, so everyone could get away who’d been drinking. But [instead] everybody [had to] go out the front door. People were trying to get out the back, they broke his screen door, tons of his flowers, like from his mom’s garden, were all like torn up. His parents wouldn’t even have found out, unless his sister told them. [My friend] went out and bought a new screen door . . . and went out and like bought all new flowers, planted them. . . . Kids will like go so far.