Not having kids doesn’t disallow you from having opinions about your own upbringing.

in my experience, my friends who had the strictest parents ended up the wildest kids with the most problems. kids with parents like mine who treated us like people deserving of respect, stayed basically good kids who never got in any major trouble nor made any huge life altering mistakes.

treating your kids like mindless property pretty much garauntees your kid is going to lie to you, sneak around, and rebel to the point of putting themselves in danger.

They took away their daughter’s BEDROOM DOOR? That is fucking creepy.
I bet they then complained about how much time she spent locked in the bathroom, too. Ugh.

When I was 16, most of my non-school hours were spent out of adult supervision. 

Same. Though somehow my parents never got robbed.

First and foremost, no one should ever ask Cary Tennis for advice about anything. As far as I can tell, Tennis uses his advice column to hone his writing skills and isn’t really interested in providing insight to problems.

Next, teenagers are notoriously hard to deal with. The parents don’t have much patience for the whole thing, either (“We’d love to emancipate her” ? Who thinks that?) Parents are understandably possessive of their home and the integrity of it, and the child seems unable to follow a few relatively simple rules, such as “call if you’re not going to be home.”

You know? I’ve stopped blaming parents for their kids or even passing much judgment on how parents deal with disagreeable behavior. At the end of the day, they’re not beating the kid. The parents could have no idea how to deal with a child. The child could be bipolar or could have developed borderline personality disorder. The parents might have erroneously expected that they could live in a home as adults without the chaos that goes along with having a child.

I don’t think the parents suffer from any kind of extreme authoritarianism. I think the child doesn’t respond well to basic rules, and the parents escalated the situation because they didn’t know what else to do.

Tennis uses his advice column to hone his writing skills

It’s not working.

DAD TOOK THE DOOR OF HIS TEENAGE DAUGHTER’S BEDROOM?

So, I guess she’s supposed to get dressed/change clothes in the bathroom only? That goes so far beyond the typical “dad controls daughters sexuality” construct… smells like an incest house.

Granted, dad would probably want her to have a door if it actually was that type of deal, but still, there’s a level of voyeurism to that kind of parenting that turns my stomach.

treating your kids like mindless property pretty much garauntees your kid is going to lie to you

I was constantly treated like a liar and a hooligan by my parents, which I found confusing, because my older brother and sister were partiers, and I didn’t drink until after I was 21.

When I was a little older, they thought I was gay, because I didn’t mess around or drink much, and I had a gay friend. They were always freaked out because I always gave their Catholocism back to them, and they wondered aloud why “I hated them”.

I really don’t think they understand what they were doing. I am constantly told that I shouldn’t judge them because I don’t have kids. They’re the reason why I don’t have kids.

WRT parents picking up their kids at school, I think its a self-perpetuating problem.  When I was growing up, dozens of kids walked to school.  My old neighborhood is admittedly less safe now, but probably not by that much.  Yet only 5 or so kids can be seen walking to school.  Now if you are a parent, do you want your kid to be out there walking to school pretty much alone?  Past mostly empty houses cuz everyone has gone to work already?

I think what surprised me most of all was how many adults seem to completely forget what it was like to be a teenager.  The prevailing opinion was that the girl was having sex as a way to act out “issues”—-it seemed impossible to believe that a 16-year-old might have a biological urge to fornicate.

treating your kids like mindless property pretty much garauntees your kid is going to lie to you, sneak around, and rebel to the point of putting themselves in danger.

Or just end up deeply insecure and unable to trust themselves, make their own decisions, or take chances in life without overthinking and doubting everything they do. If they’re lucky, they’ll go to college far away from you and start living their own lives there.

What surprised me was reading the letters, which ran at least 7 to 1 against Cary and for the idea that there’s something horribly wrong with a teenager who wants some privacy

I was surprised too, but I figured the self-righteous, controlling moral scold types are probably a lot more likely to take the trouble to comment in the first place.

It’s not that they forgot what it was like to be a teenager (in fact, that they remember may be the problem)—it’s that they don’t understand what a parent should be.

Parents aren’t parole officers, and they are only responsible for kids up to a point.

Parents are there to help kids grow into adults—something we do pretty much on our own anyway.

Well, a lot more kids got rides *to* school when I was in junior high, because that way you could sleep in, and it only took 5 minutes to get to school on your parents’ way to work.  But after school?  Forget it.  Thing is, this was true even when I lived in El Paso, when I was a small kid—-by the time I was old enough to walk a half mile, I was walking it home from school.  I guarantee that most of the paranoid parents aren’t in cities near as crime-ridden as El Paso, but common sense must prevail.  There aren’t usually drive-by shootings at 3 in the afternoon in lower middle class neighborhoods.

I’m sure most parents out there are reasonable about certain realities, but I’m just sort of stunned that most of the people in comments at Salon don’t bat an eye at the idea that one should subject a 16-year-old to a privacy and freedom free life, and that having a boyfriend that one wants to fool around with is a particularly egregious crime.

It’s worth noting that they’re are also taking their cues from how teenagers are treated by the public schools—the Human Resources Culture holds sway there just as surely as it does at many of their workplaces. Unsupervised and unprogrammed time may engender dangerous things like imagination and self-reliance, and detract from HR Culture’s main mission of turning out pliable and unquestioning little consumers/employees—you know, the kind who are happy to work through their unpaid furloughs.

I used to think my mother was over-protective. Compared to the parents I see today, she comes off more like Auntie Mame.

And yeah, Cary Tennis is pretty bloody useless both in form and content. Why Salon keeps him and Paglia around remains a mystery to me.

I thought this advice was okay—-he just reminded them to think of teenagers as human beings whose desires and needs are as real as anyone else’s.

I was having a conversation about this topic with my mom just last weekend. As a single mother with a career that require A LOT of travel we would be more or less on our own for weeks or, in a few instances, months at a time. Even when she was at home she kept us on a pretty long leash, I never had a real curfew because I could be counted on to come home at a reasonable hour in a sober(ish) state. She was remarking on how she felt lucky my sister and I turned out OK despite all of the freedom she allowed us.

As she pointed out, accurately based on other people I’ve told about this, she would be considered grossly negligent in this day and age. I said that we turned out to be successful, responsible adults because we were allowed to grow into freedom, instead of being treated like a criminal on furlough up until I was suddenly out on my own.

Now-a-days I see my sister-in-law requiring text message check-ins from her kids every fifteen minutes and I cringe. I can’t imagine the horror of living under that kind of lock-down.

And jessilikewhoa, yes, exactly. The kids with the super strict parents were always the ones who did the really crazy shit.

Teenagers can be difficult to deal with, but taking away their privacy and keeping them under constant supervision isn’t going to make it any easier!

When I was a young child, me and my siblings had the run of the country. During summer vacation, my mother would send us outside and lock the door behind us. But as my older sister and I got to be teenagers, my parents suddenly started freaking out about all the trouble we *could* get into, and I went from being free to being held under lock and key. I was forbidden to talk to my best friend, I couldn’t do things like go to the movies. And I was as pure as the driven snow - I didn’t drink, do drugs, smoke cigarettes, have sex, shoot I only kissed one person before I turned 18!

Anyway, in a predictable response, I moved out of their house as soon as I was 18, and I didn’t talk to them for a year after that. During which time I got pregnant, got married, and basically made a series of not so great choices that lucky for me, ended up turning out okay.

I know several people who think it’s hunky dory to remove the doors to their children’s bedrooms as a punishment. I think that’s insane. If your kid has a serious problem with drugs or alcohol, get them treatment, don’t treat them like a prisoner! If your kid is dishonest with you, think about how you respond when they tell you something truthful - do you jump on them? Do you think it’s more important that you express your anger rather than listen to them and guide them?

I have a 20 year old daughter and a 12 year old daughter. We went through some difficulties with my older daughter just before she graduated from high school (online relationship with older male that got obsessive and out of hand), but we worked it all out without anyone losing their right to privacy. They both know that they can talk to me about difficult issues without me getting judgemental. They consider me an authority, but I am not authoritarian.

As for the walking to school, where we live, we see a lot of parents dropping off and picking up kids, but a significant percentage of kids walk or ride bikes, which is what my daughter does.

No kids, not sure if I want ever want them or plan to have them, but my main thoughts were on the curfew thing…

Not sure how I feel about it.  I agree that 10PM is ridiculous, but I don’t know if having some sort of curfew is overly authoritarian.  Perhaps midnight on weeknights and 2AM on the weekends?  I don’t know.  There are quite a few communities in America which have curfews for people under 18 (as in, you’ll go to jail if you are 16 and out and about on a Tuesday night at 3 in the morning), so I don’t know that having a curfew which expects your kids to abide by the law is necessarily repressive.

Overall though, I do think that the parents were being way, way too authoritarian here.  And the whole taking the door off the hinges thing is creepy as hell.  Even moreso if it is a standard that is only being imposed on one’s daughters but not one’s sons.

It’s because most parents do not understand that their children are PEOPLE with independent desires and view-points, not fucking automatons or clones.  I have found that talking about things, long before they become problems, including the preemptive pointing out the “inevitable parent-child conflict through teenage years stereotype,” is a load of crap does not have to be so as long as both sides ‘work it out from mutual respect’ has worked well.

Also, I’ve noticed that most adults forget that the fact that the parental-child relationships are actual RELATIONSHIPS with asymmetrical power.  And that when power is asymmetrical, you are quite beholden to not use the power unless absolutely necessary. 

I also tell my children that we are NOT friends, mark you, but that I’m your father.  I am friendly, but do not ever mistake me for your ‘buddy,’ I am not, even if we are ‘friendly’ in our relationship and share many common interests that we pursue together.  I tell them I have a job to do as a parent and I take it damn seriously.  That job is to guide them through the hazards and trials of youth and to prepare them to live in a complex world in a manner that they will, as educated and well-adjusted adults, consider “wholesome” or “successful” or whatever it is that makes them happy/fulfilled. 

If we, when they are adults, strike a friendship, that means I did it right.  If not, I failed and have created a mess.

There’s so much mommy guilt now, and we’re supposed to protect our kids from everything. A couple of years ago a woman left her kid in his carseat in the driveway and ran back into the house for something. The car was stolen with the kid inside, and everywhere there were people talking about how irresponsible she was to leave the kid.

The kid was strapped down so he couldn’t wander off, in the driveway of her own home while she was maybe thirty feet away for about two minutes.  I don’t think she was at fault. But every time a parent can be blamed, they are, so that the rest of us can continue to think it won’t happen to us or our kids.

Also, considering that one of the top stories on CNN is about a toddler being kidnapped in 1955, I’m not buying that it’s so much more dangerous now than it was when I was a kid.

I agree that when I was a teenager, we hung out at people’s houses and ignored adults. And the more nervous parents who worried about their kids the most re-did their basement or bought a pool table so that the kids would spend more time at their house. They didn’t set rules that the kids were sure to break.

What these parents are forgetting is that it is important to give kids a certain degree of privacy and security so that they can set boundaries and limits for themselves personally, as their own personal identity. Yeah, kids can get into scary shit in high school but they also learn risk assessment and their personality develops around that.

Strict curfews, removing doors, mandatory check-ins, constant adult supervision, etc—- all these things do is make the kid so focused on getting away from your authoritarian behavior that they’ll lose their shit once they leave home and be so invested in making up for lost time that they undervalue their own safety and don’t think about their own comfort zones.

It’s weird… I sort of wonder if part of being a parent is forgetting about what it was like to be a kid yourself.

You’re not a parent, so you don’t understand.

(I’m kidding, but someone had to say it. )

If all I have to worry about when my daughter is 16 is that she’s messing around with her boyfriend, has some dirtball friends, and occasionally breaking curfew (10? Does school start at 5 in the morning?), I’ll be dancing for joy. More to the point, while there will be punishment for those (mostly involving taking away stuff), I think I’d have to discover a meth lab in my daughter’s room before I’d even consider taking her door off the hinges, and I doubt I’d do so even then. The kinds of mistakes this girl is making mostly seems to fall into the take away cell phone/ground for three days level. (I would want her to finger the friend who stole stuff, but that’s not her fault.)

WRT parents picking up their kids at school, I think its a self-perpetuating problem. 

Or it’s about the atomized life we live. I pick my daughter up after school because I don’t live in her school busing area. I’m sure I’m not the only divorced parent in the line.

Gracchus’s HR point reminds me of a high school graduation I just attended.  The priest (Catholic school) repeatedly referred to the students as products, like to the extent that it was creepy and I couldn’t stop picturing children on an assembly line.

Well, a lot more kids got rides *to* school when I was in junior high, because that way you could sleep in, and it only took 5 minutes to get to school on your parents’ way to work.  But after school?  Forget it.  Thing is, this was true even when I lived in El Paso, when I was a small kid—-by the time I was old enough to walk a half mile, I was walking it home from school.

This is how it was for me and mine, too.  In elementary school, we lived a little less than a mile from the school and my cousins and I would all walk it together, unless it was raining (and by raining, I mean pouring buckets of rain that an umbrella wouldn’t keep you dry from).  In fact, other than the first day of kindergarten, no parents walked with us either.  By junior high, we got dropped off in the mornings, because of the sleeping in factor and the junior and high schools were actually in town (we were far enough away that you had to be at the bus stop a bit before 7 to catch it, but school didn’t start until closer to 8), but we rode the bus home.

However, these days I don’t know very many parents at all who let their kids walk to school, especially not the younger kids.  We live less than a block away from our son’s school and he walks, but the line up in the mornings and afternoons is ridiculous.  I know people who live around the corner and a couple streets over who won’t let their kids walk (4 whole blocks and the kids are 9 and 11) to school.

Now-a-days I see my sister-in-law requiring text message check-ins from her kids every fifteen minutes

*Jaw drops*.

And people wonder why it’s become mostly socially acceptable that the NSA under Bush built a special program to spy on American citizens…

This is insane, as are most of the commenters. I see so many people assume that just because the parent says the teen is out of control, it means she is, even though there’s, like, nil evidence in favor (girl is having her bf in her room at 16? since when is that a big deal?)

I agree that this seems largely generational. I was left alone in the house from the time I was 12 under the premise that once you’re old enough to get babysitting gigs, you’re old enough to be left alone. (And this was in the day before 911 or speed dial, which means a person actually had to learn the seven-digit phone number of the local police! Imagine!!!) Never an issue with me or the sibs. We weren’t any better or worse than kids have ever been.

Which is why I love to watch Mad Men. That’s parenting as I remember it!

The thing about hiding her boyfriend in her closet until her parents went to bed reminded me of the Twilight books (so beloved by parents for its alleged abstinence message), in which Edward regularly sneaks into Bella’s room and spend the night with her.

“[...]fathers who removed their teenage girls’ bedroom doors.”

That is some disturbing and problematic shit right there.

Though I do have some sympathy for parents whose behavior seems overly draconian, depending on the child they’re dealing with.  My parents’ involvement in my life (practically nil) and my sister’s life (practically 24/7) differed so wildly because, left to her own devices, my sister probably would have opted to wind up jailed on DUI charges rather than graduating from high school.  If you have a kid who’s dealing with mental-health issues/substance-abuse problems*, sometimes the only readily available option can be adjusting parental behavior to compensate.  It’s not a solution, it’s an exercise in damage-control.  That having been said, I’ve seen the same behavior toward teens who were pretty much models of good and decent teenage behavior, and I definitely got a creepy parental-ownership vibe off those relationships.

*Yet another argument for single-payer health insurance.  Accessing adequate mental health services for adolescents without fat sacks of cash money on hand can be jaw-droppingly difficult.

And I believe the Republicans are trying to cut the “Safe Routes to School” funding, which makes routes to school safer for kids who can walk or bike there.

assumed by all the sexists in the comments at Salon to be the mother

Well, “then a bunch of my jewelry went missing” certainly doesn’t make a clearcut case or anything, but it’s certainly more common in modern-day America for the mother to own the jewelry. 

She says she doesn’t like to be here because all we do is yell, without seeming to realize that her behaviors are causing the tension.

That’s just the saddest line to me.  People are just so incapable of seeing themselves sometimes.

Also: the removal of the bedroom door in the Tennis letter was a response to door slamming, not privacy issues.

A ridiculous response, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t recognize the telltale sign of a Y chromosome. Door slams? Remove door. Problem solved.

Parent of a 13 year old here.

My husband and I recently went to see the Tubes with our close neighbors.  The concert was about 45 minutes away.

Our children, aged 11 and 13 were each handed $20 and a transit pass, and were dropped off two miles away in a college area.  They called us when they finished dinner and their movie tickets were purchased.  They called us when the movie was over.  They called us when they got on the bus, and when they got home around 11:00 pm.  At this age, at least, they understand that being handed money and being dropped off somewhere cool comes at the price of being responsible and checking in when you are supposed to.  The times they have failed to do so have resulted in revoked privileges and losing allowance money.

I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect teens to check in and to check up to see if they are where they say they are.  With freedom comes responsibility, and lacking responsibility means losing freedom.  Around here, “free from adult supervision” often means being one of those inebriated shits who drink themselves blind in the woods and their parent’s don’t want to be bothered to hear that you just sent them to the hospital in an ambulance as a result. Some of these kids are my older son’s classmates.  Lovely. Curfew isn’t too bad an idea either, as sleep time is important and there are daytime responsibilities to tend to.

That said, these people respond to the ineffectiveness of their discipline measures by adding new ineffective ones - like taking away the door.  For some reason, my husband’s parents didn’t like him closing his door, either - weird!  He pointed out that it was a fire hazard, and adjusted the door so it wouldn’t hang open.  Is people’s sense of smell so feeble that they don’t know what is going on in there?

When we lived in Texas my mom was constantly guilt tripped for having “latch key kids”. It was a constant emotional tug of war for her. She had to work, she couldn’t afford any after school programs (not that my brother or I would have gone) so she was left with giving us a key and assigning us responsibilities when we got home..homework, cleaning, grocery shopping, dinner prep, laundry.

We moved to San Francisco when I was 11. It was freeing for all of us. My mom was no longer guilt tripped by coworkers of friends because almost everyone expecting their kids to get to school and home on their own. It was freedom for us because we no longer had to depend on mom to go everywhere, yay public transportation. Of course we had our share of parent/teenager issues.

I also discovered the benefits of having the responsibilty for yourself at a young age when I went to college. So many of my classmates didn’t know how to do their own laundry, clean up after themselves, solve their own conflicts, decide their own meals and generally be responsible for their own needs.

I don’t think these parents understand that they are handicapping their teenagers ability to make good decisions (and learn from bad ones) by not supporting their independence early on.

ah, there’s nothing like the comments section of a Salon article to make me want to kill myself, and the idea that at least some of the posts are made by regular readers of that allegedly liberal webzine

(the only thing worse may be Slate commenters)

BTW, if high school starts at 7am, 10pm on a school night is not an unreasonable curfew.  Ditto if it is in response to a demonstrated lack of responsibility.  On a weekend night, it doesn’t even permit a 7pm movie!

The only way that I will give my kids a curfew is if they fail to be where they say they are when they say they are, or if there is drinking or drugs going on and they don’t leave.

I’d rather wish there was more supervision of the kids in my apartment complex; but that’s mostly because a dozen kids in a few square feet of open space does not engender safety.  There’s no place any of them can play without bumping elbows with someone else, no place to toss a football or any ball at all, let alone a kite or frisbee.

I realize that when a kid violates rules, that makes parents want to clamp down more, but… Door?

I think this is the only time I’ve ever agreed with Cary Tennis in the slightest.  Kind of scary.

One other thing to consider is that this over-protectiveness is largely class-based.  Poor folks who can’t get flex-time or afford for only one parent to work, can’t drop their kids off at school, be there constantly, etc…  don’t do this.  That goes for po’white trash like I was as a kid, as well as people of other ethnic backgrounds. 

Yeah, my mom was a big one for throwing us out of the house.  And the shit we got into would probably scare most of those parents to death.  But we, from elementary school on up, almost always traveled in at least pairs, if not packs, and we shared information constantly about who was safe in the neighborhood, and who wasn’t. 

Also, a good blog for people who think most of today’s parents are insanely hovery is Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids blog.  She got called the worst mother in the world for letting her nine year old take the subway by himself.

What I really don’t get is the parents who want to control and set a billion rules in place, and then also wish/threaten they could kick the kids out.  So it’s not OK for your kid to be out after 10, but living on the street is just dandy.

Heck, I was a latchkey kid by 9 or 10. My parents had jobs that lay in opposite directions, both about an hour from home. Welcome to the reality of modern life. TV has made people nuts. Stranger abductions are extremely rare, but when they do happen they often become national stories, so people learn to fear them. For that matter, any number of low risk dangers get magnified in our minds because the TV and the internet bring everything right to our doorstep, no matter how unlikely they might be. Next thing you know, we’re duct-taping our windows to protect against terrorist attacks. Here in TN, we’re passing laws making it legal to take guns into bars, ‘cause lord know you need to be armed at all times to protect yourself from the hordes of violent criminals that roam our streets. Authoritarian mindset+modern information overload = deeply nutty behavior.

There are quite a few communities in America which have curfews for people under 18 (as in, you’ll go to jail if you are 16 and out and about on a Tuesday night at 3 in the morning), so I don’t know that having a curfew which expects your kids to abide by the law is necessarily repressive.

At this point it’s not the parents being repressive, but the law.

That should read:My mom was no longer guilt tripped by coworkers OR friends

The other “horrible” parenting decision my mom made was to be very forthright about sex with my sister and I. She told us we should live with a person before getting married because too many people marry just so they can have sex (I think she was speaking from experience here, she married when she was 19). And I followed her advice. I’ve been married to my wife for almost 21 years, but we’ve been living together for 22.

She was also very admament about reminding me that I should always use a condom. When I came home with a hickey when I was 15 I got my first “condom lecture” and it seemed like I kept getting that lecture every week or so until I went to college. I think she thought I was a lot more of a Casanova than I actually was. But she was terrified I get some girl pregnant by accident. After her nagging (her phrase for it) I was worried about that too. Thank God.

I can definitely see setting some limits (even a lot of limits) on teenagers, but there is a definite line that can be crossed.  Curfew is reasonable (although 10 pm on a weekend doesn’t seem so, midnight or 1 am is, and 10 or 11 is fine for a school night), monitoring the kid’s whereabouts is reasonable, up to a point, etc. 

Taking the door off the hinges and keeping the kid under lockdown is not reasonable, especially as it didn’t seem to me, reading that, that she was especially different from most teenagers anyway.  Those are angst and drama filled years and there will be much yelling and wailing and gnashing of teeth for all involved.

Regarding the Free Range Kids blog: I wouldn’t be comfortable with letting a kid alone on the subway at 9 y-o (I think I’d wait until about 12 y-o/starting High School), but that’s not exactly “worst mother” material.

in my experience, my friends who had the strictest parents ended up the wildest kids with the most problems. kids with parents like mine who treated us like people deserving of respect, stayed basically good kids who never got in any major trouble nor made any huge life altering mistakes.

Utterly pitiless and inhumane parenting regimes cause kids to respond by fighting for their individuality and basic humanity? Gee, who the hell knew?

My mom was a gigantic control freak. The first time I was ever allowed to go on our (simple, laid-back, utterly safe, suburban) bus system alone was when I was FIFTEEN, and then only because I had a brief stint in a foster home and needed to take the bus to get to school.

I experienced my adolescent years as basically being a prisoner, probably because my mom viewed her role as a prison guard, which meant I lied to her and sneaked around to dodge her insanely rigid rules, stole stuff from her, and so on.

