Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (46 page)
Read Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex Online
Authors: Amy T. Schalet
This is not only true for romantic attachments. Rhonda Fursman, for instance, wor- ries that her son’s attachment to his high-school peer group will inhibit his leaving home and the local community for college.
This is why even the DiMaggios, who have made a self-conscious choice to permit their son to drink alcohol on summer vacations, must “pretend not to know” in case he “gets caught.”
In addition to needing parental support to afford higher education, American adults often need parental assistance to afford housing in middle-class neighbor- hoods (Rubin 1994). Also indicative of the relative financial fragility of the ado- lescent maturation process in the United States is the fact that, as young adults, Americans are much less likely to have medium or high incomes, and to be able to support a family of three, than are their Dutch counterparts (Smeeding and Phillips 2002).
Sociologists Christien Brinkgreve and Bram van Stolk noted with some surprise how little the Dutch middle-class parents they interviewed in the early 1990s seemed to be concerned about the future economic positions and well-being of their children (Brinkgreve and van Stolk 1997). However, given that welfare reforms have signifi- cantly trimmed welfare benefits, especially for youth under the age of twenty-one, it is possible that anxieties about teenage childbearing have since increased, especially in working-class and poor families.
Dutch law dictates that parents are required to help provide for their children’s livelihood and education until they are twenty-one, even though children become legal adults at age eighteen. Thus, while parents are required to help support their adult children’s education, they do not have the right to dictate their (educational) choices. Research has estimated that the average university student derives half of his or her income from government subsidies, a third from parental contributions, and one fifth from work (Dieleman 2000). On the strong rights position of Dutch adolescents in health care and education, see Abbing 1996.
Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s, many Dutch scholars argued that the provisions of the modern Dutch welfare state had equalized intimate relationships, by diminish- ing the power of parents and husbands and increasing the power of children and wives. Ali de Regt (1988), for instance, argues that, throughout the 1980s, Dutch students experienced their government stipends as a right, which diminished the dependence of children on their parents. Bram van Stolk and Cas Wouters (1983) have argued that government benefits increased the power of women to leave abu- sive marriages. Moreover, among broad segments of the population there arose what van Stolk and Wouters call the “equanimity” of the welfare state—the pro- found sense of well-being that people experience when they are protected by in- come maintenance programs. (For a critique of van Stolk and Wouters’ argument,
see Kremer 2007.) Based on their research among Dutch parents and teenagers, Manuela du Bois-Reymond and colleagues (1990) conclude that “modern” parents live together with their teenage children in peaceful coexistence based on negotia- tions. Echoing the opinions of a number of Dutch boys I interviewed, the authors note that parents have few ways to force their children to do things. Parents, they write, “are aware that they have only a few powerful sanctions to force their children into certain behaviors, particularly once those sons and daughters have passed the age of sixteen or seventeen live at home and probably will continue to do so for many years because they have a long education ahead of them. Youths are in many ways ‘partners’ of their parents and cohabitants of a common household. Decisions about family matters are no longer made by one person but are the outcome of talk- ing and searching for compromises such that each member of the family will have his or her needs met” (du Bois-Reymond, Peters, and Ravesloot 1990, 69). In recent years, welfare state reforms have repeatedly curtailed a variety of benefits for youth, and future research will have to bear out whether, and if so, how, these changes in the welfare state have changed family dynamics.
Brinkgreve and van Stolk (1997) find also that Dutch parents of the 1990s are espe- cially interested in developing the social-emotional skills of their children.
