Don't Let the Culture Raise Your Kids. Marcia Segelstein
Trying Times with Teens
Doherty believes another myth of therapeutic parenting is that parents have little control over their teenagers’ behavior. On top of that is the belief that teens should make their own decisions so that their development isn’t stifled. In Take Back Your Kids, he writes, “This myth comes into full play in the later years of high school, by which point many parents have completed the process of resigning as parents and become full-fledged buddies to their children. Thus, half the high-school seniors in town I know of spend their spring break, unchaperoned and with parents’ permission, at Mexican frolics that put them at risk for acting out sexually and drinking and abusing drugs. Some of these parents also reserve hotel rooms for their teenagers after the prom, knowing that sexual activity is thereby more likely to occur.”16 Anecdotally, there are endless stories of parents of high schoolers who host parties where the parents either provide the beer, or willfully look the other way while alcohol is being consumed. They’re the “cool” parents who make it that much harder for others who want to do very “uncool” things, such as call ahead before parties to be sure the parents will be home and that alcohol won’t be served.
Dr. Kathleen Kline is an academic child psychiatrist and affiliate scholar with the Institute for American Values. “Part of adolescent growth is a search for risk-taking, novelty-seeking, and peer affiliation,” she told me in an interview for Salvo. “It’s a very risky time, across millennia.”17 What’s changed, she believes, is the environment, specifically an environment rife with technology that can leave parents out of the mix and is potentially toxic for kids.
Losing Influence
Thanks to smartphones, tablets, and computers that facilitate emailing, texting, and instant messaging, instantaneous communication with peers is not only possible, it’s become part and parcel of being a child. Gone are the days when households had one or two telephones, and parents knew who was calling their children. Without even having to leave the house, children at younger and younger ages spend vast amounts of time with what Taffel calls their “second family,” i.e., their peers. As a result, peer influence plays a much larger role in the lives of modern children. As Dr. Kline told me, “It used to be that parents probably had a pretty good idea who their son or daughter talked to on the way home from school. And if they thought someone was a bad influence, they told their child to stay away from them.”18 There have always been plenty of bad influences within peer groups. Thanks to the digital age, it’s difficult for parents to know who their children are talking to or who the bad influences are. Nor do they have any idea of the extent to which their children are being impacted. As Doherty put it, “The amount of screen time kids have [sic] has to dilute parental influence. The use of social media has drastically increased and has got to edge out some parental influence.”
Here’s how Taffel describes this brave new world children inhabit: “They have an all-access pass to the infinite reach of the internet and are exposed at ever-earlier ages to categories of sex and violence that post-boomer and boomer parents learned about much, much later in life. Cellphones, texting, and online networks afford kids endless freedom in socializing, breaking the old bounds of school and of town. … The loss of the town center with its eyes and ears — meaning shopkeepers, church and community groups, and school — has left children of all ages more scheduled, but much less policed by the adult world.”19
Taffel reports reading “astonishingly explicit” text messages from children in elementary and middle school. Unlike small town neighborhoods of the 1950s, which contained the watchful eyes of neighbors and other parents, today’s kids can “virtually” hang out with whomever they choose. And that can mean almost anyone on the planet. Thanks to the internet, devices such as smartphones and tablets, and social media, they have access to influences that can be difficult for parents to know about, much less censor.
Dr. Kline was the principal investigator for a study published in 2003 called Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities. Sponsored by the YMCA of the USA, Dartmouth Medical School, and the Institute for American Values, it concluded that human beings are “hardwired,” i.e. biologically programmed, for connection with other people and with the transcendent. Regarding connections to other people, the report suggests that the answer lies in “authoritative communities,” of which the family is first and foremost. “Authoritative” is defined as “warm and involved, but also firm in establishing guidelines, limits, and expectations.” As to the need for connection to the transcendent, the study issues this warning:
Denying or ignoring the spiritual needs of adolescents may end up creating a void in their lives that either devolves into depression or is filled by other forms of questing and challenge, such as drinking, unbridled consumerism, petty crime, sexual precocity, or flirtations with violence.20
Even from a purely scientific, secular point of view, there’s evidence that children need God! We’ve already decided on that path. Parents must exert the authority and influence to get our children there.
In his book The Collapse of Parenting, Sax cites Dr. Gordon Neufeld, a Canadian psychologist who has been observing children and adolescents for the last forty years. Here’s how Neufeld sums up the outsized role peers have assumed: “For the first time in history young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role — their own peers. … Children are being brought up by immature persons who cannot possibly guide them to maturity. They are being brought up by each other.”21 Sax adds that most kids care more about the esteem of their peers than their parents.
Of course, a huge factor in all of this is technology. The more time a child spends connecting with friends, Sax contends, the more likely he or she will turn to them for guidance about what matters and what doesn’t. The contemporary culture of Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube, or whatever social media sites are most trendy for kids at any given moment, promotes what Sax calls the “premature transfer of allegiance to same-age peers.”22
The bottom line is that Sax believes that the defiance and disrespect so evident among young people stems from a lack of attachment between parents and kids, which is related to parents abdicating their roles as authority figures. Neufeld puts it this way: “[T]he waning of adult authority is directly related to the weakening of attachments with adults and their displacement by peer attachments.”23
Sax wrote his book because he believes that the combination of timid parents, along with the hyper-connectedness social media provides, is allowing teenagers to develop their primary attachments to their peers, not their families. Not only do they turn to their peers for guidance about what matters, they seek out approval and love from them. The problem with this, Sax writes, is that parents love their children unconditionally. Peers do not. It’s a recipe for disaster.
It seems that a perfect storm of weak, confused parents, and technology with the potential to destroy childhood innocence and redouble peer influence, has come together to create a culture that wreaks havoc on childhood.
Solutions, Tips, & Tools
Start Young
Dr. Anderson advises parents that when their child is between twelve and fifteen months old, it’s time for a transition, and that it’s no longer their job to keep their child happy all the time. Up to then, she says, parents try to keep their child smiling and avoid disappointment and frustration at any cost, because, as she puts it, “that’s what you do for a baby.” But by the age of one, and definitely by two, parents need to change that. Usually at such young ages, “no’s” are necessary for safety issues — you can’t have your child touching hot stoves or climbing on tables. By fifteen months the “no’s” are often necessary for behaviors such as biting, kicking, and hitting. Parents must be prepared to say “no,” and to expect their child to be disappointed, frustrated, and unhappy. When that happens, says Anderson, the child has to start problem solving and thinking creatively. Far from stifling creativity