Mr Kristin’s mom, however, although she was way more conservative politically than my mom, treated Mr Kristin like, you know, a human being, and recognized the utter normalcy of him doing things like riding in a car with his friends, staying out till midnight at Denny’s and so forth. Guess what, he never stole and rarely lied, and was happy to comply with the rules she did set down. He wasn’t a prisoner.

BTW, because I was so “out of control”, my mom got involved with Tough Love, and holy Jesus is that a fucked up organization. My mom’s group, at least, was focused almost totally on ways to “control” your kids that weren’t, as yet, prosecutable as child abuse. So I too had my “privileges” of door and light bulb removed, toiletries taken away and had to wash my hair with dog shampoo because it was the only shampoo not hidden or locked up, was locked out of the house and had to beg to be let in if I was 5 minutes late coming home, and so on.

It utterly boggles my mind how parents can introduce a guard/prisoner structure to their relationships with their kids, and then not see why their kid is acting like, well, a prisoner with a guard they resent.

Jackieg, that’s because they don’t know what to do, and need to understand why.  They have forgotten that the golden rule of parenting is not command and control.  The golden rule of parenting is to RAISE SOMEBODY WHO WILL LEAVE YOUR HOUSE WITH ADEQUATE SELF CONTROL, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES TO BE A PROPERLY FUNCTIONAL ADULT.

Too many baby boomers - ones that are way too far into the rules, and ones who hippydippy and helicopter away with no rules or expectations - think that their kid will just wake up one day and be a fully functioning adult because their brain will suddenly be wired right or something.  Bullshit - teens have different brain wiring, but all kids need to be constantly learning how to take care of themselves.

holy shit, i just read the actual letter at salon. the parent took the daughter’s house key away? she isn’t allowed in her own home when her parents aren’t home? thats so seriously fucked i can’t begin to comprehend it. what part of “it is the childs home too” do these people not understand? she isn’t a houseguest or a stranger, this is where she lives and she isn’t even allowed indoors unsupervised. i would be a screaming miserable asshole too is i was treated like an intruder in what should be the place i feel safest and most comfortable.

if i ever hate my own (still hypothetical) children that much i’ll head straight to a good therapist. the parent in that letter cares more about jewelery than hir kid, and thats disgusting.

Some of the comments there are terrifying:
The next time she shrieks, break something she values. Preferably the cell phone.

I really feel for the daughter here. My mum called me “delinquent” when I was 16 and while I’m sure I was a typical surly know-it-all teen at times, I didn’t smoke or drink - let alone do any drugs or get involved in crime - and was a straight A student with clear career goals. I had a boyfriend, though, and came home late sometimes: increasingly so as the atmosphere got more hostile at home. I ended up moving out to my dad’s house, and my relationship with my mum has still not entirely recovered.

(I do think it’s perfectly reasonable to have a time before which the kid should call or text so the parent knows not to worry. For any age of kid. I still do that if I’m staying at my dad’s, even though i’m now in my thirties.)

I bet they then complained about how much time she spent locked in the bathroom, too. Ugh.

I believe that’s traditional for *all* teenage daughters.

Agree on the creepy vibe re the bedroom door.

When I was in high school, my mom and I had a game.  If I wanted to stay out past curfew, I stayed over at a friend’s house—sometimes I didn’t even know who that friend would be until after I left home and called in, but I just kept a sleeping bag in the car.  Mom pretended that we went to bed at 10, while I stayed out all hours.

I understand, b/c if I wasn’t home by 11-12, and she had gone to bed, she couldn’t sleep.  As soon as she heard my key in the lock, she’d go down soundly, but she couldn’t really sleep until she “knew” I was safe. 

The game worked b/c we both actually knew what was going on and she actually trusted me to behave.

I called her once when a boy who’d driven many people to a party had had too much to drive.  We took everyone home safely, and although she let me know she disapproved of teen drinking, she always let me know I could call.

I was not allowed to close my bedroom door when my boyfriends were over.

That’s what going on dates was for.

And I agree that the kids with the strictest parents were the wildest and most rebellious.  I actually went home early a couple of times—which totally freaked out my parents—WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?—as did another daughter of permissive parents. 

I walked home from school when I was in 1st grade.  My children can’t leave school unless I sign them out (or they take a bus) until they are in 5th grade.  CPS policy.  You have to be picked up and signed out till then.

It’s hard to let my son do things on his own, not just b/c I’m protective, but b/c even if I want to let him be independent, others will snatch him from me.

Not “bad guys”.  Social services and such.  We were at Target the other day, and he forgot the list of items his teacher wanted kids to bring for Field Day.  I seriously debated letting him run downstairs, back to the car, grab his backpack, and run back.  He was game.  I believed he could do it…I just also believed someone would stop him and call security and harrass us all for negligence.

———

I’m not reading Cary Tennis, but anyone who looks forward to their 16 y/o moving out sounds more like a prison guard than a parent.  Not that teens can’t be nightmares, but if you want them to behave, you should teach them what you expect when they are little.  You know, when you can actually enforce a punishment that matters or physically remove them from a situation. 

If you let them get away with everything when they’re little, why would you expect a change when they are older?  Just b/c the things they want to do then are scarier (for you)?  They still just want to do what they want to do, and if you haven’t taught them common sense, responsibility, and honesty, then you’re simply reaping what you’ve sown.

Shakahi said:

So many of my classmates didn’t know how to do their own laundry

I remember one time telling a group of my teenage friends that I had been doing my own laundry since I tall enough to reach the top of the machine and shocked the heck out of them. Why any parent would not take a few minutes to teach kids to do their own laundry is beyond me. Why do work you don’t have to?

and I too find mind-boggling the “helicopter” style of parenting

Starting around 8th grade my parents pretty much left me to get on with the business of being an adolescent with little more oversight than requiring one phone-call check-in during an evening out, and to monitor closely how late I came home.

That included being responsible for getting to wherever I wanted or needed to be all on my own, whenever possible. That included pretty much making my own travel arrangements (excepting paying for them, of course) to visit my biological father in another state.

the new paranoid intrusive helicopter parent explains why so many of my students seem to be so timid and unadventurous and lacking in initiative and self-reliance

Authoritarian mindset+modern information overload = deeply nutty behavior.

This.  Also puts me in mind of the common conceptions regarding the so-called millennials—that they have been coddled, overprotected, etc.  The long term effects of the children-as-precious-snowflakes-that-must-be-under-twenty-four-hour-guard phenonmenon—assuming it exists—will be very interesting.

Regardless, any desire I ever had to have children myself is pretty much dead.

It is the child’s home too.  Which means chores as well as access and comfort.

My older son’s room is his room, too - or will be when the two of us finish painting it and assembling the furniture.  I think he will be far less likely to do something stupid to it if he has to put some sweat equity into it.  He also got to plan it, pick furniture, and pick the paint color scheme.  More duality of privilege/freedom and responsibility, with a helping of skill building.

When I was 16, if I had boys in my room, the door had to be open. “Not because we don’t trust you, dear, but because the boys might not behave.” Frankly, since the boys I had over were just friends in my book, I kind of liked the idea that there was enforcement of my safety if they did have the wrong idea.

But my privacy was otherwise sacrosanct. When my door was closed, my parents knocked and waited (or knocked and said, “Dinner!”). No worries about being caught with my clothing half off. (We had no AC, in California. I spent most of the summer in my undies if I was in my room)

if you want them to behave, you should teach them what you expect when they are little.

I can’t help but think the problem for the parents is that they’re starting to seek advice when it’s already too late. The early years are when kids learn the value of honesty and trust and proper behavior. If a child hasn’t learned not to slam the door when his (or her) parents ask him to stop by the time he’s around 13 or so, odds are he’s not going to change after that.

The nature of children is such that they have to learn to act like adults by the time they’re in late adolescents. If they can’t do that, there’s a problem because they’re going to face a lot of adult issues and the parents aren’t going to be able to restrain them without escalating the situation into an extremely authoritarian environment, which probably won’t work, anyway.

“Maybe it’s a west Texas rural thing”

good god, no - Fairfield county, CT, where I grew up, is culturally about as far as you can get in the US from rural W. Texas, and the fundamentals of teen life there in the mid-80s were just as you described for your time

Teaching them what to expect when they are little doesn’t quite work, because discipline and limits and responsibility necessarily have to change as they mature. 

When mine were little, I could bear hug them if they got too out of control and physically remove them from a bad situation.  My older son is now 3” taller than me, so my rather physical restraint methods had to change.

That said, nothing shuts down a teenage or preteen mouth off like shutting off the money supply.

Since we’re sharing anecdotes…

When I was in 5th and 6th grade (early 1980s) my mother showed my sister and I how to ride public transit to school. Lots of warnings, lots of contingency plans, lots of worry on her part, but she did it because she wanted us to be independent. Granted, the trip was through an upscale urban area with lots of “eyes on the street,” but it was still a major American city, and one we’d just moved to.

The middle school/HS I attended , 2 blocks away from the elementary school, had a pick-up/drop-off policy for kids under 16, so my mother reluctantly joined a carpool for a year until she realised an older student who lived nearby was glad to pick me up and drop me off.

I was a “latchkey kid” when I was younger, and by age 14 my parents would let me stay in the house by myself for days at a time if they went on a trip with my younger sister. They provided food, emergency numbers, alerted neighbours, etc., but otherwise I was happily on my own.

That said, I was a pretty mild-mannered kid—my parents trusted that they wouldn’t find the house wrecked when they returned. And I was expected to do certain household chores (laundry, watering the lawn, etc.). Still, I doubt that the kind of people who find a 10PM curfew or removing a bedroom door (ditto on the creepy) acceptable would approve of my parents’ choices.

You know what I just realized?

I took the hardware off my kids’ bedroom door.

Admittedly, they are 5 and 8, and the 5 year old is small for her age and couldn’t really manage the doorknob when we moved in.  I’m pretty sure they got locked in and freaked.

It is harder to slam it with a big hole where the knob used to be, but if the boy really tries, and sometimes he does, he can make it bang.

———-
And I’m wrong!  I just asked the boy if he remembered when they used to have a door knob.  He does.  I asked him if he remembered why I took it off.  He does—he was locking people out (like his sister who shares the room).

I asked him if he wants it back…and he doesn’t.  I told him when he gets older he might, so just let me know.  But give me a week to find the hardware.

But it’s funny.  I took his door knob!  I’m a closet authoritarian!

It’s a culture of fear and control—it’s not like the modern GOP came out of nowhere.

The big thing I read when I read about these insane parents is that none of them make any decisions whatsoever out of love for their children and desire for their physical and mental health.  Every decision is made to maximize control and out of fear of the kids doing something bad.  Kids can’t do anything good, because all they can possibly do is live up to a bad expectation, either of being too pliant and unmotivated, or of being too self-willed and active.

I really think a big part of this is the collapse of extended families and the stress that comes from atomization in the suburbs.  We’re all really kind of insane as a country.

Egad. When I was a teenager way back a long fucking time ago, we were routinely on our own. My parents would leave me alone for the weekend as long as one of my friends stayed over, too. And we got up to all sorts of trouble and parties and whatnot during those weekends, but big fat hairy deal. We cleaned up well, didn’t get caught and still turned in good grades. Because we were basically good kids in hormone-filled, bad-judgment-filled teenage bodies. Turned out fine.

Relationships between teenagers and parents are always difficult just because they’re years of such immense change. Anyone who doesn’t expect some tension has totally forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. A good parent anticipates some tension and learns to roll with it.

I remember one time I was being excessively emotional about something that seemed HUGE in my teenage world, and my mother was listening, but not appreciating just how HUGE a deal it was. So I shouted, “you just don’t UNDERSTAND!” And my mother started cracking up because, of course, every teenager in the world has said that. She felt bad about laughing, and I pouted at the time. Now, I totally get the joke.

I had a 10 p.m. curfew on weeknights and midnight on weekends. My parents’ reasoning was that they didn’t sleep well if I wasn’t home, and they didn’t feel like staying up late just because I was still having fun. But I could bring home my friends who had later curfews and hang out with them at my house. Of course I didn’t like it as a teenager, but as a parent (of a little kid), I see it as them not letting me ruin their own quality of life, which is not an unreasonable basis for a rule.

My folks were otherwise reasonable, didn’t control every movement, gave me lots of lectures on condoms, didn’t really want to know whether I’d acted on that information, and let me do my thing. But I was the kind of kid who got good grades and held down a job without anyone hassling me about anything. My brother was always in a lot of trouble and was always getting cracked down on because when he had responsibility, he tended to misuse it. It became a nasty, self-reinforcing cycle that was really hard for either my parents or my brother to break out of until he finally moved out. (But he did still get to go out and have his door closed.)

It doesn’t sound like the parents in the letter are being reasonable, but I have a little bit of sympathy in that sometimes unhealthy relationship patterns develop out of what are originally reasonable concerns that you don’t handle quite the right way, and it can be really hard for people to break out of those cycles or see themselves accurately when they are in the midst of the high emotions.

AJones, these parents aren’t parenting - and I say that as a parent.

As was said early in comments, Amanda has every right to compare this desperately messed up and side-tracked family to her own and ask WTF?  As far as I know, she has made damn few actual recommendations.

There seems to be this misconception amongst people my age (36) and older that teenagers today are more spoiled and worse behaved than we were at that age, and thus it seems reasonable to suggest all these draconian disciplinary measures.  Except, of course, it isn’t, and we need to be reminded that, despite what sensationalistic, scare tactic bullshit the media pushes on us, today’s teens are not having more sex than we were at that age, they’re not more mature, they’re not more disrespectful.  We seem to be more inclined to believe what people like Bill O’Reilly and Oprah tell us about what our children are supposedly doing than just trusting them to use good judgment.

However, I very much agree with Caren’s comment about the watchdog mentality of schools and nosy neighbors that restrict parents as well.  At some point age 10 became too young for a child to be left home alone for a couple hours, when I and most of my classmates circa 1982 were just that without incident.  How did we determine that 10 year-olds of today are less equipped to handle that than 10 year-olds of 25 years ago? I live in New York City, and my 11 year-old daughter takes the subway to and from school every day.  I go with her for the morning ride, but she goes alone on the way back.  To most people here that’s not a big deal, but if I were to tell someone who was from, say, the Midwest, they’d probably be mortified.  I don’t blame parents for feeling that a strict approach with their children is probably best, if for no other reason than to avoid judgment and criticism from other parents and those in authority.

I have teenagers. A 17 and a 14. And an 11 and 9 right on their heels.

Sometimes, the bedroom door removal IS one of the logical solutions to the problem.
Such as when you get rousted out by the cops at midnight because your neighbors have been seeing someone creep into one of your windows every night.  Turns out my oldest was having her boyfriend sleep over. Without permission. And you’ve already had the stern talk and random bed checks.

10 PM is not an unreasonable curfew on a school night. They have to be out the door at 7 AM to walk to school. 8 hours is minimal sleep for a teen.  My 17 has to make a 9 PM appearance, even on weekends, because of medication schedules. But she can go back out until 1. We do want to know when she’ll be in, and if she’s late, she needs to call so we don’t worry.

We lived in the country when I was a teen and I didn’t drive. I had no opportunity for this kind of trouble..

I’m really hoping that the door remained off the hinges for about fifteen minutes, not long term.  I can see it as a sort of shock moment - kid slams the door and storms out, comes back to find it off the hinges, is stunned, and has to replace it his/herself while getting a lesson about respect.

I’m hoping that.  But reading the description, I’m guessing that’s far too optimistic: the two dads in the letter seemed to be enjoying their sadism, rather distinctly.  And proud that they were better at it than anyone else.  I’m guessing this wasn’t a momentary arrangement, and good lord, that’s fucked up.

And this:

She spends time at the neighbors’ and enjoys spending time with their kids—fishing, hanging out watching TV, etc

Is about the most wholesome rebellion I’ve ever seen.  Hangin’ out at the old fishin’ hole with the family next door?  That little ‘harridan.’  And so, the family decided to lock her out of the house.  And they wonder why the neighbors treat them like maniacal felons.

And just out of curiousity:  The writer refers to the daughter ‘snogging’ with her boyfriend, so I’m assuming they’re all British in the scenario.  This seemed like such an American story to that point!  An

But it’s funny.  I took his door knob!  I’m a closet authoritarian!

My son slammed his door so hard he actually broke it.

We did get him a new door ... but we took our time about it and we required him to help sand it down and paint it. 

He does still slam it sometimes - and we point out that he’s paying for any damages out of his allowance.  Since he knows how much a door and paint cost, he knows that not having an allowance for 12 weeks would suck and he stops.

I’ll just say that in general we have as a society raised the age at which we start to treat adolescents as adults further and further.  We try to shield children from danger and the consequences of their own implusive and irrational behavior - padding schoolground equipment, raising the driving age, confiscating inhalers in schools - to the extent that most of them do not experience responsibility until they are 18 years old and out of the house.  Even then many teenagers are - to some extent - shielded from consequence and independence (I will not indulge the long-tired trope about helicopter parents.)

On the other hand transgressions against childhood are being more and more severely punished.  More and more teens are being tried as adults and sentenced to terms in prison which dwarf those of older offenders.

Also, we must account for social class in these discussions - children of those not fortunate enough to be relatively well-off are not as constrained by parents who are overworked and underpaid, and are conversely that much more likely to be treated as “hoodlums” if caught committing crimes and sentenced as adults (as mentioned above.)

We give children rules but no responsibility.  We constantly reinforce in their minds that we do not trust them to make independent decisions.  We inform them that they will be shielded from consequence but also punish them severely if they transgress a certain set of rules.  They see authority as harsh and arbitrary - which, of course, is nothing new.

Angela Sparrow, wouldn’t barbed wire under your daughter’s window be more fun?

Full disclosure:  Not a parent.  Will never be one.

It seems to me - as an outside observer - that a lot of parents forget that they are training children to be adults.  I know it’s tough to keep the bigger picture in mind on a day-to-day basis when you’re just trying to keep your toddler alive and your teenager in school but kids need to learn how to be independent, how to make good decisions and how to live a fulfilling life.  I work with a few “helicopter” parents who drive their kids everywhere and call them constantly.  Every moment of these kids’ lives is scheduled. 

Kids have to make mistakes.  That’s how we learn “Oops, don’t do that”.  They need to learn how to make good decisions BEFORE it really matters.  For example, let them screw up a part-time job rather than their first job on a career rung.  Let them screw up a curfew when they’re too young to get into any serious trouble. 

There were many times as a kid that I’d get pissed off at my dad for refusing to help me do something but it taught me to be independent and resourceful.  He’d tell me to figure it out for myself and I usually did.  Of course, by 17, I was a little TOO independent for his taste and any attempt at parental meddling at that point was ignored.

It’s hard to let my son do things on his own, not just b/c I’m protective, but b/c even if I want to let him be independent, others will snatch him from me.

Not “bad guys”.  Social services and such.  We were at Target the other day, and he forgot the list of items his teacher wanted kids to bring for Field Day.  I seriously debated letting him run downstairs, back to the car, grab his backpack, and run back.  He was game.  I believed he could do it…I just also believed someone would stop him and call security and harrass us all for negligence.

I feel for you. Back in March, I was in a big rush to get my daughter some hiking shoes, because she was going to camp the next day. It was Sunday, so all the stores closed early, and my husband had gone biking so I couldn’t leave any children home. So I packed them all in and got to the Dick’s five minutes before I thought it closed. But my baby was asleep. So, rather than wake her up, I left her older brother in the car with her… her older brother who was going to turn 13 in June and who often babysits her while I’m doing stuff like cooking dinner… left the car running with instructions to the boy to lock it from the inside, so they would have a comfortable environment but no one could steal the car, and me, my older daughter, and my younger son went into the Dick’s.

I got a *criminal citation*, because some busybody called security, and security called the cops, and the cops asked my son how old he was and he said 12. Legally you must be 13 to supervise a child younger than 8 when no adults are in sight, in our state. The cop said he would have arrested me except that I had four kids to take home.

They dropped the charges once I finally got to court, thank god, but I had social workers over twice to check up on me, I had to pay a lawyer $1200 (you do not fuck around with trying to defend yourself when your kids are at stake, if you can afford not to), and miss a day of work, and it was a giant pain in the ass, because a boy who was 12 and 9 months was left in a car for fifteen minutes with a napping 2-year-old baby (oh, and he had his cell phone with him too, so had an emergency occurred he could have called for help.)

They’re criminalizing normal parenting. And yet, at the same time, in the same state, a man shot his three kids after demanding visitation because the judge threw out the woman’s abuse case against him, saying that because she had “willingly” slept with him after the separation she couldn’t have a protection order against him; social services lost two children, and they turned up dead; another two children turned up dead in a freezer after their older sister escaped the house of horrors she’d been trapped in and reported the murder of her siblings and her own abuse, and the family had had a case open with social services. So they’ll go after *me* for this incredibly trivial shit and let people murder their kids and put them in the freezer. Did it ever occur to anyone that maybe the social work caseload would be eased enough to save some children’s lives if they didn’t pursue blatantly trivial shit all the time?

I’m not sure what more there could be to the story that some jewelry went missing.  Either the daughter or one of her friends stole it.  If it was her friends, they shouldn’t be allowed in the house anymore.

While I agree that parents should never micromanage teenagers, they still have a responsibility to teach their kids right from wrong.  If the daughter thinks committing theft herself or looking the other way when a friend does it is kosher, she’s going to have loads of problems down the road, and woe to the person who has to share a dorm room with her.

On the other hand, my sister would regularly remove the lock on my niece’s door as punishment.  I thought that was bad enough, but removing the entire door?  Unacceptable.

We give children rules but no responsibility.  We constantly reinforce in their minds that we do not trust them to make independent decisions.  We inform them that they will be shielded from consequence but also punish them severely if they transgress a certain set of rules.  They see authority as harsh and arbitrary - which, of course, is nothing new.

Excellent comment. Replace the word “children” with “students” or “employees” or (increasingly) “citizens” and you see the consistent thread of the Human Resources Culture.

WRT parents picking up their kids at school, I think its a self-perpetuating problem.  When I was growing up, dozens of kids walked to school.  My old neighborhood is admittedly less safe now, but probably not by that much.  Yet only 5 or so kids can be seen walking to school.  Now if you are a parent, do you want your kid to be out there walking to school pretty much alone?  Past mostly empty houses cuz everyone has gone to work already?

Interestingly enough, most people who are inclined to be overprotective and enact authoritarian supervisory regimes IME tend to be from the upper/upper-middle class and a bit too easily taken in by excessive MSM hype about dangers to kids….and have little to no apparent faith in their own parenting skills and their own kids…. 

The horrified looks on their faces when they heard that most parents* including my own allowed us from 6 years of age onwards to walk to school in a crime-ridden NYC neighborhood unsupervised always amused me. 

By junior high, taking hour-long subway rides to/from school alone was routine and more-so when I attended high school.  Heck, many parents from my childhood neighborhood would see this form of overprotectiveness as a mix of parental paranoia and excessive coddling they see as part and parcel of the upper/upper-middle class set. 

* Kinda hard to do when our parents had to work 6-7 day/week and 14+ hours/day for each. 

I also discovered the benefits of having the responsibilty for yourself at a young age when I went to college. So many of my classmates didn’t know how to do their own laundry, clean up after themselves, solve their own conflicts, decide their own meals and generally be responsible for their own needs.

Agreed.  One of the great things about NOT having a curfew since I was 11 was not only this, but also the fact I ended up being well-prepared at 17 to function in an environment where it was the UNDERGRAD’S JOB to manage his/her life and schedule so that one completed academic assignments while also having enough time to have a life.*  Because of this, I was stunned to find fellow undergrad classmates who couldn’t manage and ended up failing to complete assignments to the point of failure and even being penalized with academic suspensions/expulsions.  As I learned more about their lives in the 4 years, I found most of their parents micromanaged them to such an extent they had little to no preparation on how to function independently without supervision. 