In his ethnographic observations of Dutch society in the 1980s, anthropologist Peter Stephenson (1989) observed a strong disliking of obvious hierarchies in the workplace and in public spaces. More recently, the online resource “Expat Focus” describes Dutch workplace culture as follows: “Egalitarianism is one of the key prin- ciples underlying Dutch society, and this extends to the workplace and business re- lationships. There is little formal hierarchy, people at all levels of an organisation are likely to be on first-name terms, and will expect to be involved in decision-making, while managers and supervisors typically discuss work with their staff rather than just giving orders or instructions. Working practices usually include many meetings, called
overleg
, which means consultation. These meetings are chaired, with papers and an agenda distributed in advance. Everyone who is invited to an
overleg
is ex- pected to attend and to contribute their views and suggestions on the issues being discussed; the goal is for participants to compromise as necessary until a decision is reached that everyone is content with. This consensual approach to decision-making also characterises management/labour relations in the Netherlands, and has been institutionalized in the form of works councils which all companies employing more than 35 people are required to have under Dutch law. Worker representatives sit on these councils and are consulted by management regarding any issues likely to affect the employees of the company. As a result, the Netherlands has historically had a low rate of industrial action compared with other European countries.” The authors of the article note, however, that the principle of workplace equality has not been extended to women who rarely occupy positions of leadership in business. See http://www.expatfocus.com/expatriate-netherlands-holland.See also Fields 2008.
In their international review of workplace representation, Rogers and Streeck note that “approaching the twenty-first century, the United States effectively stands alone among the developed nations, on the verge of having
no
effective system of worker representation and consultation” (Rogers and Streeck 1994, 98; see also Wood 1998). Survey data also suggest that the Dutch are more likely to value and mea- sure freedom in terms of having a say in their everyday working conditions than are Americans (Hofstede 1998 and Inglehart 1990).In 1994, women worked full-time in only one quarter of all Dutch couples under the age of 65 (van Praag and Uitterhoeve 1999). Throughout the 1990s, women’s labor participation rate was considerably higher among the middle- and upper- middle classes than among the working class (Fortuijn 1996; Kremer 2007).
The “public” power of Dutch women is somewhat contradictory: in business and education, including higher education, the percentage of leadership positions oc- cupied by women is very low. In politics, women are relatively well represented— more than a third of the members of parliament are women. Rosi Braidotti, an Italian-born professor of women’s studies at the University of Utrecht, speaks of the Dutch paradox: women are well supported by government-funded feminist in- stitutions; their well-being and levels of satisfaction are high; however, other than as politicians and mothers, Dutch women posses very little power in society (Pruin 1998). Despite a strong increase in female labor-force participation, a decade and a half later, outside of parliament and government, Dutch women still occupy rela- tively few leadership positions, especially in academia, business, and civil service (EUROSTAT 2008).
Te Poel and Ravesloot (1997) find also that mothers, rather than fathers, feel re- sponsible for, and do the emotional work of, normalizing teenage sexuality by mak- ing it a topic of discussion with their children.
In a study of the meaning of work in the life plans of one hundred and twenty Dutch secondary-school students, conducted in the late 1980s, Frans Meijers (1991) found that 50 percent of the girls planned to stop working outside the home altogether once they had children. Only 3 percent of girls aspired to work full-time while moth- ers. As this cohort of girls came of age, their perspective changed. In 1998, seven out of ten Dutch women with children under the age of six preferred a care-sharing arrangement whereby the man works full-time and the women works part-time. Only one in ten did not want to work outside the home at all (Kremer 2007, 218).
In her 1980s research, Janita Ravesloot (1997) found general acceptance of sexual experience on the part of girls, but not of sex outside of steady relationships. In 2005, four out of five sexually experienced Dutch girls and young women had their last intercourse in a monogamous relationship. But having sex within relationships is not the same as making lifetime commitments. Indeed, six out of ten of the Dutch girls and young women surveyed have had two or more sexual partners (de Graaf et al. 2005).
It is instructive that when Ria van Kampen and her daughter Fleur were arguing about whether Fleur could have her boyfriend sleep over (see chapter 2), Fleur asked her mother defiantly, “Would you rather I had looser affairs?” It is possible that Ria, who wishes her daughter were not so attached to a local boyfriend, would indeed prefer her daughter to have looser affairs, but the taboo on non-relationship-based sexuality would have kept her from saying so and so she was effectively silenced.