As for the generational shift towards increasing parental micromanaging…friends who teach/TA undergrads have told me of having to deal with a generation of kids whose parents continue to micromange them to the point of choosing which classes they should be taking for them, talking to their advisors for them, and even taking an active part in grade disputes with the Profs/TAs…..regardless of whether the undergrad concerned asked….or even knew about their parents’ continuing micromangement of their undergrad careers. 

Back when I was an undergrad, tasks such as choosing classes to take, talking to advisors, and disputing grades were all seen as responsibilities of the undergrads concerned.  We’d NEVER even think of getting our parents involved as the first resort.  It would be seen by most of us classmates as a sign one has not matured beyond junior high/high school.

* As several undergrad Profs and older classmates explained to us in our first year, we’re all adults who have the responsibility of being proactive in our learning process and that the main responsibility of minding our academic performance was on us undergrads, not the Prof’s.

I have mixed feelings about over-protectionism: I have a sister whom is seven years younger than me and 100% of my childhood free time was spent caring for her. My brother, however, had no such responsibility (as he was male) and did as he pleased. Eventually I internalized the idea that I should rarely or never have friends and focused wholly on schoolwork while my brother got a GED and did whatever he liked. End result? I’m a grad student with NO friends (and not the slightest idea on how to make them) and my brother is dead. (A line can be drawn directly from how we were raised to his suicide, but that’s another story.) I can’t say which is better sometimes; though I may someday learn to associate with other people face-to-face, my brother has no such chance. My sister got a combination of the two experiences - she has friends aplenty, though she just barely graduated high school.

He does still slam it sometimes - and we point out that he’s paying for any damages out of his allowance.  Since he knows how much a door and paint cost, he knows that not having an allowance for 12 weeks would suck and he stops.

Ms Kate you are brilliant. i feel like i should write this down so i remember it when i parent. just so perfect, it treats your son like a rational human being while also enforcing reasonable consequences.

Blimey, Alara, that must have been terrifying for you and for your kids. Glad they saw sense at court.

I literally now hear about parents being arrested and charged with child endangerment/neglect for doing things that were considered perfectly normal when I was a kid (1970s), that were done by my mother who was a stay-at-home mother and a pretty darn good mom.  Like I’ve seen news reports of women getting arrested because they left their children alone in the car while they went into a store (I don’t mean babies, more like 8-year-olds).  I mention this to other people my age, and we all remember being left alone in the car with two admonishments: (1) stay in the car with the doors locked, and (2) don’t play with the horn!

It is amusing that men should GTFO of your business, because they have no standing, but you blithely tell parents how to handle things, even though you have no standing.

I missed the part where Amanda wanted to pass laws requiring parents to be up to her standards.  Please point out that paragraph.

Oh, and here’s a rundown of the comments (why do they call them letters?) at Salon.

Pro-Daughter:

Because you *ARE* a maniacal felon…

I was feeling sympathetic until I got to the part about locking the girl out of the house until you got home. If I were the neighbor and your kid was hanging out at my house every day because you’d locked her out of the house, I’d look at you like you were a maniacal felon too.

Teenagers do much better when treated with respect rather than mindless authoritarianism. These parents have guaranteed that their daughter will do what they are trying to prevent just out of rebellion.

And for god’s sake, do whatever you can to make sure she’s practicing safe sex. If she’s hiding her boyfriend in the closet, she obviously doesn’t think much of your feelings about her love/sex life—so you’ll need to work on building some trust, and not just lecture or throw condoms at her.

yes, it is HER house too. Figure out some way for her to have responsible supervision at home, make her come hang out at your work with you for a couple of hours after school, or make her get a job or some kind of after-school activity where you can confirm that she is there every day that no one is around to be home with her. Stick around on the weekends too, or take her places you’re going. I do not understand why you think locking her out of the family home is a good idea

I would have pointed out that she acts like her parents are tyrants, because a) locking a kid out b) refusing to let her have some privacy to make out with her boyfriend c) not letting her have some time alone with her friends and d) giving her a 10:00 curfew is tyranny. They appear to think their daughter is 12. She’s 16, and like a lot of parents, they can’t accept that. She’s two years away from adulthood. They should give her the opportunity to grow into gracefully instead of keeping her as a 12-year-old and then pushing her out and expecting her to be an adult.

I swear I didn’t notice who wrote this most reasonable letter until I had already pasted it:

—Amanda Marcotte

Pro-Parent:

Spay and Neuter your Teenagers.

Next letter.

THis child is cruising for a teen pregnancy. She’s not acting like a teen who would use birth control. She’s acting like a little hormonal idiot who has no idea about how much things cost in the real world. She sounds like she’s never really had realistic consequences before.

A girl who hides her boyfriend and does not understand that she is on an express train to pregnancy, and potentially to jail.

She may not drink or take drugs now [I suspect she does already] but they’re in her future.

She’s on Drugs.

I’m a parent and a high school teacher and from what I’m reading here, based on my experience, I’d say it’s pretty likely that your daughter is using. I’m a little surprised Cary didn’t raise the possibility given his own personal history. Drug use of any kind—pot, alcohol, and on up the scary trail—increases irritability, reduces inhibition, and encourages depression and self-alienation

I used to work at an ultra-liberal private school, and it was incredible. The children (as young as 3) were left at school from 8 in the morning to 7 at night. Most of the time they were picked up by nannies. They also were all incredibly over-protective of their children. I baby-sat for many of the older children, and the rules the parents had at home shocked me. These kids were not allowed to leave their property, and basically spent most of their free time on the internet. The parents basically saw them for an hour or two a day, and on the weekends hired baby-sitters. I completely hate the term latch-key kid, and I think there needs to be a national dialogue about how to allow parents to be involved with their kids lives without giving up their careers. What was frustrating about this was that these parents weren’t relying on normal daycare or public schools and afterschool programs: they were spending 22,000-30,000 dollars a year so their children could go to “the best of the best”. But I couldn’t understand how what was best for a 4-year old child was to be at school for ten hours a day.

So I think some of these parents overcompensate because they just don’t know their own children. Having worked as a nanny for several families as well, a lot of regular, wonderful parents are scared because they’re made to feel guilty for every choice they make. They can’t breastfeed long enough, they can’t encourage their child’s genius enough. They feel bad for using a nanny and they feel bad for wanting a career, and their companies and society aren’t making it any easier for them. So they overreact and show their love by trying to keep their child close to home. Which I think must make for an awfully strange world for the child. Twenty years ago I was allowed to ride my bike all over creation and hang with my friends; now none of the children I’ve taken care of have anything similar. If they leave the house it’s with their caregiver or their parent two steps behind. I have no idea what sort of repercussions that will have down the road, but it worries me.

Of course, I’ve also seen parents too scared to discipline or provide any structure for their kids at all, which is just as bad. Kids do test boundaries, and the children I’ve taken care of have always done best when I’ve explained my rules (you can’t hit) and stuck with and reinforced them (if you hit me or your brother you are going to take a time-out because violence is unacceptable). I’ve seen way too many parents unable to do that basic level of parenting. Though of course, that’s way preferable to taking off a sixteen-year old’s door. That’s insane.

It is amusing that men should GTFO of your business, because they have no standing, but you blithely tell parents how to handle things, even though you have no standing.

Ah, but the men who want to get into her business by legislating what an adult woman can and can’t do with her body do indeed have no standing. How that compares with her commenting on control-freak parenting methods (without calling for legislation) is for you to explain.

Society changes.  I hear kids born in the 50s say they didn’t wear seat belts and they’re just fine.  Or that their mom smoked and they’re fine.  Guess what?  We don’t hear from the ones who aren’t fine.

Society also stays the same in many ways. Those paedophiles that parents worry about today were there in the ‘50s as well. We didn’t hear about their victims because the interest in those days was to pretend that such things didn’t happen to (or in) “nice” families. A society that’s obsessed with keeping up appearances and hiding realities will find different ways to do so depending on culture and the historical moment, but tyranny is still tyranny and control is still control.

No-one here is clamouring for a return to the parenting methods of the 1950s and early ‘60s—there’s a reason we watch Mad Men and laugh uncomfortably at the pregnant women sucking down martinis and cigarettes and at the rampant corporal punishment (I get the feeling you’re all for “letting parents parent” even when that parenting involves strapping the child as punishment). But there’s nothing wrong with pointing out that there’s something equally wrong with a society that accepts removing a 16-year-old’s door or giving her a 10PM curfew as commonplace rule rather than an exception.

I mention this to other people my age, and we all remember being left alone in the car with two admonishments: (1) stay in the car with the doors locked, and (2) don’t play with the horn!

I was always told not to play with the parking brake too.

There’s something else—

The years 4 - 12 are easy.  Even when kids are total brats, their ability to do damage is so small that consequences are light.  And they tend to be pleasers.  So parents can get into very bad habits with only kinda bad consequences.

The problem is, if you haven’t established yourself as legitimate authority by 13, you aren’t.  And if you try to take that authority back, not only are you going to do a bad job of it in general (due to ill-practice), but you’ve also squandered any possibility of success.

At that point, you’re gonna have to take a collaborative approach with your kid and accept that they’re gonna do some dumb stuff they wouldn’t otherwise have done.  It’s about damage control and trying to, as quickly as possible, repair their capacity for self-management.  The worst thing you can do is try to establish an authoritarian relationship (with you in charge), because you don’t want to be an authority figure (or you would have been earlier) so you can only be a lousy one.  And so all you’re doing is asserting power you didn’t used to have so you can use it very badly.  There is no way that can possibly work.

blockquote>irritability, reduced inhibition,  depression and self-alienation</blockquote>
Doesn’t that pretty much define a teenager?

Something I’ve noticed now that most newspapers allow comments on articles is that the same kind of parent blaming and insistence on draconian measures is on full display anytime a kid either does something bad or has something bad happen to him.

A few years back, there was a case where a 10-year-old went over to his neighbor’s house, where he often hung out and learned stuff while the neighbor worked on old cars. The neighbor wasn’t home, kid started playing around the old cars, got trapped in one, and died from the heat. It was just a stupid, tragic accident. The neighbor had even told the kid he wasn’t supposed to play or be on the property when he wasn’t home, but sometimes kids don’t do everything you tell them to do.

The comments all blamed the parents for not having their 10-year-old under constant supervision. This happens over and over again on these types of stories. Where were the parents!!?? and on and on.

I don’t actually believe that all the people making these demands actually have that level of supervision of their own children. At a certain point, it’s physically impossible. I think it’s another manifestation of a certain type of magical thinking - if I can find some reason why this bad thing happened to someone else, I can assure nothing bad will happen to me.

I’ve had these bizarre reactions when i tell people that I have high school and college students babysit my 4 year old.  ONE kid.  Babysitters who are over 16. 

I used to babysit for four little girls ranging in age from 1-8, all at the same time.  I started doing this when I was 12.

I don’t blame parents for feeling that a strict approach with their children is probably best, if for no other reason than to avoid judgment and criticism from other parents and those in authority.

This. I feel as if parenting standards are set by the most fearful and protective people in the community, based on advice from experts who churn out endless lists of tips on keeping your kids safe, healthy and utterly perfect in every way at all times.

I let my 9-year-old run up the hill to play with a neighbor’s daughter in the field next to the neighbor’s house. I let her do it because she needs to have that experience of freedom and mastery, but I believe that I would be blamed harshly if something happened to her during that short trip out of my sight. We have so much information about safety at our fingertips that we’re expected, I think, to be responsible for it all—and if something bad happens, it’s our fault for disregarding expert advice.

A parent has to be pretty bloody-minded to not allow this to affect her actions.

When? I guess the 90s, because it sure wasn’t an issue in the 80s, but a friend has a kid born in 1999, and has been running into that attitude forever. Her daughter’s the only 10yo in the exurb who is allowed to be out of the garden on her own.

What caused it? If I had to make a bet I’d say information technology. For once, the internet makes a crime a 1000 miles away seem like it happened next door. Unless you learn to scale the news to the size of the place they come from, it gives you a seriously distorted image of the world. Second, with tech from cell phones to twitter you grow the idea that you can know where everyone is and what they are doing all the time. With parents (and jealous spouses) it’s just the jump from “can” to “must”. The scenario Ms Kate describes wouldn’t have been possible without cell phones.

To go a little more “out there”, maybe since it has become less accepted to beat your kids, lock them in their room or break down their door with an axe, some parents feel the need to compensate for their insecurity another way.

Not that there weren’t controlling parents (which is not the same as “strict” parents, not exactly) when I grew up, too. They had the girls that moved out when they were 18 and never called, and the boys who still lived at home in their 30s (or, in one case, joined the military).

Or it’s just an expression of CYA culture.

Curfew: I had “8 pm or call in”. As long as I didn’t sleep or eat at a friend’s place it was OK. The reason for that was that my mother hated having vistors and the idea of having to reprociate on hospitality freaked her out.

Isabella: It has been argued somewhere on LJ that part of the appeal of the Twilight books for teens is that Bella, by today’s teens’ standards, has an immense amount of control over her life and her time.

I’m a college student who lives at home and goes to a local university. My family worries about me so they can be strict (although I don’t know why, since I’ve never given them reason to suspect I’d get into trouble), but they still give me enough freedom to go places with my friends, and I can stay out till after midnight on weekends as long as I check in once in a while. I’m not dating anyone, but I think they’d be much stricter about that. I plan on having kids someday and I worry that I might be a little too free when it comes to sex and dating. But I want any children I have, whatever their gender, to be responsible and self-respecting when it comes to those issues, but I want to trust them to make their own decisions and be as helpful as I can if they need advice. The important thing is to create a relationship of trust with your kids, so they’re comfortable coming to you with their problems. I get along okay with my family, but I don’t really feel like I can talk to them about things.

My friend, on the other hand, had a really strict father who wouldn’t let her have male friends or stay over friends’ houses for sleepovers, among other restrictions. Her mother also had a mild mental illness and wasn’t very helpful. She constantly had to lie and sneak around, especially once she got a boyfriend, and it was really stressful for her. I guess that put into perspective how different my family situation was. She moved out once she turned 18 and got an apartment on her own, and her mother and younger brother left not long after. So that turned out okay, thankfully. My friend said she will give her children hardly any restrictions, so I guess she wants to be the opposite of her parents.

Treating your kids like prisoners only makes them resent you, and it will probably increase the likelihood of them getting into trouble.

raising the driving age

This is one that I actually don’t have huge problems with, provided it isn’t too draconian.  The law in Missouri changed a few years ago to a graduated license program…

Between the ages of 16-18, a person gets an “intermediate license” which has several restrictions:

1) For the first 6 months, they cannot have more than one passenger who isn’t immediate family under 19 years old.

2) After 6 months, they cannot have more than three passengers who aren’t immediate family under 19 years old.

3) They cannot drive between 1am-5am unless it is for school, work, or an emergency, unless they are accompanied by someone 21 or older.

4) If they receive any alcohol or drug-related driving offense, even if they only have a 0.01 BAC, they lose their license until at least 18.

Those all seem like reasonable rstrictions.

My parents didn’t take our doors off, but my dad did actually break my sister’s door down once when she refused to open it. It remained there but it never closed properly until it was replaced many years later.

When I was home last Christmas, I heard my dad yelling at my much-younger brother about how he needed to learn obedience and to do what his father told him without questioning him. I was like, Um, the kid is 13 years old. Not only is he biologically unable to be obedient, but this is the time in his life where you should stop teaching him unquestioning obedience, and start teaching him responsibility and critical thinking. As someone said upthread, kids are supposed to leave your house with the skills to be an adult, not as mindless automatons that do whatever you say.

I also want to tell the story of the time I was over at my best friend’s house watching a movie on a Saturday night to celebrate my 17th birthday and didn’t hear my cell phone ring over the movie. When my mom finally did get through to me, I had to come home that moment (it was before 10 PM) and was grounded for the rest of the weekend. On my birthday! For an innocent failure to hear my phone! At the time, I could not have felt the injustice was graver.

many parents from my childhood neighborhood would see this form of overprotectiveness as a mix of parental paranoia and excessive coddling they see as part and parcel of the upper/upper-middle class set.

It’s really upper-middle class. Part of the reason for this is because their place in the class hierarchy is so precarious that they’re worried their kids will end up making some tiny (perceived) mistake (like making the wrong friends or not getting into the right school) setting them down the road of dropping out of college and ending up working class or lower middle class forever. I don’t think the problem is fear of crime or kidnapping so much as fear of exposure to a wrong element if left unsupervised.

The upper class parents will simply make sure the kid spends the summers in the right places, and if the kid can’t be an academic achiever, finds a small college for other lazy rich kids and ensure that they marry each other.

It is amusing that men should GTFO of your business, because they have no standing, but you blithely tell parents how to handle things, even though you have no standing.

Because the only reason you would criticize someone’s control-freak behavior is because you want to control what they do. Kind of like how hating homophobes is just as bad as hating gays.

I love how often the wingnut’s trump card in an argument is “See, you’re no better than me.”

I’ll note that moral-panic adults tend to attribute all teen problems to weed, sex, video games, or alcohol.  All four of these things have some problems, but they’re also all marvelous ways to relax.  Adults, especially, are constantly encouraged to enjoy sex and alcohol, and video games are even carving out their place.  If weed were legalized, I’m sure it’s be up there too.

There never seems to be a sense that the misuse of these activities is a symptom, rather than a cause, of problems.

One of the great things about NOT having a curfew since I was 11

The problem with that is that in most places, it is ILLEGAL for an 11 year old to be out and about in the middle of the night on a weeknight.  And will likely get the parent put in jail.

I don’t think curfews are inherently bad.  I think draconian curfews are bad.

“a midnight weekend curfew on a high school senior, which was reacted to by myself as a grave injustice instead of a minor injustice, because yo, teenager”

100% this. My parents gave me a curfew which I NEVER met. Not once. By the time I was a junior in high school they gave up on it. My backup was always the stories my dad told about all the crazy shit he did when he was a teenager. Everytime I would do something stupid, she would look at my dad and ask “Where would he get an idea like THAT?”

The problem with that is that in most places, it is ILLEGAL for an 11 year old to be out and about in the middle of the night on a weeknight.  And will likely get the parent put in jail.

I’m not sure exactly what that person’s situation was - I never had a curfew, but it didn’t mean I could stay our as late as I wanted, it just meant that there wasn’t an everyday rule about when I had to be home.  It changed from day to day, and since my parents and I both seemed to treat it in good faith, we never had to formalize it. 

And it may be illegal for an 11 year old to be hanging out in front of the local Arby’s all night, curfews usually have the practical meaning for middle schoolers of limiting how late they can be at a friend’s house.

One of the great things about NOT having a curfew since I was 11 was not only this, but also the fact I ended up being well-prepared at 17 to function in an environment where it was the UNDERGRAD’S JOB to manage his/her life and schedule so that one completed academic assignments while also having enough time to have a life.

I had the same experience in undergrad, and that spending my teenage years under parents and a school that would be considered by wingnuts as prime examples of “irresponsible liberalism” in terms of the independence and privacy they afforded me.

It’s telling that those conservatives and Libertarians who crow the loudest about “personal responsibility” are the first to make every effort, overt and subtle, to ensure that young people (including their own children) are not prepared to take on the responsibilities that come with living in the adult world.

Drug use of any kind—pot, alcohol, and on up the scary trail—increases irritability, reduces inhibition, and encourages depression and self-alienation

Hee hee. Is there a dime novel hidden in the corncrib? A nicotine stain on his index finger? Does he re-button his knickerbockers BELOW THE KNEE?

Yup, my mom was convinced I was on drugs too, despite the fact that to this day I have never used a single illegal drug, smoked a cigarette or had more than half a glass of wine. Because I was manifesting all these dire symptoms of <strike>being a teenager</strike> drug involvement eleventyone. I just this minute realized how lucky I was that my health care providers had the ethics and good sense to believe me when I told them I never did drugs, because I can just imagine what it would have been like to be forcibly put in rehab “for my own good” when I’d never touched the damn stuff.

I raised the topic earlier of Tough Love, and their list of how to tell whether your kid was Out Of Control (tm) was also simultaneously giggle-inducing and cringeworthy.

As were, you know, the instructions for telling whether you had a witch on your hands, back in the Middle Ages. When you want to tyrannize a group of people, you find justifications for doing it that are wide enough to conveniently include the person you really want to tyrannize at a given moment.

Graccus: The middle school/HS I attended, 2 blocks away from the elementary school, had a pick-up/drop-off policy for kids under 16, so my mother reluctantly joined a carpool for a year until she realised an older student who lived nearby was glad to pick me up and drop me off.

These things really bother me. Kids are always in more danger from people who know them then from strangers. I had “you take the train, or the bus, or a cab, or bicycle, or walk, or call home for a lift, but you never get in a car with a man behind the wheel” drilled into me.

Chinoga: My parents’ reasoning was that they didn’t sleep well if I wasn’t home,

Anecdote: My mother was entirely convinced that she wouldn’t sleep until I was home. I came home at 4 am, no sound in the house. I got the bike indoors, took a long shower, put away my things and went into bed. I got woken by a mighty commotion at 8, because my mother was sure that she had been awake all night and I hadn’t come home!

This sort of thing is why I never liked the phrase “teenage rebellion.” Very few teenagers are truly rebellious as the term is applied to anyone else. Calling teenage behavior “rebellion” suggests it needs to be opposed and pushed back against.

Billingham:
And this:

She spends time at the neighbors’ and enjoys spending time with their kids—fishing, hanging out watching TV, etc

Is about the most wholesome rebellion I’ve ever seen.  Hangin’ out at the old fishin’ hole with the family next door?  That little ‘harridan.’ And so, the family decided to lock her out of the house.  And they wonder why the neighbors treat them like maniacal felons.

Exactly. A child who knows what’s expected of him or her in a general sense can actually be given a lot of leeway to make decisions the parent wouldn’t necessarily have made in that situation. But conceptualizing it as rebellion as good as says that the parent needs to make al the decisions. A child needs a certain degree of safety when he or she starts experimenting with making meaningful decisions; delaying that exerimentation until the child is out of your home (by punishing it before that) is dangerous.

The problem with that is that in most places, it is ILLEGAL for an 11 year old to be out and about in the middle of the night on a weeknight.  And will likely get the parent put in jail.

I’m not sure exactly what that person’s situation was - I never had a curfew, but it didn’t mean I could stay our as late as I wanted, it just meant that there wasn’t an everyday rule about when I had to be home.

I didn’t have a formalized curfew either, but I think that’s because I never gave any reason for needing one.  I was never out past 11-12 on weeknights in high school, and most often was in by 10pm.  On weekends, I was almost always home by 1-2 at the latest.  I came home wasted one time late in my junior year of high school and got chewed out about the dangers of alcoholism, but didn’t have a curfew immediately imposed (though I did lose car privileges for a month).

But I imagine, if, like my older brother (11 years older), I decided that it would be OK to make a habit of stumbling in the door drunk on a Tuesday at 1am, I very likely would have had a curfew imposed, as he had.

If I ever have kids, I probably won’t formalize a curfew, but I’ll reserve the right to do so should it ever become an issue.  If they bother to ask what time I want them home, I’ll probably say 11pm or so on a weeknight and 1am or so on a weekend.

Amanda,

I’m at work, so I haven’t read all the comments. But I agree with the drift of what I have read. I suspect I’m older than many of your reader/commentors. I go through these discussions now with my offspring vis-a-vis the grandchildren.

Let ‘em have a life!

They’re going to make the usual run of teen age screw-ups (didn’t we all?), but I’d rather have them do it now than bottle it all up, repress it down, and then have it explode out at college.

Particularly on the curfew thing: by 10th grade (16ish) the default setting was midnight (-ish), but it was open to discussion if there was a reason, and obviously, if something came up and you were going to be late, give a call (the latter was always presented in the “simple courtesy” category, not in the “we don’t trust you, what the hell are you doing category”). The only time I got rather upset about the curfew thing was the time one of the offspring came in, and then sneaked back out and came in @ 4:30 AM. Although I will admit the memory of catching her coming in through the basement window has provided provided me with fond memories. Oh yes, and the New Year’s Eve she didn’t come home at all, although the “I was too drunk to drive, so I just crashed at my friend’s house” was considered a pretty good defense.

The bottom line for me (on the whole issue) is that people do a terrible job of evaluating risk. We get way too concerned over the most unlikely things, and miss out entirely on the elephants in the room.

TIP

When? I guess the 90s, because it sure wasn’t an issue in the 80s

I’d say it rose from the 80s, and I think you could virtually feel the changes as the decade progressed.  The constant warnings of danger throughout the decade, “stranger danger”, the kids on the milk cartons, the McMartins and the other Satanic cult cases, they all took a major toll on the way people thought about raising kids.  By the end of the 80s enough people really thought the world was a constantly scary place.  By the end of the decade people were looking for gated communities to keep their kids away from the bad, scary world, and then the parental peer pressure kicked in and it’s grown ever since.

Anecdote: My mother was entirely convinced that she wouldn’t sleep until I was home. I came home at 4 am, no sound in the house. I got the bike indoors, took a long shower, put away my things and went into bed. I got woken by a mighty commotion at 8, because my mother was sure that she had been awake all night and I hadn’t come home!

Well, my parents would stay up until I came home.

Anecdote: The first time I came home from college, I went out with some high school friends until about 5 or 6 in the morning. My father asked me idly the next day what time I had come home - he had woken up when the garage door opened, but hadn’t looked at the clock. When I told him, my brother (still in high school and suffering under the thumb of parental oppression) flipped out and said “How come she can do that?” My father said, “She doesn’t live here anymore.”

It was really funny because it was true and perfectly reasonable and fair but it actually kind of hurt my feelings. Then they took down all my posters and turned by room into a guest bedroom.

It’s so weird to compare this stuff to my grandparents, who had eight boys, of which my father is #2.  My grandfather worked in NYC and flew down to VA on the weekends to see my grandmother and the boys, starting from when my dad was 5 and they moved down here.  So my grandmother was living on the farm with her six little boys for a lot of their young life.  The stories they tell!  The bee-bee gun fights in the barn.  The time they drove the tractor onto the frozen lake and it fell through and they had to get the other tractor to get it out and it fell through too.  My dad’s big brother got his driver’s license when he was 13 (which you still can if you’re a farmer in many places in the US) to help his mother out with the driving.  The boys didn’t all fit into the car necessarily, so they’d frequently be standing on the running boards hanging off.  I remember my youngest uncle telling me how *responsible* kids today are with their whole designated driver thing back when I was about 21 and told me the story of Uncle Jimmy’s cherry tree, which is the one on the farm he smashed into coming home drunk one time.  And this is not some sort of old-timey story.  I’m just a few years older than Amanda.

Growing up we were not allowed to go on the other side of the big street on our bikes, but anywhere in the neighborhood was fine.  We figured out a sekrit path down to buy candy at the drug store, built treehouses, and played Beckon - such rebels!  Though I did grow up in a neighborhood with a lot of kids, and we all rode the bus six blocks to school.  But we were the last stop on the way in and the first stop on the way out, so we mostly didn’t mind.  When the bus driver took the route backwards, though, we’d always get out at the first stop that way too - walking was faster.  I always wondered why those kids never did the opposite.

Also, a good blog for people who think most of today’s parents are insanely hovery is Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids blog.  She got called the worst mother in the world for letting her nine year old take the subway by himself.

By that standard, almost every parent in my childhood neighborhood would make her look like the paragon of good parenting.  Kids like us were taking the subway by ourselves as early as 6-8 in NYC during the 1980s….when crime such as random beatings, muggings, armed robberies, and murders were far more common. 

Even today, I routinely see kids as young as 6 taking the NYC subway without anyone batting an eye….and as someone who knows….the NYC of today is in many ways..far safer than it was back when I grew up…..

Drug use of any kind—pot, alcohol, and on up the scary trail—increases irritability, reduces inhibition, and encourages depression and self-alienation

OMG!!11! All teens are on drugs!

These things really bother me. Kids are always in more danger from people who know them then from strangers. I had “you take the train, or the bus, or a cab, or bicycle, or walk, or call home for a lift, but you never get in a car with a man behind the wheel” drilled into me.

Well, my mother knew the kid, knew his parents. And I wasn’t the only kid in that carpool. Also, from an early age I had the sort of relationship with my parents where I would have been comfortable telling them if someone I knew was behaving in a dangerous way (and you’re absolutely right about the danger of abuse from people you know vs. strangers).

When I started driving a couple of years later, I drove carpool and went through the same drill my mother put my carpool driver through: had to submit to interviews with the parents, give references, prove myself. Driving carpool was one of the responsibilities that came with a car.

Getting into a stranger’s car, of course, was strictly verboten.

ha:
smells like an incest house

This phrase is going to haunt and trouble me for days. Thanks for that.

I have some odd reactions to this all.

On the one hand, I agree completely with the idea that oversupervising kids creates huge issues, and that most of the listed things these people are doing are stupid.

On the other hand, some of the specifics that people are calling horrible seem perfectly rational to me.

I was a teenager in the 70’s, well before cell phones. I felt pretty much unsupervised, or at least not overly hovered over. I had privacy in my room, and so on. But on a school night, I was expected to be home early - can’t remember when, but 10 sounds pretty much right, unless it was otherwise negotiated in advance.

Similarly, I could have friends over when a parent was home, but not when the weren’t, again, unless I had permission in advance. A couple friends ended up with defacto permanent permission. But I would not have been allowed, and would not have considered, having more than one or two friends over, and certainly not a party, when they weren’t home.

I had pretty free run of the area, and my parents provided and paid for a car for us kids to use, but we had to say roughly where we would be (“out shopping” was sufficient) and roughly when we would be home. If we were going to miss dinner, that had to be discussed in advance.

At the same time, my parents always told us the same things - where they were going and when they’d be home, when they expected guests, and when to expect dinners and other family events we were expected at.

While drinking outside the home would have been severely punished, we started having drinks at home around 16, if we were socializing with our family, and I can’t remember a single time where there was any issue at all, after about age 9, of our being home alone.

It felt a lot more like open and regular communication among responsible people rather than harassment. We run our home the same way.

<blockquote>irritability, reduced inhibition, depression and self-alienation

Doesn’t that pretty much define a teenager?

BadKitty on 06/18 at 05:40 PM</blockquote>

No.  It’s a cliche.  A tired one at that.  Most teenagers I knew as a teenager weren’t like that.  Most teenagers I know now aren’t like that.

Sure, some are.  And, sometimes, mine did the affect for whatever silly reason went through their heads.  But, by-and-large, it’s just a cliche’.  Just as the “inevitable fight between the oppressed teenager and the parents who understand NOTHING…”

Fights I didn’t have with my parents Fights, I believe, my wife didn’t have with her parents.  Fights most of my teen friends didn’t have with their parents.  Fights we’ve not had in our family.

I liked Cary’s advice. Stop obsessing on rules and think about your daughter, what she is going through and what future you want for her.

I don’t know about teenagers but so far I give a lot of latitude and privacy to my kids. I remember what being a kid felt like.

This is insanity.

And people wonder why (some) people at college today have no sense of boundaries. Or why evangelical/conservative people my age are leaving the movement in droves.

I bet these are the same people who send their kids to Summer Torture Camp in Jamaica or Mexico. I can sort of understand why they do this though, because in the pruned whitebread communities where these people live, having the other bored corposerfs see your “wildchild” out after 8pm or with a member of any sex is like not mowing your lawn for three months or not replacing your pseudo-luxury automobile every three years.

Also, put me down on the list of people who had intensly lame adolescent years: I’m 17 and I’ve only been out past 1 once in my life, and I’ve never done drugs. The most “rebellious” thing I’ve done was, I think, refusing to help with housework. But I apparently need to be arrested!

I didn’t really have this kind of problem when I was a teenager.  Not only were my parents pretty cool about things, but peer abuse kind of beat out any self-esteem I had, and I was too damaged for any kind of dating or sex life to really need privacy from my parents.

I got therapy. 

But yeah.  Education here would have been helpful rather than taking the damn door off.

I wasn’t allowed to close my bedroom door when my boyfriend was over when I was Eighteen and not even living at home regularly (in dorms). However, I also didn’t have a set curfew as a teen, and got to stay out pretty much however late I wanted to as long as I cleared it with my parents first. They did insist on parents/adults being present at activities I went to, and WOULD call to confirm, but I didn’t mind that at all… probably because I’m incredibly boring and never did anything dangerous or edgy. None of my high school friends drank! NONE OF THEM. Hardly any of them even smoked cigarettes! I have a friend now who played hooky for most of her high school career and was an alcoholic by the time she was a Freshman in college (having started drinking socially in jr high) and that is just such a foreign life to me.

Kristin, you actually made me spit-take.  Knickerbockers.  Hee hee!

The only time I ever had a curfew was if I was on a date with a boy I was unsure of, and the code word for the curfew was, “Dad, what time should I be home?”  Other than that, it was my decision, and the only time I ever really got in trouble was the one sunday morning where I was getting home just as he came out to get the paper my senior year of high school.  Then my curfew was 1am, unless I was doing Rocky Horror, then it was 3, and call if I was going to be late.  After the third time I woke them up at quarter to three, they said forget it, you graduate in two months.

IT’S 10 PM. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILDREN ARE, RIGHT NOW?

This was a standard warning broadcast on the Big three Networks going back to at least the 1960s. I remember being like, six or something and thinking, “What? I’m here in front of the TV. What’s the point?” But someone somewhere wanted a message of control broadcast with the regularity of a church bell.

Then in the eighties I started noticing parents putting leashes on toddlers… in the malls. Someone was marketing these damn things, and I usually saw them used in the safest spaces outside the home imaginable.

Now Britain is noticing that kids don’t like to play in playgrounds with all the CC cameras everywhere. And when they do capture teens on tape, they are partying sooo hard, and this fun must be stopped, or well, the hooligans will win.

Power corrupts, but that corruption is often delivered in the form of increasing ineffectiveness and stupidity.

Moses - OK, that was probably just me as a teenager.

BadKitty:  No, that was me as a teenager as well, and tons of my friends.  And ohhh, the fights with parents…

My poor husband, though.  His folks were totally cool and permissive.  They gave him nothing to rebel against, poor kid.  He did manage a bit, though, mostly over chores.  To this day he hates yardwork.

Unstructured time to goof off, listen to records, and yes, sexually experiment was considered a god-given right of teenagers. 

Well, I guess that would explain why y’all have such a high teen pregnancy rate. I won’t even ask about your drunk-driving problems.

Seriously, what I saw in that letter was a very ugly cycle; teenager is an asshole, parents come down hard and overreact, teenager reacts by being MORE of an asshole, and everybody hates each other.  Sounds like counseling to set everybody on a more productive path is in order.

Amanda, it’s not about having kids; it’s about being able to see the problem from other than your own former teenager, Yeah Parents Suck Dude point of view. Teenagers are rarely aware of what complete assholes they can be, or the fact that maybe Mom and Dad were themselves once teenagers and remember that “but mooooom, we’ll be careful!” is not an iron-clad guarantee that said teenager will in fact behave in a responsible, mature, thoughtful manner.

It’s one thing to tell people to loosen up - and clearly these parents are not reacting productively by any means - but excuse me, when you have friends over without your parents knowing and they steal shit, and you have them over again, you have given up your claim to be responsible enough to host without adult supervision.

Kristen pointed out (in her own life) the problem with the rebellion approach: if you give kids rules (which, to be fair, will tend to be ad hoc) that effectively prohibit being a teenager or having a life, they’ll break the rules and lie to you. If you use that as justification for further repressiveness, it becomes a vicious cycle.

but excuse me, when you have friends over without your parents knowing and they steal shit, and you have them over again, you have given up your claim to be responsible enough to host without adult supervision.

To be fair to the daughter, it wasn’t stated or implied that she continued to have the same friends over, and the parents haven’t just claimed she’s too irresponsible to host without adult supervision. They’ve claimed she’s too irresponsible to live inside the house without adult supervision.

I have to admit that my partner works in the library of a middle school so I hear a lot of stories about the difficult kids.  I believe the words I hear most often are “horny” and “sullen”.

Mythago:

excuse me, when you have friends over without your parents knowing and they steal shit, and you have them over again, you have given up your claim to be responsible enough to host without adult supervision.

The reason it got to that point is that she couldn’t tell her parents she was having a party back before any robberies occurred. That meant she had no motivation to monitor her friends, because she’d get in trouble no matter what they did. That’s because her parents prohibited her from having friends over at all. If they had banned her from having friends over unsupervised but taken a very light hand with supervision (intervening only to prevent criminal activity, destruction, or violence, say), she might have been willing to comply, at least in the long run. I think the problem began whenever the parents decided obedience was an end in itself.

Can I just say, given her parents reactions to things, it’s not surprising that she can’t deal well with negative emotions? How much yelling, door-slamming, wall-hitting, etc, do you suppose she saw growing up? Her parents never taught her how to deal with anger or frustration constructively because they don’t know how to do it themselves. (And just banning all friends after the jewelry-stealing is an example of this.) There are always exceptions to the rule, but in general, you reap what you sow.

Ms Kate: We planted a rosebush but it didn’t work well enough.

the parent in that letter cares more about jewelery than hir kid, and thats disgusting.

Possibly.  It could also a manifestation of the feelings of having one’s trust violated and feelings of betrayal at their child’s stealing or allowing others to steal their parents’ property. 

Don’t know about you, but if someone I trusted like a friend or family member stole stuff from my home or allowed their friends to do so whether knowingly or out of carelessness, that friend/family member’s credibility as a trustworthy responsible individual has gone down the tubes as far as I’m concerned…and it will take him/her a very long time to rebuild that trust.

Can I just say, given her parents reactions to things, it’s not surprising that she can’t deal well with negative emotions? How much yelling, door-slamming, wall-hitting, etc, do you suppose she saw growing up? Her parents never taught her how to deal with anger or frustration constructively because they don’t know how to do it themselves. (And just banning all friends after the jewelry-stealing is an example of this.) There are always exceptions to the rule, but in general, you reap what you sow.

Excellent point.

They pretty much have adult brains, but not a lot of life experience. I have admittedly limited experience, having never raised a kid, but so far I’ve found the best way to deal with older teenagers – the kids that ended up living at our place, for example, one as a ward (sigh) – is to treat them as adults, with all due respect, while taking into consideration there’s some stuff they still need hammered into ‘em – like that calling when late is a sign of courtesy, not submission.

They’re genuinely good and hard-working; the “adults things” they have to learn before they go on their own almost invariably involve self-protection from predatory people and institutions (e.g., depending on age, the friend’s dad selling his rusted out car for a “real good price,” the pay-day loan companies, the attractive guy who is mean but ‘ohhh-so irresistible,’ the store credit card carriers, and so on).

Teach them these things and then you generally don’t have to worry yourself with watching them 24/7. (You’re better employed guarding the refrigerator. Holy shit, can they eat!)

My parents never showed even a tenth of the interest in me as the letter-writer shows in his daughter, and for that I’m grateful. I never broke the law, and wasn’t much of a partier. I didn’t even have sex until I was well beyond my teen years.

The wildest, most obnoxious adults seem to be the ones whose parents controlled them until they were 18 (or 21), then lost their iron grip as their kids reached the age of majority and could make their own decisions.

CPS is my primary concern about having a kid.  Not “What if they have an expensive, crippling, ongoing disease?” or “What if I do a terrible job and they hate me forever?” or “How will I ever afford any of this?”.  My primary fear is that I will do something wild and crazy like let my child go across the street to the park when they’re 8! all alone! without a cellphone!, and the police will take my child away and put them in a foster home and doom forever.

I read Free Range Kids (written by the parent who let her kids ride the NYC subway all alone! when he was 9! holy crap!), just so I can get some reasonable stories and stats to offset my authority-anxiety.

Seriously, what I saw in that letter was a very ugly cycle; teenager is an asshole, parents come down hard and overreact, teenager reacts by being MORE of an asshole, and everybody hates each other.  Sounds like counseling to set everybody on a more productive path is in order.

Actually, I don’t see a lot of evidence that the daughter in this case IS being an asshole. Certainly, there were some issues with curfew and whatnot and there was probably some bad judgment going on with the friends and the jewelry (though we don’t know exactly what happened). But what other evidence is there? The mother admits she’s “sweet as pie” with the neighbors, and the mother doesn’t dispute the daughter’s charge that the parents yells all the time, merely blames the daughter for the “tension.”

We can agree that some counseling could certainly be in order.

Information technology

Cf. the too tightly wound wife and mother in the “Knocked Up” Apatow film: scene where she is looking at a Google Map of L.A. with all the sex offenders marked on it in red, as if L.A. had the pox.

Now-a-days I see my sister-in-law requiring text message check-ins from her kids every fifteen minutes and I cringe. I can’t imagine the horror of living under that kind of lock-down.

*gawp*

Jesus.

My kids are expected to check in with me when they get to where they’re going, when they change locations, and when they are on their way home.  That’s it.  People think I’m entirely too permissive with my kids.

By the way, where’s the evidence that this kid was involved at all in the jewelry theft?

If my husband (or adult sibling or whatever) was home alone without me, and had friends over and when they left some of my jewelry were missing—I’d call the cops, and he would be treated as a witness, not a suspect, because, you know, the fact that they were his friends doesn’t mean he encouraged or allowed them to steal my jewelry. Why is this kind of basic common sense tossed out when it’s a teenager?

If you have a non-adversarial relationship with your kid and don’t give them a reason to hate your guts, well gosh, doesn’t it seem likely that they’d be upset by the theft and want to help you get your jewelry back, like a decent human being?

“Anecdote: My mother was entirely convinced that she wouldn’t sleep until I was home. I came home at 4 am, no sound in the house. I got the bike indoors, took a long shower, put away my things and went into bed. I got woken by a mighty commotion at 8, because my mother was sure that she had been awake all night and I hadn’t come home!”

I don’t recall ever having a curfew, but my mother was a ridiculously light sleeper.  The door alone would generally wake her up, and if that failed, well, our dogs were not exactly the quietest animals ever to greet someone coming home from the great outdoors.  If I got home after she’d gone to bed, I’d hear about it the next morning almost without fail.

“Well, I guess that would explain why y’all have such a high teen pregnancy rate.”

Except that that has fuck-all to do with the teen pregnancy rate.  Because, you know, it’s not actually a choice between encasing your genitals in carbonite and winding up an STD-ridden teen parent.  Though I will admit, the womb-controllers have spent the last decade making a very, very loud case for that particular false dichotomy.

I had a miserable time growing up with a mother who had control and rage issues.  She made it very clear that it was my “job” to “be a member of the family”, and that having interests and passions outside of what she would control was bad.  There were screaming matches pretty much every day that led to one or the other of us crying, usually because I was too focused on music or doing a play or something and I wasn’t “acting like a member of this family”.  I was the artist in a family of sports fans, so “act like a member of the family” meant tag along because otherwise Mom’s fantasy of a perfect family won’t get to be enacted and she’ll be even worse than usual, and shut the hell up if you don’t want to be there because you have no choice.  You are a “member of this family” and thus you will do what you are told.

The fact that the parents in the Salon letter hate the daughter having a good relationship with the neighbors sounds just like that.  My parents accused me of that sort of thing all the time - why are you so seemingly nice around everyone when we know you’re really not nice at all?  I will forever be haunted by my mother screaming at me “I love you because I am your mother, but I don’t particularly like you most of the time” simply because she was mad at the world and hated that I had my own interests. 

Things have smoothed out in the ensuing years, but that letter sounded familiar in a lot of ways.

For some reason, my husband’s parents didn’t like him closing his door, either - weird!

Same here.  They said I “might get sick at night.”  It wasn’t until I went to college and came home at break that I could close it.  And yeah, there are some things teenage boys learn about that I didn’t pick up until college…  I was very immature when I went to college and I think some of it had to do with being an only with very over-protective, hovering parents…

and yeah, thinking about being a teenager STILL makes me wince and gives me nightmares…  Not enough money in the world to pay me to be a teen again…

Wow… my just-turned-16 must be headed for a life of horrible delinquency. She does have a curfew on school nights of 10-ish simply because school starts danged early and I want her to have time when she gets home to shower etc, but otherwise… not really. Hell, I just took her to an Offspring concert for her birthday a few days early, not getting back from Seattle til 2am, and it was a school night. She’s at her best friend’s right now staying a few days, then her friend will come here a few days. I am a lil peeved she hasn’t called just to say “hey I’m alive” but we’ll talk about that. She’s taken care of her younger siblings overnight before, with dad being in town to call if there was an emergency. I often don’t know exactly “where she is” at a given moment, just that she is with her friend.

Oh hey she just called while I was typing. Never mind!

This delinquent child of 16 has no interest in dating, wants to get a job for spending money, as far as i know has never “partied” (and I take her word for it, as she has a personality much like mine who hates that whole scene) and has close to a 4.0 average in honors classes, marred this last trimester because she sucks at chemistry almost as bad as I did. She’s trying to decide if she wants to go into art design for video games or become a lawyer.

Granted, the lawyer part might be some cause for concern.

I had a miserable time growing up with a mother who had control and rage issues.  She made it very clear that it was my “job” to “be a member of the family” ... My parents accused me of that sort of thing all the time - why are you so seemingly nice around everyone when we know you’re really not nice at all?

Oh my God, how did my mom manage to raise another kid without my noticing?!

Speculating on the missing jewelry: Asshole friends (“Oh, shiny, I’ll just take it”) is likeliest. However, alternate theory, one of the way stuff disappears in a household with children is that the children are not fully aware of degrees of mine, yours, and ours. So stuff gets borrowed and lost. When it’s a bottle of mineral water, few parents will care, when it’s great-grandma’s diamond necklace, nearly all will. School and youth club kind of expected us to be always able to find some old wont-be-missed towels and sheets, which gave my mother fits, because this stuff costs real money. What jewelry we had in unlocked drawers, OTOH, was cheap plastic stuff for play.

I’ve seen this with friends who had younger siblings, the latter being unaware of any wrongdoing when they nicked their older sisters’ stuff and sold it at a flea market. Also seen it with parents taking grandma’s presents to the kids for themselves. Property boundaries in a household need to be made clear.

More anecdote: When I was 14 and my sister was 12, my mom and stepdad went to Italy to visit his parents. For a month. We lived a couple blocks from my grandmother, so Mom let us stay at the house alone. We did our own laundry, cooked our own meals, and basically kept shit together with once-a-day visits from Grandmom to make sure the house was still standing. We even kept up with Mom’s bills and mailed the checks she’d left on the correct date.

It worked out so well she did it every year until we both moved out. And you can bet we were some of the only people in college who knew how to make a budget and generally live on our own.

Speaking of which, we were both responsible for our own college admissions and financial aid. Nowadays, I work in financial aid, and I cannot. fucking. believe. how many parents of graduate students take responsibility for managing (and sometimes outright complete!) their kids’ paperwork and scholarship applications. And by “kids,” I mean 22- to 25-year-olds. I’m 26 now, and my mother would laugh me out of her house if I asked her for help with a scholarship application, and would have done the same thing when I was 18.