In an interview with
The New Yorker
, Christian conservative Mike Huckabee says, for instance, that although he himself married young, “If my kids had come to me and they were eighteen or nineteen and said we’re getting married, I’d have said you’re crazy” (Levy 2010).See Bellah et al. 1985; Gorski 2003; Stephenson 1989; Kickert 2003; van Elteren 1990; Schama 1988; and Engbersen et al. 1993.
Reviewing the Dutch welfare state policy style during the early 1990s, Engbersen and colleagues write that, in comparison with the American policy style, it is “infor- mal, flexible, cooperative, and consensual rather than adversarial, relying more on
Notes to Pages 199–200 / 253
persuasion than on coercion, and willing to take account of specific circumstances of individual clients” (Engbersen et al. 1993, 20). A decade later, after substantial shifts in the Dutch welfare state, crucial elements of this flexible approach remain (see note 66). On the role of cultural concepts in Dutch and American welfare state policies, see also van der Veen 1996; Knijn 1994a; Levine 1988; Zvesper 1996; Fraser and Gordon 1997; and Steensland 2008.
The term “social imaginary” comes from Charles Taylor (2007). “Harsh justice” is the term James Whitman (2003) uses to describe the particularly harsh penal cli- mate that is the “dark side of the nation’s much vaunted individualism.”
60. Swidler 2001, 157.
Between 1996 and 2006, the proportion of young people (fifteen to twenty-nine) who were themselves, or whose parents were, born in a country categorized as non-Western, increased from one in ten to one in six. Immigrants of Turkish or Moroccan descent— who constitute of the bulk of the Muslims living in the Netherlands—make up about 40 percent of the non-Western immigrant population (Garssen 2006; 2008; and Ersenalli 2007).
In 1994, 51 percent of Dutch women were employed. By 2007, that percentage had risen to 68 percent, very similar to the percentage of American women who are in the workforce (66 percent). However, six out of ten Dutch working women do so part-time versus only 18 percent of American women (Kremer 2007, 86; OECD 2008b). Indeed, even single mothers—who, following what Monique Kremer calls a 1996 paradigm shift in policy, were no longer supported unconditionally but were rather required to work once their children were over five—were not required to do so full-time. The consensus in recent debates, Kremer asserts, is that all political parties and social organizations oppose requiring single parents to work full-time: “In the new 2003 law municipalities are allowed to place work requirements on lone mothers of children up until the age of 12, but they have to take into account the wishes of lone mothers and make sure enough childcare is available” (Kremer 2007, 128). Knijn and van Wel (2001) also found that following the 1996 welfare reform, local officials preferred to carefully stimulate rather than harshly pressure single mothers to move from the home into the workplace, and they often accom- modated mothers’ wishes to continue to care for their children by exempting them from full-time work obligations.
The Commonwealth Fund recently ranked the Dutch health-care system first among seven industrial nations on a variety of items, including on access and equity of care (Davis, Schoen, and Stremikis 2010). On Dutch 2008 poverty rates in European per- spective, see Eurostat 2010.
On the Dutch and American poverty and public investment rates compared, see OECD 2008a and OECD 2009. The Dutch “replacement rates” (the average unem- ployment benefits) declined steeply from 53 percent in 2000—which was the high- est among all OECD nations—to 34 percent in 2007. Despite this strong decline, the Dutch replacement rate has remained in keeping with those in several Scandinavian countries and other Northern European countries, and is more than twice as high as in the United States (14 percent). Moreover, the percentage of the Net National Income (NNI) spent on income supports to the working-age population remained relatively high in the Netherlands—in between that of the social democratic Scan- dinavian welfare states and the corporatist welfare states of Germany and France. At 7 percent, it is more than three times as high as the percentage in the United States (2.2 percent) (OECD 2009).
In 2001, 88 percent of Dutch children fourteen and under lived in two-parent fami- lies. Italy was the only country in Europe with a higher percentage of children liv- ing in two-parent families. One in nine Dutch children fourteen and under lived in a one-parent family. By comparison, in 2005, a quarter of American children seventeen and under lived in a one-parent family (OECD 2010). In both countries, children in single-parent families are much more likely to experience poverty than children in dual-parent families (Misra, Moller, and Budig 2007).