Conclusion: I often fear for our country.

/delurking

Just agreeing with everyone who thinks this is totally fucking nuts, and echoing the multiple previous “How do you expect a kid to become an adult by treating them like a toddler until the age of eighteen?” comments.

I grew up in the much more dangerous late 80’s/early 90’s era, and I and all of my friends were allowed - if not encouraged - to leave the house by ourselves, to get jobs, to form relationships, to generally explore the world in an uncontrolled manner.  The first time I came home drunk I woke up my mother by tripping and falling into the closet; her main reaction was “The way you will feel tomorrow is punishment enough.”  And she was right!

/lurking

kristin and suet, are we long lost siblings?

My mom had these crazy rules and fantasies about having a perfect family. She alternately wanted to get rid of me or expected me to run everything. I was literally not allowed to do my own laundry, all the “family’s” laundry had to be done together. Which meant I was forced to fold my mother’s thongs at 16. Yeah…that was fun.

My dad actually did remove my stepsister’s door when we were 16 or so, because she was too messy. I never had that, but I was constantly told things like how i was going to fail at life for having bad handwriting, or that clearly I’m a rebellious drug addict prostitute.

And my parents wonder why, at 25, I won’t talk to them anymore.

There are other ways of kids learning responsibility than just freedom (not that I’d wish those other ways on anyone). I had all the freedom I wanted (could stay out till midnight and all) up until I was about 15 1/2, and then my father had a stroke. My mother worked graveyard shift. Guess what that meant. No curfew, no need for one, I had to be home when my mom went to work, 8:30. Everyone I knew thought I must have had the strictest parents in the world, since I never mentioned the stroke to anyone, not even the school administrators. I became a nightly caretaker until he died two years later. Oddly, my brother resented the responsibility of helping care for an ailing parent and left just months after our dad died.

Does this also help explain the wingnut focus on getting their daughters married young—not just because of the evil sex, but because they recognize that a childhood full of strict rules has left their offspring completely unable to cope with independent living. (When I was in college, in the 70s, it was pretty much a watchword that the kids with the strictest upbringings were the ones who went wildest and made the stupidest decisions. One of my sister’s roommates, a national merit scholar no less, and don’t you ever forget it, started drinking a few weeks in and finished the year as an instructor at the local dance studio…)

Oh, and I have a confession to make. The other day, on the way home from a shopping trip, the 10-month-old was asleep when I arrived at the local ice cream stand. I must have been more than 50 feet away for as much as two minutes. And what sucks is that I felt paranoid about doing it.

I hope to be a fair and trusting (unless proven otherwise) mom when my son is a teen. It’s hard to extrapolate because he’s 3, and right now I can’t imagine him being self-sufficient…but then, before he did them, I couldn’t imagine him walking, talking, or using the potty. 

I actually have a whole list of things I want him to be able to do: laundry, balancing a bank account, cooking, cleaning, basic house maintenence, yardwork, shopping for food and necessities, avoiding debt. But then I think it’s actually quite abusive to cripple your kids by not teaching them how to deal w/out you around, if only because you’re going to die eventually. Sex is in there too; yes condoms, yes respect for women (or men if that’s his pref) but also, the fact that I will not be raising any kids he creates for him, so if he wants to enjoy his 20s, he’ll take precautions.

One thing I can’t figure out: why don’t these people use their employee referral benefits?  Why write letters to a columnist?

Maybe, just maybe, because they know full well that any sensible parenting source will tell them that they are very wrong?  That they were looking for validation rather than resolution, because resolution would require treating the teen as something other than rebellious property?

Amanda…this makes me think of Maia Szalavitz’s excellent book “Help at Any Cost” about the ‘boot camp for troubled teens” industry…I think it sheds some light on this whole phenomenon.

Then in the eighties I started noticing parents putting leashes on toddlers… in the malls.

Those didn’t start in the 80s, and they exist for a good reason.  For the same reason that I and my brother and my husband wore them in the 1960s and my older son wore one in the late 90s: early walkers run away faster than a pregger can waddle, and they have not one smidgen of fucking sense in their 13 to 18 month old brains when they do so!

Husband and I each walked at 9 months, older son could RUN at 10 months.  The harness made sure that he could run around as he pleased, as he could be prevented from dashing out into the street or head first down an escalator or flight of stairs in a split second.

The wildest, most obnoxious adults seem to be the ones whose parents controlled them until they were 18 (or 21), then lost their iron grip as their kids reached the age of majority and could make their own decisions.

Add in the kids who have never had to do anything and have had their parents plan and control everything with a velvet grip.

I wonder: is there a sweetspot on the map defined on one axis by “control” and the other by “demand” (with apologies to professor Karasek, who used this scheme to classify heart disease risk of specific job types)?  Demand being “what is asked of the child to do on a regular basis” and control being “degree to which child is being forced to behave a certain way”.

The hippydippy folks might end up at low demand, low control, these parents at high control, low demand, I think I would end up middle of control and relatively high on demand, and some high on both demand and control.  My father grew up in a high demand, high control household and could not escape fast enough.  My parents were moderately controlling, but low demand.  My husband’s parents were pretty high on both demand and control without being too too extreme on either.  My mom’s family was high demand and control, too - that old fashioned stuff.

Must be a Texas thing. I am roughly the same age as you, and had almost all of the rules mentioned in the article. My dad took my door off the hinges when I slammed it one too many times - though granted, I was more like 11 when that happened. I had an 11 o clock curfew clear through my freshman year of college, extended to 11:30 or possibly 12 if I was driving friends home (or later if it was the prom or something), and my parents always knew where I was and would occassionally call to check up. Everyone I knew had basically the same rules, and we all lived to tell about it. Looking back I don’t feel that my parents were too strict. Just my .02.

Most of the commenters at Salon hate teenagers. That much is clear. As a high school teacher, there are times when I hate teenagers. I understand how they feel.

But if they think that the solution is overriding control they are crazy. I am in constant give-and-take with my students. Sometimes it works. Other times, I’m glad I’m not being filmed (hell, if I was, imagine what Amanda might think of the small part of my day where I made a mistake! A whole column might be needed about how horrible teachers scar teenage lives forever, like this guy who did/said this thing one day in one of his classes! Horrors!). The point being, the longer you can avoid acting like a f***ing idiot, the better off you’ll be as a parent, teacher or any other role having to do with teenagers.

As for the long forgotten subjects, the actual parents and the actual teenager—you are not in their house. Neither is Amanda. The amount we know about their lives and the complexities of their relationships can be measured in millimeters and not many at that. My two cents.

I am so ridiculously jealous of all these stories. I was 18 and home from college when I stayed out til 1:30 on a date and my parents flipped the fuck out. Dating in high school was certainly not going to happen and boys in our room with the door closed? They weren’t even allowed in our room with the door open. We had to stay in the living room. I didn’t really have a curfew but I wasn’t allowed in a car that a friend drove unless it was pre-approved by my parents, I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without adult supervision and then only if my parents approved of the parents, which generally meant one of my friends from church. I was allowed to talk on the phone for 15 minutes and a timer was set. If I tried to stay in my room I was screamed at for my anti-social behavior. Fun times. I got the hell out as fast I could, the only way I knew how, which is how I ended up married 2 months after I turned 20. My sister was married at 22, the next one is getting married next month at 21. I also have a 14 year old sister who is so socially stunted she has next to no friends and a 13 year old sister who has autism and is the only one of us who was allowed any privacy. My mom was a SAHM- we were occasionally allowed to play down the street, but not often. She was ALWAYS around. And super paranoid.
It’s a very hard mindset to escape. I live in the middle of nowhere with a 3 acre lawn and I just started letting my kiddos (5 and almost 3) play outside without me as long as they keep the door open because I realized it was ridiculous to spend every minute in their face. I agree with a lot of other posters though- the constant blaming of parents for everything coupled with the pervasiveness of CPS scares me almost as much as the thought of something happening to my kids. I remember my dad leaving us in the car to go pay for something in the store- I wouldn’t even consider it today. Because I think they’re going to be kidnapped in the 2 seconds it takes me to pay? No, not even I’m that paranoid. Because I know it will get me arrested. Hell, I have left my kids in the car in the driveway for 2 seconds to run in my house and get my cell phone, freaking out that someone might see them and turn me in.
I don’t think a 10pm curfew is totally unreasonable on weeknights if you can make exceptions for things (the occasional concert, party, etc..) but on weekends that seems pretty absurd.

Note to self: Buy doors for bedrooms before eldest turns 13.

Avoiding (the appearance of) evil/incest-laden-creepiness one sticky note at a time.

Of course, trying to learn how to parent on the internet has its flaws: Many of the comments above make it sound like if you aren’t raising kids like a spoiled american suburbanite, that your in fact causing abuse.

“DAD TOOK THE DOOR OF HIS TEENAGE DAUGHTER’S BEDROOM?

So, I guess she’s supposed to get dressed/change clothes in the bathroom only? That goes so far beyond the typical “dad controls daughters sexuality” construct… smells like an incest house.

Granted, dad would probably want her to have a door if it actually was that type of deal, but still, there’s a level of voyeurism to that kind of parenting that turns my stomach.
ha on 06/18 at 04:04 PM”

I think you’re overreacting a bit - sort of like Palin’s accusation of pedophilia against Letterman.  Same door removal thing happened to me - but mine was for a messy room - and using said door as shield to hide the mess when guests came over.  Did it work - yeah - it finally inculcated minimal neatness habits and believe me, nothing incestuous about it.  Just parents who knew that slobbiness and disorganization is a pain to deal with as an adult.

In Sweden, we were called “latch key kids” (actually just key kids, but I suppose the principle is the same), but in that case, it was to protest against closing the government-run after-school activity center.

Not sure how I feel about it.  I agree that 10PM is ridiculous, but I don’t know if having some sort of curfew is overly authoritarian.  Perhaps midnight on weeknights and 2AM on the weekends?  I don’t know.  There are quite a few communities in America which have curfews for people under 18 (as in, you’ll go to jail if you are 16 and out and about on a Tuesday night at 3 in the morning), so I don’t know that having a curfew which expects your kids to abide by the law is necessarily repressive….

DTG in STL on 06/18 at 04:21 PM

In some areas, it’s protective of the kid and parent FROM authorities, too.  While middle and upper middle class suburban cops may look the other way at underage teens out past curfew provided they aren’t committing a felony in front of the officer, that’s not the case in many cities if one is melanin endowed and especially male.  It’s used as an excuse to arrest for standing/driving while black or brown.

Must be a Texas thing. I am roughly the same age as you, and had almost all of the rules mentioned in the article. My dad took my door off the hinges when I slammed it one too many times - though granted, I was more like 11 when that happened. I had an 11 o clock curfew clear through my freshman year of college, extended to 11:30 or possibly 12 if I was driving friends home (or later if it was the prom or something), and my parents always knew where I was and would occassionally call to check up. Everyone I knew had basically the same rules, and we all lived to tell about it. Looking back I don’t feel that my parents were too strict. Just my .02.

Pretty strict.

If we, when they are adults, strike a friendship, that means I did it right.  If not, I failed and have created a mess.
MosesZD on 06/18 at 04:22 PM

Hey Moses, unsolicited book recommendation: you might like “The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice Cream God”  Author is Powers - I think you’d like it.  There’s a great line in it similar to yours above.

With the child leashes, there was definitely a huge fad for them in the 1980s during the height of the “stranger danger!” paranoia.  It seemed like every toddler who was out in public was being held on a leash.  I’m guessing that parents eventually figured out that unless your kid tended to bolt, you didn’t really need it, because they faded away and now I only see them occasionally.

As a parent of a 17 year old, I’ve spent most of the last 3 or 4 years practicing benign neglect. My son and I live together and as fellow housemates as well as family, we check in (mostly via text. God bless texting, it really has halved my parental burden) when we’re coming or going or our time at home doesn’t overlap. We started his teen years with some rules but there are fewer and fewer as he becomes more adult and ‘earns’ more freedoms simply by being his lovely, trustworthy, mostly responsible self.

Previous to 13, 14-ish, I was more involved, required more checking in and was much stricter with when/where he was allowed to go, particularly alone. One of my primary concerns with him out and about alone, or after dark, wasn’t so much kid-snatchers but regular city issues that make even adults uncomfortable. I was far less concerned with his internet usage or sexual behavior than I was with the distinct possibilities of him being aggressively panhandled, or encountering an extra disturbed street person, or on a weekend night the belligerant drunkies that can populate Seattle’s bar neighborhoods. I didn’t want him to feel the adult pressures of social fear, or physical fear, or the particular empathetic/nervous fear that can come with dealing with the mentally ill. So I can partially understand the urge to hover- for me it wasn’t protecting his person, it was protecting his right to enjoy being a kid.

And I empathize, though completely disagree with, parents who hammer their kids with a controlling, anxious, angry and tense family atmosphere- I’d wager a LOT of it is based in the quality of the relationship between parents, or the level of stress/craziness a single parent or other custodian is living with. Seems to me that happy, healthy adults don’t torment their kids. Unfortunately it bleeds into the whole family dynamic. The kids become just something that CAN be controlled if/when things are out of control with a partner, or other family, or at work, or in the parent’s private emotional life.

her parents are getting so obsessed with their daughter’s rebellion that they forget that she’s a human being.

I’m not surprised.  Most adults that are involved with teenagers don’t even believe that teens really are human beings.  I’m lucky that my parents respected me and I turned out well because of it.  My mom said that if I wanted to do drugs, I should invite my friends over to the house so she could make sure we didn’t do something stupid.  I never even wanted to do drugs, probably because they weren’t forbidden.  My mom had done drugs in her 20s, and she turned out fine, so they didn’t seem so dangerous either.  My mom actually suggested that I use birth control pills, when I was 14 and still a virgin.  It was initially to delay my period for a vacation I was going on, but I’ve been taking them ever since.  The first time I drank alcohol, I was with my parents and they knew about it.  I learned to be responsible, and also it was less appealing to me because it wasn’t forbidden.  I think that people become what you expect of them.  If you expect teens to be irresponsible, they probably will be.  If you treat them like adults, they’ll act like adults.

Kristen pointed out (in her own life) the problem with the rebellion approach: if you give kids rules (which, to be fair, will tend to be ad hoc) that effectively prohibit being a teenager or having a life, they’ll break the rules and lie to you.

The way the commenters on this thread are defining “being a teenager” and “having a life” seem really weird to me. Getting home at 1am drunk is a normal and necessary part of being a teenager? Really? ‘Cause somehow I survived skipping that step. Getting home by 10pm is impossible and you’re just asking for trouble if you demand that of your kid? Lying is totally acceptable as a kid if that’s the only way you’ll be able to party on school nights?

Teenagers *don’t* actually have adult brains—their brains aren’t developed all the way yet and they can be super irrational at times; acknowledging this doesn’t mean you hate teenagers. Taking doors off and screaming are creepy and over-the-top but it’s not like enforcing a curfew is the equivalent of sending your kid to Guantanamo. Asking them to check in sometimes (no, not every 15min) isn’t going to damage them irrevocably.

As for the girl in this article: I don’t know what her deal is, obviously (she sounds fine, albeit upset and saddled with jerky parents.) But, if teenagers should be treated like people, shouldn’t we then be allowed to occasionally come to the conclusion that certain teenagers *are* just kind of irresponsible assholes (like many adults?) If you’re required to let said irresponsible asshole live in your house, why shouldn’t you be allowed to lay down a few rules (even if the asshole whines about them and says “you’re ruining [their] LIFE. GOD.”) Parents can’t/shouldn’t subsume their entire existences into being perfect launching pads for their children. Sometimes they want to get to sleep at a decent time or not have to deal with a cranky kid who knew they had to get up for school but decided in their teenagerly wisdom to stay up all night anyways.

Also, they all need to get off all of our lawns. :D

(My last line was not clear about whether I mean the teens or the parents. I guess I mean both, now. :p)

Angela Sparrow, wouldn’t barbed wire under your daughter’s window be more fun?
Ms Kate on 06/18 at 05:21 PM

I think electric fencing of the cattle type and a good charger might be more…. amusing and less permanently scarring, no blood to wash off the clapboard.  Tee hee.

I wonder: is there a sweetspot on the map defined on one axis by “control” and the other by “demand” (with apologies to professor Karasek, who used this scheme to classify heart disease risk of specific job types)?

They definitely didn’t hit the sweet spot because my dad and I are way too much alike for either of our comfort, but my parents were high demand, medium control.  I could have friends over for parties in the basement and my parents would stay away unless things got too loud for them, but I would have gotten in major trouble if I had a party while they were away.  I did have a midnight curfew, but my dad’s explanation/excuse was that our town had a midnight curfew, which he (correctly) assumed was difficult for me to argue against.  We had way more conflicts over my grades than anything else since I was a nerdy kid.  I don’t think I had a drink at a party until I was 20.

In retrospect, there are some things my parents did that I really appreciated—like if they needed to scold me about something when my friends were over, they would ask me to come to another room with them instead of just letting loose in front of my friends.  Several of my friends would get into huge screaming matches with their parents and I would have to sit there and pretend not to hear.  Parents, if you can avoid yelling at your kids in front of their friends, please do so no matter how much you feel like they’re part of the family.  Just don’t.

The way the commenters on this thread are defining “being a teenager” and “having a life” seem really weird to me. Getting home at 1am drunk is a normal and necessary part of being a teenager? Really? ‘Cause somehow I survived skipping that step.

Well, no, I don’t think so. I know even as a teenager I had zero desire to get smashed or do anything truly raucous or rowdy. But I think it’s definitely part of becoming an adult (which being a teenager is rehearsal for) to choose the people you spend time with, to choose the things you do during your free time, to exercise a little your ability to make decisions. To be horny and sexually experiment.

Not to mention having your right as a human being to express anger or disagreement without being punished for it, or to have some private space (no, not an absolute human need maybe, but one that most people in the US do have so when someone is deprived of it it feels abnormal). To not have it assumed without evidence that you’re up to no good. Being treated like you’re in lockdown and the default setting is that you’re untrustworthy is terribly demoralizing.

<blockquote>Taking doors off and screaming are creepy and over-the-top but it’s not like enforcing a curfew is the equivalent of sending your kid to Guantanamo. Asking them to check in sometimes (no, not every 15min) isn’t going to damage them irrevocably. </quote>

Well, yeah, but nobody said it is or would, so that’s quite the adolescent strawteen you’ve got there

Also, keep in mind that the parents have been established to be crazy, so their view on who stole what from whom are not necessarily gospel.

Well, yeah, but nobody said it is or would, so that’s quite the adolescent strawteen you’ve got there

Alright, maybe not *Guantanamo* ...but Amanda seemed pretty horrified by the curfew. That’s the kind of tone of voice I’d expect saying something like “as long as it’s not thicker than his THUMB??” yanno? :p

bklyngirl:

I had an 11 o clock curfew clear through my freshman year of college, extended to 11:30 or possibly 12 if I was driving friends home (or later if it was the prom or something), and my parents always knew where I was and would occassionally call to check up.

There’s a difference between having a curfew that’s negotiable and having a curfew that isn’t negotiable and if you break it enough times your parents lock—-or kick—-you out of the house. The non-negotiable curfew is going to be violated more, for one thing.

I’m not a parent and I’m not the stepparent of a teenager yet, but in the cellphone age I’d be open to the idea of not having a formal curfew in exchange for frequent check-ins.

phylosopher, did you wear and sleep in the same clothes for years on end? That’s what ha was talking about: removing the door forces her to change either in the bathroom or in front of everybody.

“...So I think some of these parents overcompensate because they just don’t know their own children. Having worked as a nanny for several families as well, a lot of regular, wonderful parents are scared because they’re made to feel guilty for every choice they make. They can’t breastfeed long enough, they can’t encourage their child’s genius enough. They feel bad for using a nanny and they feel bad for wanting a career, and their companies and society aren’t making it any easier for them. So they overreact and show their love by trying to keep their child close to home. Which I think must make for an awfully strange world for the child. Twenty years ago I was allowed to ride my bike all over creation and hang with my friends; now none of the children I’ve taken care of have anything similar. If they leave the house it’s with their caregiver or their parent two steps behind. I have no idea what sort of repercussions that will have down the road, but it worries me….

thefeistysweetheart on 06/18 at 05:34 PM”

These are also the parents who had children because “everyone else has one, so we should, too” sans really understanding that parent is a verb, too.  Just like they bought the SUV and the big screen or the trip to Tahiti. They really don’t know what to do/how to interact with their kids, and have no desire to learn. 

I ran into another parent (mom) last night who is just the opposite - asking what we were going to “do” with our kids for the summer,  I outlined a few plans we had - bike trips, museums, and the kids helping in the family business etc.  But she quickly explained she meant “do” as in what camps I was sending them to.  It has only been 3 days since school let out here, but she claimed hers were driving her crazy and she couldn’t stand having them at home. 

Reminded me of the folks who get a dog and then send them off to doggy day care and hire a dogwalker so someone else has to play with them!  And I don’t mean occasionally, but 24/7 except when they want to show off to the friends at the dog park.

bagelsan:

Kristen pointed out (in her own life) the problem with the rebellion approach: if you give kids rules (which, to be fair, will tend to be ad hoc) that effectively prohibit being a teenager or having a life, they’ll break the rules and lie to you.
The way the commenters on this thread are defining “being a teenager” and “having a life” seem really weird to me. Getting home at 1am drunk is a normal and necessary part of being a teenager? Really? ‘Cause somehow I survived skipping that step. Getting home by 10pm is impossible and you’re just asking for trouble if you demand that of your kid? Lying is totally acceptable as a kid if that’s the only way you’ll be able to party on school nights?

I skipped it too, don’t get me wrong. But I made bad decisions, becase may parents didn’t prohibit me from msaking decisions. I’m not talking about forbidding procreation or hard drugs; I’m talking about prohibiting friendship and soda; I imagine you experienced at least one of those last two during your teen years. So yeah, lying is, while not acceptable, pretty much inevitable if you don’t let your kid hang out with his or her friends: they will do so anyway because adult or not they are human and then lie about it because they might avoid getting in troule that way.

The wildest, most obnoxious adults seem to be the ones whose parents controlled them until they were 18 (or 21), then lost their iron grip as their kids reached the age of majority and could make their own decisions.

I really don’t think you can make any general statements about this because, let’s face it, plenty of families will have two or more siblings raised in the same household by the same parents who will all turn out completely different from each other. In some cases, one friendly and normal and one a wild, obnoxious adult.

or in front of everybody.

Only if everybody is standing right in front of the door every time you need to change. I mean, I’m not endorsing the door removal, but it’s not like we’re talking forced daily strip searches.

fathers who removed their teenage girls’ bedroom doors.

My dad did that to my sister, because she was trying to sneak out to see her boyfriend. My parents are staunch christians. At one point he tied her up, and then asked the sheriff if it was OK. The deputy told him he sympathized. Me and my siblings all pretty much hate him.

I’m stunned.  I was never allowed to be out of the house after 8 pm without a family member.  The first time I got to go out at night with my friends was when I was in college.  I was also not allowed to lock my door, and I was never given a courtesy knock, which resulted not too few times in me getting yelled at for the crime of being half dressed in my own room.  Perish the thought!

I wasn’t allowed to have privacy, or keep friends my parents didn’t approve of, or have boyfriends.  My parents were nuts though, because I frequently wasn’t allowed to eat, and gawd help me if I actually tried to have a conversation with my dad.  The authoritarian crap went hand in hand with the abuse both of them dished out.  Anyone who thinks it’s a fine way to parent, realize that I haven’t spoken to them for more than half my adult life.

It just shocks me though how much I missed out on.  10 pm curfews would have been blissful, just for the chance to get out of that fucking house for a while!

There’s a difference between having a curfew that’s negotiable and having a curfew that isn’t negotiable and if you break it enough times your parents lock—-or kick—-you out of the house. The non-negotiable curfew is going to be violated more, for one thing.

That’s a good point.  My parents’ rules were very strict BUT generally negotiable.  It took weeks, but I was able to convince them when I was 14 that I should be allowed to go to a concert with a group of my friends, supervised by only one of their mothers, on a school night.  My dad even drove me to buy tickets at 6 am on a Saturday in a 40 below winter.

Of course, when I tried to stay home from school the next day because I was tired, they pretty much dragged me out of bed and told me I’d better hurry because if I missed the bus for school, they weren’t going to drive me.

Again, though, I was a pretty nerdy kid.  The one time I got serious detention in high school—five hours after school—was when I parked in the high school parking lot without having a permit.

/delurking/

Speaking as an eighteen year-old living at home before going to college, I have to say: that’s really fucked up. Not necessarily the curfew, although its strict, but the being-locked-out-of-your-own-house and the whole not having a bedroom door thing. I’d be pissed off and an asshole if my parents did that to me. The curfew is particularly weird: when I’ve worked for two summers (can’t seem to find a job this one, though) I got home after ten most nights I worked, because I usually closed and we never got out before nine forty-five.

But I’ll admit I wasn’t one for rules-testing.

And my parents did get mad at me for not calling when I was out one day, although that was less “where is she?” and more “did she crash on the forty-minute drive home?” because I was coming home from a debate tournament that ran late, so it was kind of understandable as coming more from honest worry than control.

Other than that, I think there is a *lot* of teen-hate going around, and a lot of people think they own their kids.
I think that there’s a different problem I see with some Asian parents (it probably happens with white parents, too, but I see it more with my Asian friends) is that the parents devalue extracurriculars/friend-time because they believe that getting into the top college is more a necessity for success in the US than it actually is, mostly because I think that’s how it is in some modern Asian countries. And boy, does that cause problems. My date had to sneak out on prom night because Prom was in the middle of IB testing, and they were under the impression that IB testing actually matters (hint: no, it doesn’t) and that going out with his friends on Saturday would hurt his testing the next Monday (he would have probably played Starcraft instead). But he snuck out, which I honestly can’t blame him for. I think that forbidding a dance on Saturday for a test on Monday that is a bit extreme, especially since the dance was such a big one.

hey phylosopher: i completely understand. your comment about the SUV and Tahiti gave me a gruesome chuckle, because i saw exactly that happen with the majority of the families whose children i took care of. prius/lexus suv? check. christmas vacation to guatemala? check. hosting a $1000 dollar a plate fundraiser for politician of the week? check. entirely organic diet from whole foods? check. mansion in suburban virginia with polished yet rustic garden? check. pure-bred dogs (with one dog-walker) and one nanny and one twice-a-week maid? check. two children at elite area school? check.

i liked working as a nanny far more than i did at a private school because the (middle-class) families i chose to work for were involved with the children. the parents at the private school had the same mentality you described: what are they going “to do” with their kids, meaning how are they going to get rid of them? all the kids at the private school had extensive summer camp options, from seven hour swim camps (for three-year olds) to all-day camps for the older kids. I get parents needing a break: people who are with kids all day require one. But most of these parents are relying entirely on nannies and other caregivers. I still love kids after all my not-fun work with them, and I know having them is going to require a lot from me, and I’m willing to give them that time. People who aren’t willing to shouldn’t have kids, which can be an absolutely great decision for some individuals… and yet so many people still have kids. And some of them, the fundamentalists and the over-controllers and the paranoid and the parents-who-outsource are missing out on doing the fun stuff with their children, and they’re denying their kids the right to explore and grow. One day their kids are going to be 16 and aren’t going to need nannies or daycare or being told to follow this religious system or else… and then the child and the parent are going to find themselves in uncharted territory. Then those children are going to go off to school. How are they going to get around when for so many years they weren’t allowed to ever cross their neighborhood streets or stay out late playing with other kids? How are they going to encounter new ideas when they weren’t allowed to engage with others?

Whew, I don’t know.

I finally bothered to read the Tennis column and, to be fair, it wasn’t this girl’s parents who took the bedroom door off its hinges.  Tennis supposedly overheard two guys trading teenage war stories about their now-grown daughters on an airplane.

However, the parents who wrote in actually are nutty enough to forbid their daughter from being inside the house at all when they’re not home and yet complain that she spends all of her time at the neighbors’.  What is she supposed to do, sit outside on the stoop until her parents get home?

I think that there’s a different problem I see with some Asian parents (it probably happens with white parents, too, but I see it more with my Asian friends) is that the parents devalue extracurriculars/friend-time because they believe that getting into the top college is more a necessity for success in the US than it actually is, mostly because I think that’s how it is in some modern Asian countries.

Ironically, you’re pretty much required to have cool extracurriculars on your application to get into a top college in the US, so they’re actually sabotaging the outcome they’re trying to create.

Parents, if you can avoid yelling at your kids in front of their friends, please do so no matter how much you feel like they’re part of the family.  Just don’t.

Amen to that, man. I was always so appalled at the way that my friends’ parents felt completely fine with letting loose on their kid while I was sitting right there. Humiliating for the kid, embarrassing for the friend, bad all around.

Teenagers *don’t* actually have adult brains—their brains aren’t developed all the way yet and they can be super irrational at times; acknowledging this doesn’t mean you hate teenagers.

Hmmm. My bad: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52687-2005Jan31.html

I think we can both agree, however, that they’re not stupid and nor are they necessarily incapable of either self-control of personal responsibility.

Taking doors off and screaming are creepy and over-the-top but it’s not like enforcing a curfew is the equivalent of sending your kid to Guantanamo. Asking them to check in sometimes (no, not every 15min) isn’t going to damage them irrevocably.

No, but as far as I’m concerned, kids should be able to pretty much govern themselves by their mid-to-late teens. They certainly understand cause and effect: ‘If I stay up ‘til 2 AM playing video games the night before the big math test, my performance may be negatively affected, causing me to score poorly. This means I won’t get the B-Bonus concert tickets I’d hoped to score on my caretaker’s dime.’

Getting them to check in sometimes is more than reasonable: it’s a necessary way of showing concern for their well-being. But the over-parenting of teenagers could lead to them failing to develop confidence in their own ability to make choices without immediate and continuous oversight from a moral guardian. 

I don’t know why the hell some parents would want their kids to check in every fifteen minutes. I don’t want to hear from ‘the kids’ except to call once upon arrival and again if they’re going to be late coming home. Other than that, they’re not to call for any reason except if their heads are on fire. 

Parents can’t/shouldn’t subsume their entire existences into being perfect launching pads for their children. Sometimes they want to get to sleep at a decent time or not have to deal with a cranky kid who knew they had to get up for school but decided in their teenagerly wisdom to stay up all night anyways.

To a cranky teen: “Suck it up and stop acting like a wiener. You brought this on yourself.”

corwin:

Here is the best definition of fascism I can come up with: A highly authoritarian governmental system with highly centralized control over culture and extensive nationalist propaganda based around widely accepted cultural symbols, combined with demonization of unfavored minorities as either parasites or traitors. Often includes an economy that can best be described as inside-out socialist, where the government actively encourages and even subsidizes corporate dominance over workers.

Applied to helicopter parenting:

-Unquestioned obedience to parental authority is required.
-The child is frequently shamed for minor offenses (or no offense at all), sometimes compared to That Good Kid Down The Block. Punishments often outweigh the crime, and standards are often inconsistent but always just a bit too high to meet.
-Information flow into the family is as tightly controlled as the parents can make it, and the child’s self-esteem is kept low by constant attacks on the child’s judgement.

“Soft fascism” is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but at least some of the elements of fascism are often present in these parent stories. The problem here is that the paranoia that families have been steeped in for the last quarter century has created a culture and even regulatory systems that actively encourage this form of parenting, to the point where child autonomy is sometimes equated with parental neglect.

Mmenosyne. Yeah, I know. But I think a lot of the parents don’t realize that. Plus, it ticks the kids off when they can’t go to football games on Fridays (seriously—I’ve heard friends complain about that).

The same friend who had to sneak out to prom also had parents who he had to fight to go to debate tournaments. I mean, if there is one wholesome, good-for-college extracurricular out there, its speech and debate. I think its probably a first-generation thing—most of the kids are fairly normal American teens about it and respond by, well, sneaking out to go to prom.

I do think that’s a sort-of separate phenomenon from mainstream middle-class controlling parents, which I think is based on more the idea that teens are bad and will get in trouble if you leave them alone—which leads to a loss of status both for the parents (who were obvious Bad Parents) and for the teen (who won’t go to college and succeed and perpetuate the middle-class status). The overcontrolling patterns I see in some of my Asian friends’ parents comes from an emphasis on education which has some good parts—in moderation, instead of an outright fear of teens. A lot of the students who were in my IB (basically like AP) classes were Asians, moreso, I think, than in the general student population, and I think part of that is because more had parents who expected them to work harder than a mainstream American parent would, and most succeeded and I would say were probably helped by that expectation. Basically, I think a lot of the non-immigrant parents were like “oh, my kid is average, and doesn’t have to do IB” while some of the Asian parents (usually first-generation) were like “my kid can handle IB” even if the kid wasn’t any better academically than the other kid. But it can go to extremes that aren’t healthy, just like every behavior.

SufferinBruins said:

Most of the commenters at Salon hate teenagers.

You know, I’m not fond of them either. But having been one long ago, and having a job that brings me in contact with them a lot, I firmly believe that that a) we can’t really hold them responsible for being teenagers and b) there should be a statute of limitations, and a short one, on the trangressions we commit as teenagers. Oh and c) they are in fact humans, all evidence to the contrary aside. And thus deserving of the respect all humans deserve.

They certainly understand cause and effect: ‘If I stay up ‘til 2 AM playing video games the night before the big math test, my performance may be negatively affected, causing me to score poorly. This means I won’t get the B-Bonus concert tickets I’d hoped to score on my caretaker’s dime.’

I guess my feeling is that they understand this kind of stuff in *theory* but in practice/emotionally they don’t understand it. The teenager(s) I have been (and known) are often quite likely to think exactly that thought and then proceed to play video games all night, do terribly the next day, and then be miserable and think God hates them. :p Obviously this all depends on age and the individual in question, but all the *intelligence* in the world didn’t help me make the most rational or foresighted choices as a kid.

But I definitely have kind of the opposite bias that a lot of people here seem to; mostly my parents would restrict things/enforce things ‘cause I genuinely was having self-care and rationality issues due to depression/etc. as a teenager. Also, I never *wanted* to go out or socialize much so that wasn’t a point of conflict between us. (I *did* have a bedroom door, though, so maybe I’m just speaking from door-owner privilege here. ;p)

It’s so age-based that it’s really impossible to generalize, I think. 10pm curfew: good for 13-year-olds, okay for 15-year-olds, terrible for 18-year-olds? (Irrelevant for depressed-year-olds?) “Teenagers” is too broad a category. Maybe I’m a prude but I’d find some behaviors perfectly fine in an older teen that would be pretty horrifying in a younger one, and ditto how their parents act on these behaviors.

there should be a statute of limitations, and a short one, on the trangressions we commit as teenagers

Oh HELL yes. It should be just a teeny bit longer than their memory of the event. (So, about two days…) My little sister would have arguments with my parents about stuff that had happened literally the previous day and not remember a *single* thing she’d done to piss them off. (”Why can’t I go to so-and-so’s house? ...What, no, I never said that! No I didn’t. ...Whatever.”

Speaking of which, we were both responsible for our own college admissions and financial aid. Nowadays, I work in financial aid, and I cannot. fucking. believe. how many parents of graduate students take responsibility for managing (and sometimes outright complete!) their kids’ paperwork and scholarship applications. And by “kids,” I mean 22- to 25-year-olds. I’m 26 now, and my mother would laugh me out of her house if I asked her for help with a scholarship application, and would have done the same thing when I was 18.

Weird.  I filled out all my college applications and financial aid forms at 17.  Only things I asked from my parents was for signatures where applicable and financial information for financial aid/scholarship applications. 

I think that there’s a different problem I see with some Asian parents (it probably happens with white parents, too, but I see it more with my Asian friends) is that the parents devalue extracurriculars/friend-time because they believe that getting into the top college is more a necessity for success in the US than it actually is, mostly because I think that’s how it is in some modern Asian countries.

As someone who is Asian-American and who attended a NYC area public magnet high school with a slight Asian-American majority, most of our parents understood that extracurriculars were just as important in achieving Ivy/Ivy-level admissions.  Though most of us had parents who are working/lower middle class, immigrant, and/or had limited educational backgrounds, they were certainly clued in….and this was back in the late 1980’s/early 1990s. 

Heck, most of the Asian-American dominant student body were pros at playing the “extracurricular game” IME.  Whether it is jockeying for leadership positions in student organizations, creating clubs/activities so they get leadership cred, volunteering for the sake of college admissions, and/or join dozens of clubs and maintain presence by going to club/organization meetings….signing the attendance roster….leave…...and repeat ad finitem. 

This was enough to leave a horrid taste in the mouths of myself and the group of high school friends I hung out with who felt this was disgustingly hypocritical BS.  A taste made more putrid when we found that in the vast majority of cases….those hypocritical BS tactics actually worked on the high school college guidance counselors and the Ivy/Ivy-admissions offices. 

they believe that getting into the top college is more a necessity for success in the US than it actually is, mostly because I think that’s how it is in some modern Asian countries.

In many East Asian countries, failing to gain admission to the top universities means one is effectively shut out of many prestigious and/or lucrative careers in both the public and private sector.

For instance, up until a few years ago, if one didn’t graduate from the University of Tokyo’s Law Department, forget about working in the most prestigious Japanese bureaucratic government departments such as what was formerly known as the Ministry of Trade and Industry(MITI). 

Likewise, in the private sector, failing to attend a top university means one is almost certainly shut out of many middle and upper-level corporate leadership positions from the get-go.  There was a case of a Japanese student who attended Lehigh University and found out that even after gaining a Masters degree from Waseda, a topflight Japanese school was not enough to atone for the “sin” of not attending a topflight undergrad which prevented him from getting hired by many major Japanese conglomerates.  However, after gaining admission to UTokyo as a “transfer student” and getting a bachelors from that place, those same conglomerates were suddenly falling all over themselves to hire him solely because he has the coveted UTokyo undergrad degree. 

Similarly, if one didn’t graduate from the top 1 or top tier institutions in South Korea, China, or Taiwan, many prestigious public and private sector positions would be completely inaccessible to him/her because there is a common perception that if one failed to gain admission and graduate from a top 1 or top tier institution, that individual has proven to be wanting in proving his/her academic/intellectual acumen and is thus, unworthy of further consideration.*

* If you want to see “high stakes” educational systems on steroids in action, these systems are great examples. 

My date had to sneak out on prom night because Prom was in the middle of IB testing, and they were under the impression that IB testing actually matters (hint: no, it doesn’t) and that going out with his friends on Saturday would hurt his testing the next Monday (he would have probably played Starcraft instead).

While IB testing doesn’t matter a whole lot in the greater scheme of things, this inclination to privilege academics over non-academic/leisurely pursuits is a helpful trait to have when a high school graduate starts having the responsibility to self-manage his/her undergraduate life by learning how to balance one’s life so one can complete one’s academic work well and still have a life. 

Though my high school ended up having to cancel our junior prom because of a strong lack of student interest, most of us ended up excelling academically at our respective undergrads while being able to have a life because most of us prioritized our academic studies over fun leisure pursuits whenever the two came into conflict. 

It is far better than following the example of dozens of native-born US undergrads I’ve seen/known of who deprioritized academics in favor of leisure pursuits and ended up on academic probation, suspension, and/or being expelled.  Something that is not only potentially embarrassing for parents, future employers, and grad schools, but also a good way to squander an expensive educational investment considering how expensive even state university tuition is in the US.  This is doubly so if the parents are the ones footing the costs of that investment. 

Granted, I had the privilege of not worrying about the last part as my parents never had to pay a dime of my private undergrad tuition or subsequent educational costs thanks to scholarships and my working during summers and part-time during the academic year.

When the hell did parenting as soft fascism become so acceptable?

Oh, that’s easy - when parenting as hard fascism became less acceptable. Most people these days realise that beating the crap out of your kids on a regular basis is not OK, so they resort to other means of oppression.

corwin: Amanda’s definition of fascism here seems more to come from antiauthoritarian theory then from historical/political one. For a good working definition from the latter perspective, I recommend Eco’s 14 points.

Anders H.: In Germany, the term “latch key kids” was used to protest against working mothers as early as the 60s. I have a book from 1961 which is all in crocodile tears about the poor kids who come home to an empty house and have the whole afternoon to themselves. I kept the book because it reminded me how privileged I was to come home to an empty house and have the whole afternoon to myself. Those of my friends with SAHM sure weren’t.

Personally, I think not allowing boys in bedroom with doors closed is reasonable. Although I think that a midnight curfew is more reasonable for a 16 year old. When she gets 18, she can stay out all night. I was raised in the 90s, and today when I see 12 year olds walking around alone at 11 pm, it bothers me. I could see them walking alone say, at 5 pm, but 11?

I hate the parents picking kids up thing.  My mom is a vice principal at an elementary school, and there is a neighborhood right across the street.  Parents there drive over and pick their kids up.  Parents drive their kids to bus stops IN THEIR NEIGHBORHOODS and sit with the kids in the car.  I mean, wtf?  How do these people have the TIME to do this?  I loved my walks to school and home, alone or with friends.  I feel sad for the kids missing those.

I might be weird, but my bedtime through high school was in the room at 9:30, lights out by 10:00.  I mean, the bus came at 6:45.  Teenagers need more sleep time than younger kids.  I was the only kid in my class who wasn’t sleeping through the first three periods.  I see nothing wrong with a 10:00 curfew on a weeknight.  FFS, the kid is supposed to be going to school.  I always wondered what all those kids were doing that late at night anyway.  It’s not like they’re old enough to go do anything good.

The way the commenters on this thread are defining “being a teenager” and “having a life” seem really weird to me. Getting home at 1am drunk is a normal and necessary part of being a teenager?

No—but having the opportunity to do so and find out why it’s a a bad idea is part of growing up. Some do it at 15, some at 18, some at 25, some find other bad ideas they need to test out.

Just like being allowed to read whatever you want might mean that you’ll read a lot of crap, being allowed to manage your own schedules might mean that you’ll spend time doing stupid things. The point is in learning which books are crap and which pasttimes are not worth it.

Personally, I think not allowing boys in bedroom with doors closed is reasonable.

Can you explain further the reasoning behind that thought? I understand it if your kid is 13 or something, but surely a 16-year-old or 17-year-old should be trusted to be able to have responsible sex if you’ve raised her right. Is it just that you don’t want your kid fooling around while you’re in the house because that’s kinda gross to think about (understandable)? Or do you actually think that you’ll prevent a teenager from having sex with that rule, and that preventing a teenager from having sex is reasonable?

As a side note, it’s interesting that this issue has been consistently framed as letting boys into girls’ rooms, throughout the thread. Do parents of sons just tend not to have a problem with letting girls go into their sons’ rooms, or what?

The way the commenters on this thread are defining “being a teenager” and “having a life” seem really weird to me. Getting home at 1am drunk is a normal and necessary part of being a teenager?

I didn’t drink, do drugs, have sex, or get any grade lower than an A throughout high school. I didn’t want to get home drunk at 1 AM. I wanted to be able to watch a movie at a friend’s house until 1 AM when I was done with all my homework. And with all the extracurriculars I was doing and the advanced classes I was taking in order to get into a good college, some nights I really would have appreciated the opportunity to stay up late doing my homework without getting lectures from my parents about how it was time to go to sleep now.

Also, though, drinking might not be normal/necessary for a teenager, but if it doesn’t get out of hand, is it really so abnormal or abhorrent? And in my experience, at least, it’s more likely to get out of hand when a teenager is rebelling against strict rules and the idea that getting drunk once in a while makes you a horrible person if you happen to be under an arbitrary age limit.

It’s not necessarily sexist to assume that “Had Enough” is the mother writing, because the writer refers to “my jewelry.” Ok, I know men wear jewelry, but usually it isn’t called that, and really, how many suburban dads in Americana do?

This was such a great response to “Had Enough” who by all accounts has a low threshold of “enough” and is an authoritarian beast of a parent:

“It depends on how we view the human project. If we think of ourselves as components made to function dutifully within a society with fixed rules and fixed parameters, if getting and holding a job and raising a family are the primary goals, if existence is a preordained program of obedience to commands and right answers to tests, then yes, a somewhat punitive, controlling, rigid structure that denies the child the opportunity to fully master the multifarious arts of being may be just what is required.

“But if you think that the child’s project is much broader: to become, to unfold, to fully realize every merest spark of genius in her being, then you may agree that to accomplish that project, she needs more leeway to figure things out. She needs to make some mistakes.”

My impression of parents and families in the USA is that too many people, not just parents, view “the human project” as the first of the two ideals proposed by the writer here - obedience to fixed rules and fulfillment of socially prescribed goals. And since these rules are poisonous to happiness, no surprises that parents who feel constrained by them are so insecure that challenged to them by youth threaten them greatly.

Do parents of sons just tend not to have a problem with letting girls go into their sons’ rooms, or what?

I know gay guys who were not allowed to close their doors when a girl was over for homework, but it was fine when their (unknown to parents) boyfriend was over.

I grew up in a trailer with very thin walls.  Closing the door would have made no difference to my mom or dad being able to surveil.

Oh, and i suspect my boys might be disinclined to have partners over for sex anyway ... they would know that I would know and would be mortally embarassed when there came a knock on the door to draw their attention to the dayglo condom pack being pushed under the door.

Oh, and i suspect my boys might be disinclined to have partners over for sex anyway ... they would know that I would know and would be mortally embarassed when there came a knock on the door to draw their attention to the dayglo condom pack being pushed under the door.

You’re the reason why your kids will wind up paying shrinks later in life, you know…

“How are they going to get around when for so many years they weren’t allowed to ever cross their neighborhood streets or stay out late playing with other kids? How are they going to encounter new ideas when they weren’t allowed to engage with others? “

Naïvely.

Phoenician, I think Ms Kate’s ensuring the kids are having safe sex is the rational, healthy and caring reaction. Why would the kids need a shrink in response to that?

Ms Kate, I’m disappointed in you. Dayglo condoms? What is this, 1985? Durex Pleasurewave, darling. Make sure that you embarrass the son with the double-message of “be safe” and “make sure she gets off, too!”

You’re the reason why your kids will wind up paying shrinks later in life, you know…

Coming from somebody whose upbringing did give me a reason to be paying shrinks, or would if I thought most of ‘em knew their asses from a hole in the ground—what a dick.

Now Britain is noticing that kids don’t like to play in playgrounds with all the CC cameras everywhere. And when they do capture teens on tape, they are partying sooo hard, and this fun must be stopped, or well, the hooligans will win.

Actually, I *am* in favor of cameras on playgrounds.

There was an incident here where some teenagers thought it would be fun to pour acid on a sliding board in the middle of the night. The next morning, the first child to use the slide, a two year old boy, burned the skin on the back of his legs badly. Frequently, the playgrounds my children use get trashed by unknown people who wreck the equipment, and since the perps are unknown and wouldn’t have any money anyway, and the city isn’t wealthy enough to just fix it, the children go without playground equipment.