See Buruma 2007. Elizabeth Bernstein has argued that, ironically with the legaliza- tion of brothels in 2000, a legal distinction was drawn between documented and undocumented sex workers, which significantly worsened conditions for the latter. A Dutch legal scholar she interviewed described the Dutch regulation of prostitution in the following terms: “It involves self-regulation, enforced if necessary through administrative rules, but always with the criminal law as threat in the background” (Bernstein 2007, 162). In the wake of legalization, more informal arrangements became more complicated. Indeed, Bernstein reports that the
huiskamer
or “living room,” described in note 25, was closed several years later. Incarceration rates qua- drupled between 1990 and 2004 in the Netherlands. The reasons for the rise remain debated. Among the factors to which this rise has been attributed are increases in serious offenses, harsher sentencing practices, and more vigorous enforcement of hard-drugs laws. Immigrant populations, especially from non-Western countries, are overrepresented among those incarcerated (Tonry and Bijlenveld 2007). Schol- ars have noted the growth in Dutch incarceration rates with some astonishment. While a more severe climate—both among officials and the public at large—is in- disputable, it should also be noted that prison conditions appear to remain rela- tively humane: prisoners typically serve sentences of under a year. They have their own individual cells and the right to weekly visits, regular sport activities, and daily outdoor time. They may also purchase televisions, keep small pets, and have spaces for sexual relations when serving longer sentences. But prisoners are also required to work and spend leisure time together. Notably, the principle informing Dutch prison policy is not, Peter Tak (2003, 94) writes, one of “separation” but one of “association.”To the surprise of many Dutch researchers, a 2005 study found that among twenty- one to twenty-four-year-old women, almost a quarter had ever been forced to do or permit sexual things against their will. “Sexual things” was purposively left un- defined, the authors of the study wrote, so that respondents could interpret it to in- clude a forced kiss or manual or oral sex (de Graaf et al. 2005, 107–8). Sexualization and female objectification in the traditional media—which has been increasingly commercialized since the early 1990s—and in the new media have also become causes for concern to researchers and policymakers.
In 2000, the Netherlands still ranked number five on a list of eighty-one countries in terms of their overall levels of trust. But even then there were notable differences by education: Almost eight out of ten Dutch people with high levels of education (compared to only four out of ten highly educated Americans) said most people could be trusted. Three out of five Dutch people with medium levels of education agreed, but only four out of ten with low levels of education did (Inglehart et al. 2004). But since then, public confidence in tolerance as effective government policy and in people’s tendency to “do the right thing” has waned.
Sniderman and Hagendoorn (2007, 28) report, for instance, that a large majority of immigrants of Turkish and Moroccan descent surveyed in the late 1990s agreed
at least somewhat with the statements “Western European women have too many rights and liberties” and “Western European youth have too little respect for their parents.” Over the past decade, there have been increased expressions of mutual hostility between immigrants of Moroccan and Turkish descent and members of the native Dutch population. Since September 11, 2001, and the murder of Dutch filmmaker and author Theo van Gogh by a member of a radical Muslim group, anti- Muslim prejudice has intensified, as has right-wing violence (Ersenalli 2007; Veld- huis and Bakker 2009). But Veldhuis and Baker (2009) have concluded that although many Muslim-identified youths have become alienated from Dutch society, perceiv- ing a lack of respect from the dominant (opinion) leaders, radicalization and the embrace of political violence is rare among them. Among political elites, moreover, there are signs of increased integration. In 2007, eleven of the one hundred and fifty members of parliament were of non-Western immigrant descent. One member of the cabinet was of Moroccan descent and one was of Turkish decent (Ersenalli 2007).
This film was introduced in 2006 as part of educational materials for an entry exam that certain prospective immigrant groups to the Netherlands (those seeking family unification) were required to pass. These course materials are no longer mandatory, although strict cultural “integration” and language criteria remain.