My opinion is that playgrounds are for children (under the teen age). Teens should be able to use them only if they will treat them with respect, and so *many* teens do not treat playgrounds with respect—but I don’t want to see teens banned from playgrounds either. Having cameras seems to me like a good compromise between the need to keep teens (and perhaps adults) from trashing the things, and permitting teens to use the facilities at all. And I’m having a hard time imagining what ten year old would give a damn that there are cameras on a playground… although, I’m American, so I’ve been raised in a security state for forty years.

But adults need to show some responsibility if there are cameras, too. Teens hanging out on playgrounds, using the equipment the way it’s intended to be used, and having fun is not bad. Teens drinking on playgrounds and leaving beer bottles all over the place is bad, as is teens wrecking the equipment, but just having *fun* is not wrong.

I had rigidly strict religious (Calvinist) parents. Rage and control issues. I was not allowed out of the house after 8:00pm. I was not allowed to have a job, or to drive a car. After my parents divorced and my mother remarried it got even worse:  I was slapped for talking back, called “uncontrollable” when I acted out. They threatened to put me in foster care despite my an A student.  To them my “will” was a character defect. 

That’s the problem, I think, in a nutshell:  The human will seen as a character defect.

I figure a kid is pretty much set in his/her character by the time s/he is 13.  If you haven’t done your job as a parent by then you’re TOO LATE! But still, if you raised your kid with a moral compass and critical thinking skills, mistakes and disasters can and do still happen.  My dad was a decent soul at 13 but he STILL burned down the cow barn by accident. Shit happens.

As a parent I threw in the control towel early. My daughter is 16. Fingers crossed: Really, it’s all out of my hands at this point.

My parents’ rules were very strict BUT generally negotiable.  It took weeks, but I was able to convince them when I was 14 that I should be allowed to go to a concert with a group of my friends, supervised by only one of their mothers, on a school night.  My dad even drove me to buy tickets at 6 am on a Saturday in a 40 below winter.

My mom was like this in some ways.  In some ways (usually things involving sex, which I had anyway, but she got pregnant young and she did not want her daughters to do the same and for some reason, pushing birth control wasn’t her way to deal with that, it was absolute abstinence that she wanted from us) she absolutely would not budge over unreasonable rules.  I was not allowed to have boys in my room with the door closed, and once when she caught me toughing my boyfriend’s neck inside his sweater, I wasn’t allowed to have boys in my room at all, because my hand was “inside his clothes”.  I was only allowed to go on unsupervised dates (he could come to my house or I could go to his, but we couldn’t go out on our own) when I was on my period, and I had half an hour to get home from things like football games or other school functions that didn’t strictly count as dates (that she also attended, but didn’t sit with us). 

But we were allowed to drink in the house from the time we were about 14 (which is why my sisters and I never really got into trouble with alcohol—it was never forbidden), my dad occasionally offered to share his pot with us, I worked through high school and didn’t really have a curfew if I wasn’t with the boyfriend, I managed my own schedule most of the time, etc.  And I was allowed (after much begging and promising to pay for it myself and swearing the boyfriend would not be there) to go to senior week at Myrtle Beach with a bunch of friends right after graduation.  But again, my boyfriend (graduated a year ahead of me and so had gone himself the year before) had to drive to my house and see my mom every day I was gone so that she could be sure that he wasn’t with me and we weren’t having sex.

Oh, and i suspect my boys might be disinclined to have partners over for sex anyway ... they would know that I would know and would be mortally embarassed when there came a knock on the door to draw their attention to the dayglo condom pack being pushed under the door.

Ms. Kate, you are my hero.

The girl in the letter sounds a little like my bi-polar younger sister, right down to the friends who stole shit from our family. Repeatedly. How do you deal with that? It’s tough to live like that, and most parents know that people are going to judge them no matter what they do. If they let the kid have leeway and he/she gets in trouble, they are greeted with a chorus of “where were the parents?!” yet if they take the opposite approach, they’re upbraided for being controlling jailors. Parenting a teenager is a tough path to walk (reason number 15,000 I’m never having kids), and I don’t think we should draw too much from anyone writing to Cary Tennis, of all the colums in the world.

I agree with you 100%, I"m 43 (no kids) and things were pretty much as you describe for me as well.  Most of the people I grew up with turned out just fine.  But have you seen the recent article in New York magazine about the class of ‘09?  Many of them consider their parents to be their best friends, there just doesn’t seem to be the resentment that I would expect with a generation that was never allowed to be out of their parents’ sight.  Many of them have no problem moving back in with mom and dad if they can’t find a job, talk with them freely about sex, money, etc.  It’s a very different generation, one that I don’t recognize at all.

“You’re the reason why your kids will wind up paying shrinks later in life, you know…”

This may very well be true no matter how you raise them…

In the spirit of the calls to “common ground” from fellow abortion rights activists understandably tired of ducking-and-covering, let’s choose our comments to address points raised by both sides.  And in so doing, we’ll probably piss both sides off too.

First, to be the devil’s – sorry, the parent’s advocate – it might be worth at least asking the parent what concerns they have about the boyfriend as a person, or even what they know of him at all.  A number of commenters have focused on actions by the parent(s) that seem to be unreasonable (including taking away the daughter’s house key) but it’s interesting (and seems so odd that it makes us wonder if the letter may be faked) that no one we read asked seriously:

(1) how old the boyfriend of the sixteen year-old daughter which is the focus of this summertime rant,

(2) if he is known to be or has been known to be a substance abuser, or a close friend of users, or even

(3) if he has a record of criminal activity or violence.

Oh, and the letter doesn’t say if she’s dropped out of school – which would be something that would be prominently on the mind of any parent of a supposedly delinquent sixteen-year-old, even one as distant as this (or these), making us wonder all the more if this is not a utterly faked parental “summertime blues” rant-to-the-advice-columnist.  We’re not saying that Cary (the Salon columnist) faked this letter, maybe it was faked and sent in, or maybe edited to remove these references, but the subtext of teen teen sex sex and how so many of the commenters focused on that rings hollow to us.

The lack of any detail (and, hence, concern) at all on the daughter’s boyfriend (despite how her activities with the boyfriend take up a significant part of the letter and subsequent response from the advice columnist) is the biggest issue we have with the letter, the column, and many of the comments we’ve read.

But if we’re to take the letter seriously, we’d note that the tone of the letter implies that the parent(s) – and as Amanda noted it’s not obvious if there is one parent, two parents, or if there are two who is writing the letter (though it does sound superficially like it’s a guy) – are all but estranged from their daughter.  If so, they may not know (or care about) the answers to questions #1 - #3 above – even the question on how old the guy is – and if that’s the case it might make sense for them to do the things that so many commenters that position themselves as the daughter’s advocate say are unreasonable, including removing the bedroom door and taking away her key.  If they are estranged and the boyfriend is an unknown to them, one can say they should be more trusting, but it’s probably unreasonable to really expect them to be or to become so.

That’s what makes Salon’s advice columny, cotton candy, diabetic coma-inducing essay on unconditional love ring hollow, because the parents (and perhaps the daughter and boyfriend) seem way beyond any love at all for each other.  If that’s so, one of the best things they could do is to look into emancipating their daughter and engaging the daughter in doing so.  It might at least make sure she understands the legal responsibilities that come with adulthood, and maybe steer her away from the most obvious forms of self-destructive behavior that some young adults get into: criminal, economic, and otherwise.

Now, to take the daughter’s side, we’d say basically the same thing.  First thing we’d do is ask questions around #1 - #3 above about the boyfriend.  Second, if she is old enough to be emancipated and would like to be, we’d suggest she look into that.  If she’s been locked out of your parent’s house, it sounds like she is already pretty much on your own.  If the local legal system is likely to see her as too young or immature to be emancipated, she should get familiar with the guardian ad litem program (or the equivalent) before that program becomes mandated to get involved with her.  She may not like that but that’s what she’d be dealing with if she can’t get emancipated right away and there are serious (or seriously trumped-up) legal concerns for her safety.  She should look to establish a relationship with the program that allows her to prove she’s properly pursuing her education (which again the letter doesn’t make reference to) and not getting into trouble, and is managing her time outside of school appropriately.

If she does all of that, it’s more likely that she will be able to emancipate herself when she can prove herself mature enough to do so, and maybe even move towards some sort of reconciliation or amicable parting with her parent(s).  We don’t have much hope for that latter possibility, but we don’t want to rule it out, either…

…because sometimes the best route to “common ground” begins with defining boundaries, and working towards an amicable parting of the ways.

“I was literally not allowed to do my own laundry, all the “family’s” laundry had to be done together. Which meant I was forced to fold my mother’s thongs at 16. Yeah…that was fun”

Ok, from the enviro flip side, conserving water - and saving money if you get metered water not to mention gas or electricity for dryer is something some of us take seriously.  The day you find one, tiny white and not so dirty sock in the machine is the day you institute washing must be done in loads, thus all the family’s stuff together.

So yeah, you teach them to sort, which they should have been doing since about age three when they asked to help with something. 

Sorry you were freaked out by your mom’s thongs, but I had dad’s and grandad’s boxers and that sorting meant before wash , too, not to mention grandad’s ace bandages for his bad leg. Oh yeah and mom’s girdle - be grateful your mom wore a thong - she sounds cool.

phylosopher, did you wear and sleep in the same clothes for years on end? That’s what ha was talking about: removing the door forces her to change either in the bathroom or in front of everybody.

Sorry, but back in the day when sharing a bedroom wasn’t considered child abuse, you still had to go to the bathroom to change if you were nudophobic - as most of us weren’t back inteh days of 800 sq ft, one bathroom 3 to a room homes.  So gee, walking a few steps to the bathroom is an inconvenience, and in my case taught me to hang up (or not try on every piece of clothing in the closet before deciding what to wear).  It’s just the kind of inconvenience that teaches a kid/teen something. 
Also, not being nudophobic means that not everyone sees the naked body as sexual, just comfortable.

Exholt—you’re right about the majority of parents noticing that Extracurriculars are important (although—believe me—the extracurricular game gets played by everyone). The ones who don’t are very rare. I don’t think I notice it as much because people don’t complain so much about their parents forcing them to do ECs as forcing them to do full IB.

I mean, my mom kind of played the EC game, although I limited my ECs to what I was comfortable with (I prefer not to have every part of the day scheduled).

But that up another level of this kind of control—do you know any kids that, starting with elementary school, always had at least two things going on? Like ballet class and painting and theater? Yeah, I kind of think that’s a problem. I think teens can choose that if they thrive in that kind of environment—and some do—but I don’t think children should be controlled all the time. I took classes in dance and gymnastics at that age, but it never cut into my wander-around-the-neighborhood time, which is what I really remember about childhood.

And about the parent slipping condoms under the door? As a teenage girl, if my hypothetical boyfriend’s parents did that, I’d think it was kind of funny.

“The way the commenters on this thread are defining “being a teenager” and “having a life” seem really weird to me. Getting home at 1am drunk is a normal and necessary part of being a teenager?”

It wasn’t my experience, but doing something like that once or twice during their adolescence seems about par for the teenager course from conversations with pretty much everyone else I’ve met.  Hell, based on my grandparents’ and great-aunts’ and -uncles’ stories of the stupid/hair-raising shit they got up to back in the 1930s and ‘40s, in a farming community, it seems to have been about par for the teenagers course since the idea of teens as a specific demographic really cottoned on.

“Getting home by 10pm is impossible and you’re just asking for trouble if you demand that of your kid?”

Speaking as someone who had about the tamest possible teenage experience, voluntarily, yes, demanding that your kid be home by 10pm, without fail, always, is asking for trouble.  If your kid has a job, there are likely going to be nights when they’re not getting home before 10.  If your kid is involved with school activities like team sports or the drama club, there are going to be (probably many) nights when they’re not getting home before 10.  If your kid has friends who don’t have social anxiety disorder or agoraphobia, there are going to be nights when they have perfectly reasonable and wholesome reasons to want to be out past 10.  As someone upthread pointed out, a 10pm curfew does not necessarily permit the teen to catch the 7ish showing of a movie.  Most school dances I attended, never mind things like prom and homecoming, did not end until 10.  There’s a reason most parents have a negotiable curfew—if your kid has any sort of life, it’s far more productive to say “10pm unless I know where you are and approved a new hour” than scream at/ground your kid because closing duties at their mcjob took longer than usual or the homecoming game ran long.

thefeistysweetheart on 06/19 at 01:31 AM

Yeah, to all.  Though the kids I knew in college who did the overseas summer camp were generally more well-rounded internationally- after all not all the kids in that camp were Americans, but they were pretty well insulated from other classes up to college where the scholarships kicked in.

And before somebody blasts me for criticizing parenting styles, if you want to be a management only parent, OK.  But say so - don’t ever start with the “how hard it is to parent” crap.  And please, realize that some day they’ll say, like Winston Churchhill did, or the Trey character on “Sex and the City,”  my mother birthed me, but she didn’t raise me, that was (nanny, governess) and to her I am forever grateful for….

However, the parents who wrote in actually are nutty enough to forbid their daughter from being inside the house at all when they’re not home and yet complain that she spends all of her time at the neighbors’.  What is she supposed to do, sit outside on the stoop until her parents get home?
Mnemosyne on 06/19 at 01:36 AM

I’m not sure why no one did what a few of my friends’’ parents did when I was a teen - parent valuables (or sex toys for all I knew) were kept in the parents room which had a hasp and lock on it if mom and dad weren’t home.  As did the liquor cabinet.  Did it show a lack of trust, or just a realistic acknowledgment that some teens can’t be trusted to act responsibly and respect privacy?

Stories/comments like these in Salon are some of the few things that make me WANT to have kids.  Because, holy lord, I can be a better parent than these nuts! 

The curfew thing isn’t ridiculous, though; while I never had a firmly enumerated curfew, 10-11 on weeknights and 12-1 on weekends when I was 16ish was a general “understanding.”  Given ridiculously early high school start times and community curfews, it’s not unreasonable.

One recent kid-related thing I REALLY don’t understand is this fad of arresting parents for leaving kids in cars for 5 minutes.  WTF?  I absolutely loved to read, and my mom never had a problem letting me read in the car while she made a boring-errand stop (for which I am eternally grateful.) 

And all of that insanity brings me back around to NOT wanting children.

Oh, and i suspect my boys might be disinclined to have partners over for sex anyway ... they would know that I would know and would be mortally embarassed when there came a knock on the door to draw their attention to the dayglo condom pack being pushed under the door.
Ms Kate on 06/19 at 07:58 AM

Love it.  My daily giggle.  thanks, Ms Kate.

... teenagers are notoriously hard to deal with. The parents don’t have much patience for the whole thing, either ...

I have two teenagers (15 & 18), and I can’t say that they’re any harder to deal with than a lot of the adults I deal with (they’re much easier than their mother, but then, there were reasons why divorced her.)  It’s a lot of work, and they do make real demands on your maturity, but if you don’t want to do a lot of work and don’t like having to rethink yourself on a regular basis, don’t have kids.  If you don’t want to run, don’t join a running club.

Actually, I’ve gotten to know quite a few teen-agers, and if you’re willing to accept them for who they are, you find out that most of them are great people and not hard to deal with at all.

I’ve also seen some examples of parents who get along (reasonably) well with their teenagers and some who don’t, and when they don’t, it’s usually because the parents are treating their kids in ways that no self-respecting adult would put up with.  (Kids will put up with more, either because they’re used to it, or don’t know any better, or don’t feel they have a choice.)

One thing I keep in mind all the time: when they’re 18, they’ll be legally able to do what they want.  You need to figure out a way to deal with your children that doesn’t involve compulsion even before they’re 18.  Actually, you need to start working on this as soon as they are born.

One recent kid-related thing I REALLY don’t understand is this fad of arresting parents for leaving kids in cars for 5 minutes.  WTF?  I absolutely loved to read, and my mom never had a problem letting me read in the car while she made a boring-errand stop (for which I am eternally grateful.)

And all of that insanity brings me back around to NOT wanting children.
Kirjava on 06/19 at 11:42 AM

I’m just thinking the landscape has changed though, kirjava.  I mean literally.  There’s a heck of a big difference between leaving your kid in a curbside spot, or in a 20 car lot at the local, neighborhood grocery, compared to in the treeless 500 car lot at the megastore.  For one, unless you leave the damn thing running (polluting) it quickly becomes sweltering.  And you never know when the motor may die.  we recently lost a police dog in our town because the handler’s a/c alarm failed to go off.

I actually had a negotiable 10 pm curfew growing up, and I think that was pretty reasonable, especially on weekdays. Recall that high school kids have school that starts sometimes before 8 am. Many people believe my parents were overprotective, and perhaps they were, but here’s why I didn’t usually see it that way: we would have a conversation about my plans and agreed together on what would be a good time for me to get home. If that didn’t work out, I called to tell my parents the new plan so they wouldn’t worry.

I don’t have kids either, but I think that talking about everyone’s needs and making decisions together is a good way to help your kids learn how to make smart decisions for their whole life. I hope that’s how I’ll behave if I ever become a parent.

Lauren O, it’s a cultural thing. It’s one thing to give your daughter/son the condom talk and talk about being safe and respectful, and it’s quite another to allow your daughter a place for sex with a wink and a nod.

I’m not sure why no one did what a few of my friends’’ parents did when I was a teen - parent valuables (or sex toys for all I knew) were kept in the parents room which had a hasp and lock on it if mom and dad weren’t home.

We called my parents’ room “the vault.”  Once they went to bed and locked the deadbolt on their bedroom door, the vault was closed for the night and we could come back out of our rooms and goof off some more around the house if we wanted to.  But QUIETLY, because the last thing you wanted was for the vault to be re-opened.  That was a guaranteed grounding.  They kept the door locked if there weren’t any adults in the house.

Though we did figure out how to get in through their bedroom window when they weren’t there if we really, really wanted to.  That was mostly so we could watch cable movies on their TV, though I suspect my older brothers went rifling through the liquor occasionally.

In Memphis, people are discouraged from leaving kids in the car since in 100 degree weather, a child can overheat rapidly.

“I’d say it’s pretty likely that your daughter is using.”

All I wanted was a Pepsi! Just a Pepsi! And she wouldn’t give it to me!

(It doesn’t matter, I’ll probably be run over by a car anyway.)

waspie BWAHAHAHAH! 

With that, I can’t believe 200+comments and nobody has linked to Teenagers Scare the Living Shit out of Me!

Strictness in parents also works better if the parents themselves are carefully disciplined.  Even if it’s not a good fit for the kid, people do recognize basic fairness—if mom and dad work hard and don’t get a lot of toys, but enjoy some success and stability as a result, there is going to be regular reinforcement of the idea that working hard and asceticism is a good way to live. 

In general, I agree with AMM.  Teenagers are basically adults with relatively little background.  If you take them seriously and explain what’s going on a lot, they tend to act like, well, adults with relatively little background.  This business of undeveloped risk centers and whatnot is silly; it is entirely appropriate for young adults to be taking risks which would be much less appropriate for older adults with more responsibilities.  You’re just seeing the physical manifestation of a psychological truth.

The problem with that is that in most places, it is ILLEGAL for an 11 year old to be out and about in the middle of the night on a weeknight.  And will likely get the parent put in jail.

I don’t think curfews are inherently bad.  I think draconian curfews are bad.

DTG,

A large part of that may have been due to the fact my father was forced to live completely on his own from the age of 12 because he had to flee the Communists during the Chinese Civil War.  Since he lived through being held up multiple times by different armies, large scale battles between armies, people being shot right in front of him,  and the general chaos which comes with having a Civil war.  Comparatively speaking, he figured even the crime-ridden NYC of the 1980s could not compare with his formative experiences at 12 and 13 years of age.

As far as he was concerned, if he was able to cope living on his own at 12 and 13 without any adult supervision, others could and he always felt curfews past the age of 11 or 13 was too infantilizing, especially for those who have proven they are responsible and able to care for themselves with minimal supervision. 

Another factor may have been the fact they figured I was responsible and sensible enough to not get myself into the same types of trouble so many other teens in my area were getting themselves into back then*.  With the exception of McCain-level academic performance in high school, they were mostly vindicated. 

Then again, if they had to raise many of my older cousins, they’d probably have had a curfew for them considering how irresponsible and idiotic they were from childhood until well into their thirties.** 

* Lots of teens in my area were into crack and heroin as the littered crack vials and heroin needles on streets and parks in my childhood neighborhood showed. 

** One set his family’s lawn ablaze in an attempt to pay homage to Van Halen back in the day necessitating a large firefighter response to put it out…....

Teenagers are basically adults with relatively little background. 

ah yes - a pre-iterative bayesian prior distribution of a human adult.  Put in information, process, reformulate, repeat.

when not acting like a posterior, that is ...

Ms. Kate—that is exactly my model.  So my job when dealing with teens is to provide as much clean data as possible…

Punditus, hp, exactly.

Wordspinner,

That was my point.  Nearly everyone in my high school…including most of the Asian-American students played the extracurricular game like pros. 

Personally, I just joined clubs that interested me personally and concentrated on those as opposed to most classmates who signed themselves up for nearly every club and pull BS like walk in, sign in, leave, and repeat ad finitem routine. 

But that up another level of this kind of control—do you know any kids that, starting with elementary school, always had at least two things going on? Like ballet class and painting and theater?

Most of that really only started well after I became an undergrad during the mid-late 1990s. 

I also find this phenomenon was confined exclusively to upper/upper-middle class families as most of the families of childhood friends and classmates didn’t have the financial resources to do all of that.  If anything, it was far more likely we’d be asked to work one or more afterschool jobs to help the family out financially instead of attending such activities. 

i was an ABOVE-4.0 student (because AP classes grade on a 5 point scale. i got straight As, which translated into, generally, a 4.3 or 4.4, depending on how many APs i had that semester).

As someone who attended a NYC area public magnet high school where even the regular classes were taught at a greatly accelerated pace than classes at my well-reputed private undergrad or grad classes taken as a “Special Student” at some Ivy/Ivy-level institutions, having a 4.0+ GPA in high school is no guarantee/proof one is a mature responsible teen…or adult for that matter.  There are too many high academic achievers who ended up getting into trouble in other ways…including hardcore drug abuse and getting arrested for felonies like breaking into institutional servers.

I haven’t had a chance to read all the comments so I hope not repeating what other people have said:

1) I think that these trends in parenting are a really important political issue. This post reminded me of Alice Miller’s theory that fascism and Nazism were in large part a product of authoritarian and violent European (and especially German) child-rearing practices at the beginning of the 20th century.  The Nazis were taught unquestioning obedience as children.  Miller also believed that the violent punishments these children resulted in many turning their rage and anger on others in sadistic ways, i.e. the death camps.

Certainly Hitler was treated like total crap when he was growing up.  I know it is a cliche to blame evildoing on the evil doer’s upbringing, and people are certainly responsible for their own actions, and there are plenty of abused children who grow up to be decent adults. But I totally buy the idea that a child who is treated with respect and consideration is far less likely to be an authoritarian asshole as an adult.

2)  I was recently watching the new reality show “World’s Strictest Parents” in which “bad” kids are sent to live with strict families for a week.  One of the strict families were fundamentalists in Arkansas. They had a rule that no one in the family was allowed to close their bedroom door except to change clothes.

I mentioned to my mother how creepy I thought that was—and she said that her father in the 50s had a rule against anyone in the house having a lock on the door.  Maybe as a result of that weirdness, she always treated my privacy with respect.

I don’t have any problem with parents pressuring teenage girls to wait, as long as it’s not with the creepy expectation that they’re never going to have sex ever, though. I feel like a lot of the former teenage girls I know actually didn’t want to have sex in high school, or didn’t want to have sex with the person they were dating at the time, and made recourse to “my parents would flip, let’s just make out”. Because sometimes it’s hard to put your foot down for yourself when you’re a teenage girl.

That sounds completely counterproductive. You’re still encouraging teenage girls to rely on other people to tell them what to do instead of empowering them to trust their own desires and opinions. Why not tell them they don’t have to have sex if they don’t want to, and if they do want to, they should do it and enjoy it, as long as they’re safe? Why do they need to wait until they’re adults to realize they deserve to have fun and be respected on their own terms instead of trying to live up to the endless pressure to be sexually available without being slutty?

Sure, let them blame their parents if they still don’t feel secure standing up for themselves, but don’t be another voice telling them they can’t trust themselves and need to be told what to do.

As someone who is Asian-American and who attended a NYC area public magnet high school with a slight Asian-American majority, most of our parents understood that extracurriculars were just as important in achieving Ivy/Ivy-level admissions.

Which makes the point of the person you were replying to quite well: the focus on extracurriculars Was for the express purpose of making sure they got into a prestigious college, which the parents were clearly focused on. And I think that people who don’t come from this background don’t understand it from the perspective of such parents: particularly for immigrants, your position in the class hierarchy is extremely precarious, and the safest way to stake out a secure professional position is to go to a prestigious school, which ensures both that the student will have a lot more available opportunities open to him as well as providing better odds that the student won’t get distracted into taking a less economically successful, less career-focused path. The consequences for them are much higher than for someone whose family has been here for a long time and has both a more established identity as well as less at risk.

Also, I don’t know who designed the houses than any of you people lived in, but I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a house growing up where any doors had locks except for the bathrooms and the outside doors.

“This post reminded me of Alice Miller’s theory that fascism and Nazism were in large part a product of authoritarian and violent European (and especially German) child-rearing practices at the beginning of the 20th century.”

The one friend I have who has reproduced at this point decided to give the diaper-free thing a go.  Her father warned her that some people said the Germans’ potty-training methods were what let Hitler rise to power.  For some reason, she didn’t find my assurance that I didn’t think Hitler was going to take over her baby no matter what happened particularly reassuring.

More to the point, I think it’s a kind of questionable assertion.  On the one hand, yes, growing up with abusive and harming family dynamics can certainly give you a very warped sense of what’s okay in a relationship between adults or between a citizen and the state, and it can certainly desensitize you to the wrongness of certain types of social and interpersonal violence.  On the other hand, a lot of these movements rely on people who are panicked and hurt and confused and instinctively slipping back into a more childish mentality where they want the comfort and protection provided by a parentlike figure.  That’s something pretty much anyone who’s ever been entirely reliant on a caretaker is going to be vulnerable to.

Also, I don’t know who designed the houses than any of you people lived in, but I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a house growing up where any doors had locks except for the bathrooms and the outside doors.

Believe it or not, my parents designed our house (well, the one I’m primarily talking about) and we all got to have locks on our doors.  Lame push-button locks that you could easily open from the outside with a screwdriver, but locks nonetheless.  So at least they were willing to give us a similar level of privacy to what they demanded for themselves.  Well, except for when my mom would snoop through my stuff when I wasn’t home, but that’s a whole other issue.

“Also, I don’t know who designed the houses than any of you people lived in, but I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a house growing up where any doors had locks except for the bathrooms and the outside doors.”

Really?  One of the standard pieces of advice given to parents of children old enough to use doorknobs but not old enough to always knock is “put a lock on your bedroom door.” You know, spend ten bucks and half an hour to avoid a crash course in how the kid came to be. 

I imagine the same thing would be commonly said if we were comfortable acknowledging that our offspring start masturbating in earnest once puberty kicks in and would be equally unappreciative of younger siblings barging in.

I’m going to add another thing: I don’t have any stories of my parents being cruel or having a set of fascist rules around the house. In fact, both of them were just not authoritarian by nature. What is clear, however, is that they had no idea what they were doing. Now, they didn’t do any permanent damage, and I turned out perfectly fine, but it was (and is, in their interactions with their children who still need their attention), that they were sort of bumbling their way through it. They meant well, and I can say that because they didn’t do an actively bad job, but I could see they were just making it up as they went along, starting from a place of pre-conceived notions that may not have been particularly thoughtful. I suspect that most parents were the same, and these ultra-authoritarian parents just didn’t have the ability to look at the big picture, see what other parents were doing, evaluate what worked and what didn’t, and just continued on their destructive path.

Nearly everyone in my high school…including most of the Asian-American students played the extracurricular game like pros.

Despite ranking in the 82 percentile on the verbal SAT for incoming Stanford freshmen, I was rejected from there, and was told that I should had more extracurricular activities (and this was in the mid-70s, mind you), which is fucked if you consider that Stanford was originally envisioned to be a place where West Coast people could go instead of having to go to a school back east.  Fortunately, I was able to do so on a scholarship, and it was the “Stanford of the Midwest” to boot. 

Also, I don’t know who designed the houses than any of you people lived in, but I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a house growing up where any doors had locks except for the bathrooms and the outside doors.”

If it’s an old house and built by the original inhabitant, not so much.  I had a cousin whose mother-in-law walked in on her and her husband at the time because there was no lock on the bedroom door and for some reason the front door was unlocked at the time as well.

Which makes the point of the person you were replying to quite well: the focus on extracurriculars Was for the express purpose of making sure they got into a prestigious college, which the parents were clearly focused on. And I think that people who don’t come from this background don’t understand it from the perspective of such parents: particularly for immigrants, your position in the class hierarchy is extremely precarious, and the safest way to stake out a secure professional position is to go to a prestigious school, which ensures both that the student will have a lot more available opportunities open to him as well as providing better odds that the student won’t get distracted into taking a less economically successful, less career-focused path.

Actually, Wordspinner said most of the Asian parents s(he) knew actively discouraged their kids from getting involved in extracurricular activities…..something which was totally the opposite of the Asian parents of my high school classmates. 

As for getting into a prestigious college, a larger part of their obsession for the kids to attend Ivy/Ivy-level institutions IME and from studying East Asian societies is the fact that back in most of their home countries, failing to make it to a top-tier institution literally meant the student concerned would be permanently shut out of many lucrative and/or prestigious public and private sector careers from the get-go.  This was confirmed by relatives and classmates from those countries. 

Up until a few years ago, if one didn’t graduate from University of Tokyo, they would never be considered for a position in prestigious Japanese government bureaucratic departments or many middle to upper-level corporate leadership positions in many big-name conglomerates.  Even after they became “more open-minded”....it just meant that they now will consider people from “lesser” top 5 schools like Kyoto, Waseda, and Keio. 

If a similar situation existed in the US….it would mean that the most prestigious Federal government departmental and major US mid-senior corporate leadership positions which were once only open to Harvard or MIT graduates are now opened to people from the rest of the Ivy/Ivy-level tables like Columbia, UChicago, or Berkeley while still shutting out everyone else. 

In short, someone who attended a university out of that elite top 5 will still be shut out from the get-go. 

I’ve heard similar dynamics are at play in China, Taiwan, and South Korea…..though maybe a smidgen less extreme than Japan.

Phoenician, I think Ms Kate’s ensuring the kids are having safe sex is the rational, healthy and caring reaction. Why would the kids need a shrink in response to that?

“Well, just as I get going with my partner, I get this feeling that my mother is *watching* me, and things go all to hell performance wise…”

It was tongue-in-cheek anyhow.

Oh, I get it now.  I was agog at LaurenO’s comment until I realized she’s from Europe.  The folks from here saying it was like that for them, I can only ask, “Where the hell were you coming up in the world?”  I was raised in NY state, a fairly liberal place I believe, and neither I nor any of the kids in our class were allowed to do this stuff you’re talking about.  This was the 1980s. (Class of ‘89 Rules!!  LOL)

Yeah, that’s just Not Done Here.  It’s several things:  1.  respect for your parents’ house.  You don’t have sex in your parents’ house, unless you are married to the person and even then…ewww.  2.  You don’t encourage the child by making it easy for them.  “By God, you can have sex as a teen the same way I did!  Folded in half in the back of a 1980 Chevy Monza, getting rug burn on the small of your back from the carpeted hump in the middle.  And that’s that!”  3.  Teen sex is not seen as a right or even a privilege but instead something to be discouraged at all costs. 4.  Even among liberal parents, most teens would not be allowed to be alone with a member of the opposite sex, esp one s/he is dating, in their bedroom (or any room with the ability to lie down in comfort) with a closed door because discouragement and also because the other child’s parent would not appreciate it one bit and would probably win the law suit for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor”.

I have a 17 year old daughter.  She’s had most of the rules stated here as draconian applied to her.  As she gets older and proves that her brain cells are functioning properly, she gets more freedom.  She has a cell phone and she has a curfew.  She cannot have friends over if we aren’t home, except Sora and she better not have a boy over when we aren’t home.  We caught her sneaking out to see a boy we absolutely hated, turns out for good reason. She didn’t have the use of her window for awhile.  She was about 10 or so when she slammed the door one too many times and got it taken off the hinges for about a month.  But now at 17, she can get and hold down a job, she can run a household, she can cook, clean, do laundry, fix her scooter, handle lawn equipment, knows her way around a toolbox and all kinds of power tools, understands money (better than we do, actually), knows sexual facts and protects herself and generally makes good decisions.  So, we don’t worry too much about her. 

My 8 yr old son has the “draconian” rules.  And, btw, he won’t be allowed in his room with a girl with the door shut either.  Actually, he might not be allowed in his room with a girl at all but will have to keep it in the living room.  Again, if rug burn and carbon monoxide was good enough for us, it’s good enough for them.  You gotta REALLY want to have sex to put up with all that.  It’s not really going to be a “I’m bored, let’s fuck” situation, I don’t think.

chingona:

or in front of everybody.

Only if everybody is standing right in front of the door every time you need to change.

For the one changing, I don’t think the presence or absence of people at a given moment makes a huge difference. Wouldn’t you be arrested for standing outside a kindergarten naked even if no one were actually looking out at the time?

Mnemosyne

Of course, when I tried to stay home from school the next day because I was tired, they pretty much dragged me out of bed and told me I’d better hurry because if I missed the bus for school, they weren’t going to drive me.

Well, to this day that excuse will cut no ice with an employer, so it counts as adulthood training.

The detention is for a dumbass reason, though.

preying mantis:

it seems to have been about par for the teenagers course since the idea of teens as a specific demographic really cottoned on.

I think you nailed it: before “teenagers” were recognized as a group, you were an adult at 16, or certainly 18, and doing or at least wanting to do adult things (drinking, fucking) wasn’t remarkable.

But what other evidence is there?

“Aside from THAT, Mrs. Lincoln….”

If the daughter is ‘sweet as pie’ to everyone but her parents, it means they’re observing or being told about her behavior to other people - and being an asshole to them, and only them, is deliberate on her part. Of course, the parents are reacting to this in exactly the wrong way. And it doesn’t sound like anybody in that family is interested now in doing more than winning the power struggle. Unless that mentality goes away nothing will get better.

Again, this isn’t about you-have-to-be-a-parent-to-get-it, but what I see here is a lot of extreme failure to recognize that teenagers are not always right and children do not all become mature at the same rate or age. 

As for the nine-year-old on the subway, if something had happened to that little kid, I’d bet my left tit that at least half of you would be screaming about what a bad mother she was for leaving her child alone like that and what did she expect would happen. One of the unspoken secrets of parents is that we’re worried about our kids, but we’re also worried that if the teeny chance of something bad happening does, in fact, happen, it will be All Our Fault for doing everything wrong.

Shannon: Personally, I think not allowing boys in bedroom with doors closed is reasonable.

Well, it says, “I expect you to have sex with any boy you talk to given half an opportunity.” It says, “Boys and girls have nothing in common but a desire for sex”. With an 8 yo (WTFBBQ?), it says, “You might not have a dirty mind yet, but I sure have and I’ll help you along”.

Bagelsan: It [statue of limitations on things done by teenagers] should be just a teeny bit longer than their memory of the event.

Goodness. At family gatherings on my father’s side, they still argue about who ate that sausage in 1947.

Speedbudget: I might be weird, but my bedtime through high school was in the room at 9:30, lights out by 10:00.  I mean, the bus came at 6:45. <i>

Preying Mantis: <i>More to the point, I think it’s a kind of questionable assertion.

Miller argues that “black pedagogy” disconnects kids from their feelings by making it impossible to phrase or even admit them, so they fight their own natural reactions of empathy, and react with fear or agression to weakness. And that’s what makes them easily led or easily destroyed, and willing to commit crimes while never being aware of it.

“If the daughter is ‘sweet as pie’ to everyone but her parents, it means they’re observing or being told about her behavior to other people - and being an asshole to them, and only them, is deliberate on her part.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s certainly deliberate.  I know I certainly let things slide with friends’ parents that I might have gotten into a snit about with my own because, well, it’s a one-off with them, isn’t it?  They haven’t spent the last six months up your left nostril over it.  It didn’t provoke a reaction because it wasn’t the fifth time this fucking week or because there was no reason to expect that this was the opening round of a big fight. 

Yes, it could be that the girl has run through the social calculus of the situation and is refraining from shrieking at everyone else based on the previously-drawn conclusion that it’ll just get her banned from their house, while she shrieks at home because she’s reasonably sure that her enemies’ auditory defenses are weakest and that it will be easiest to achieve victory by concentrating her offense in that area and avoiding Eurasia, because she’s played Risk.  But it could also be a fairly natural and generally subconscious reaction to the dynamics of a relationship that’s been hostile for some time.

It could also be that she hates her parents, therefore is nasty to them, in a way she doesn’t care to be with others - and that there’s also a degree of satisfaction in rubbing her parents’ noses in that. I don’t know how you drag Risk into that, but what do I know, I was never ever a teenager or anything.

And of course it’s stupid for her parents to play right into that. If your teenager tells you that she hates you, the response should not be “Okay, let me give you a bunch more reasons to justify your hatred”.

For crying out loud, inge, read before your knee jerks. Obviously nobody thinks an eight-year-old is having sex.

My kids sometimes shriek “you are NOT my friend”.  My response: good. 

That’s all kinds of wrong.  Too many parents try too hard to be their teen’s friend.  That’s a sign of a parent who can’t grow up enough to grow up their young one - or is too pathetically wrapped up in trying to be young forever than doing their job.

I definitely agree with that—your kid has friends.  They need parents.

I disagree Inge.  When I was a teenager, I could talk to boys at school, over their houses, in the common areas of my house, in public places, such as the mall, etc. Just because I wasn’t allowed to have a boy over in my room with the door closed doesn’t mean that I couldn’t be just friends with a boy. My parents had this boundary because respecting your parents and their home was important to them. I’m not saying that it’s a firm boundary for me, but to me, this is not a draconian regime like making your teenager go to bed at 9 pm or something.

All “modern” houses we’ve lived in (built 1980s-2000s), the bedroom doors have all had the standard push-button locks.
hp on 06/19 at 03:04 PM

Which are very easily opened with a straightened bobby pin or small screwdriver if I remember correctly?

I imagine the same thing would be commonly said if we were comfortable acknowledging that our offspring start masturbating in earnest once puberty kicks in and would be equally unappreciative of younger siblings barging in.
preying mantis on 06/19 at 03:15 PM

Again, I think some upper class un-consciousness is kicking in here - many kids have to SHARE a bedroom with a younger sib.  That’s why you masturbate in the bathroom or shower.

Again, I think some upper class un-consciousness is kicking in here - many kids have to SHARE a bedroom with a younger sib.

Also, keep in mind that there are many families who are unable to have the luxury of having separate bedrooms for parents and the kids.  Many of my classmates before college had to sleep in the same bedroom as their parents or in the living room because rents were too high to get a 2 bedroom apt. 

I didn’t get my own bedroom until I was in my last year of high school for the same reasons.

My parents had this boundary because respecting your parents and their home was important to them.

I don’t understand how respecting one’s parents, or respecting one’s home that one shares with one’s parents, is at all involved in not shutting one’s door. I just can’t. Is having the wrong kind of curtains similarly disrespectful? Moving the bed to the opposite wall? How does whether one chooses to have a door open or shut have anything to do with respect for other human beings?

Chet I wouldn’t say universal, but characterizing it as “the majority of the time”, yes.  My family took in a cousin in because her mother wouldn’t to anything to stop her boyfriend(s) from trying to grope her daughter when she was 14.

“Again, I think some upper class un-consciousness is kicking in here - many kids have to SHARE a bedroom with a younger sib.  That’s why you masturbate in the bathroom or shower.”

Given the trend for families to have fewer children, getting a bedroom or a converted den to yourself seems more likely for at least a respectable portion of teens than being able to tie up the bathroom or waste water in the shower without inconveniencing family members.

“Isn’t this, like, the universal reaction by women when they find out their boyfriend or spouse is abusing their daughter?”

Certainly, because, you know, women are monsters.

Everything I read like this makes me so glad that I’m not (and never will be) a parent.
Too much horrifying shit all the way around.
It’s pretty sad that the commenters were immediately on the “parents can do no wrong” trip.
It’s amazing how powerful that meme is.
Especially considering that most young children are harmed and/or killed by their families… I guess if they’re past the age where they’ve made it past that it’s more of an idea of killing their soul for some.

Yes, Chet, in many places, parents and children are not equals., are not buddy-buddy, etc.  I am 25. Yet I would not disrespect my mother by cursing in front of her.

Given the trend for families to have fewer children, getting a bedroom or a converted den to yourself seems more likely for at least a respectable portion of teens than being able to tie up the bathroom or waste water in the shower without inconveniencing family members.

There are plenty of working and middle class families, especially in expensive urban areas like NYC who share a one bedroom or studio apartment because that’s all the space they can afford which allows the parent(s) to live within reasonable commuting distance to their jobs. 

There are plenty of families where the children and parents share the same bedroom or the children end up sleeping in the living room because of high housing costs.  Plenty of high school classmates lived under those conditions including myself until senior year of high school.

the point i was making was that, aside from being sarcastic, i was pretty much a model kid. and that, for no fucking reason i have *ever* been able to discern (and my mother can’t explain it, either

Denelian,

Not disputing your model kid point. 

Just pointing out that being a Straight-A high school student is not necessarily strong proof that s(he) is one.  Heard about and seen too many school admins, teachers, parents, and even authorities who effectively allowed high school classmates to get away with serious and sometimes even criminal behavior that would have gotten most adolescents punished or even imprisoned solely because they were “Straight-A” high school students.  This was especially the case if the student concerned happened to be middle/upper class and White or Asian-American from a middle to upper-class neighborhood/suburb.

“Again, I think some upper class un-consciousness is kicking in here - many kids have to SHARE a bedroom with a younger sib.”

phylosopher, *I* shared a bedroom with one of my siblings for most of my childhood, and your comments have been creeping me out from the beginning.

Granted, that likely has a lot to do with me and the fact that I had to deal with a “Peeping Tom”* for several years, but I also think that there is a big difference between teens lacking privacy due to lack of space and teens having physical privacy taken away as a punishment.  The former does not at all suggest deliberate invasiveness, the latter comes with the threat that all the other ways in which teens can seek privacy may be systematically destroyed as well.  THAT is a hell of a lot more damaging, especially, imho to teen girls - who are often taught that there bodies and their sexuality are not their own - than simply having to make do.

* GOD how much do I hate that term?  The dismissal of the harm is right there in the name.

(sigh)  Their isn’t any way to edit for spelling, is they’re?

“waste water in the shower”

eh?? sweet manual release only added a couple of minutes of shower-time, tops, for this former horny and lonely teenaged boy; hardly a waste at all, really

and I think my parents understood that I would have been truly insufferable without it

“waste water in the shower”

eh?? sweet manual release only added a couple of minutes of shower-time, tops, for this former horny and lonely teenaged boy; hardly a waste at all, really

emphasis mine

(granted, ymmv, but I’ve always has a harder time getting off in the tub/shower, what with the water actually making everything less slippery once you get to a certain point, if that’s not tmi)

and I think my parents understood that I would have been truly insufferable without it

again, see emphasis above.  parents are much less likely to <strike>realize</strike> admit to this when it comes to teen girls.  leading to stupid decisions like “let’s take the door off of her bedroom so that she will be less insufferable!

(a bedroom of one’s own is not necessary for jilling off, but it certainly makes it a lot easier - and therefore more likely to happen.)

its not that all women are monsters - it’s that in a large number of instances like mine, the first reaction of the mother is to blame the daughter. for “taking her man”.

And as you say, this has nothing to do with women being monsters; it has to do with women being raised in a patriarchy, which fucks them up, the phenomenon of victim-blaming being one symptom of that.

Teenagers, hell.  The tendency of parents to overprotect their kids extends well into adulthood now.  I’ve seen parents of college students (which is a cue that this is a very class-based observation - I don’t know how parents of non-college student young adults act) meddle into their kids’ lives to a shocking degree.  One morning I was watching a segment on young people’s health on GMA and Meredith Viera was SHOCKED that college health centers don’t have to disclose the medical records of students to their parents.  Imagine that?  Many parents flat out refuse to accept that their 18+ year old children are legal adults entitled to privacy so it’s no surprise at all that they view their minor children as virtual prisoners.

“its not that all women are monsters - it’s that in a large number of instances like mine, the first reaction of the mother is to blame the daughter. for “taking her man”. not ALL of them; probably not even a majority of them. but the ones that get the most media devoted to them…”

It was the “universal” part of it that got me.  Like the mother who opts to protect her children from sexual abuse suddenly turns into a legendary creature when the sexual abuse is coming from the mother’s intimate partner.  Like women are so caught up in having a man and/or being the pretty one that it’s just natural for them to throw their own children to the wolves if it lets them keep that brass ring. 

The fact that the MRAs felt it necessary to come up with a whole new syndrome in order to call mothers trying to leave men who’d proven physically and/or sexually abusive towards their children crazy?  Meh.  The way economic dependence, substance abuse, and battering play roles in the “ignore/victim-blame” reponse?  Meh.  The women who wind up dead as a result of trying to stop sexual abuse?  Meh.  I mean, acting like Snow White is just how things are is pretty fucked.

but now that you talk about it, i know *exactly* what you mean. there was a group of them at my high-school - they *all* hated me beause my grades were as good as, if not better than, theirs, and i didn’t have a single solitary tutor, while they all had several tutors. and they were forever trying to get me and anyone else not in the group in trouble, secure in the fact that they were on important teams and so wouldn’t themselves be punished and case SO or another team to win first place. because “good students” are somehow always considered “good people” unless they are “other”.

Denelian,

Some of the types of kids you’re talking about were just like the upper/upper-middle class private school/suburban public school graduates who condescended down to those of us who attended urban public high schools because they felt their schools, 3.8+ high school GPAs, various merit awards, and being in the top 10-20% of their high school classes meant they had superior education compared to us “urban public school kids.” 

Those very same kids became pissed when they found all of that didn’t necessarily mean they would be able to excel….or even perform passably at my undergrad.  Heck, it was a weird experience to watch many of them end up being placed in remedial classes, were mediocre performers, or even flunked enough courses to be suspended or even expelled. 

Was a weird experience as on paper, they had all of the best preparation and education money and location could buy.  Only after a year or so did I find that academic standards at even the upper/upper-middle class topflight private/suburban public high schools were such that if one was moderately intelligent, one can easily graduate with a 4.0+ grades without having to crack open many textbooks or spend serious study time…..if they had to at all.  Of course, most ended up paying for that when they start undergrad and find that they cannot get away with those habits in college as much. 

A few older upper/upper-middle class older cousins who attended some of the best boarding schools in the nation(including President Obama’s alma mater) ended up struggling even at third tier universities for some reason after breezing through their high school academic experiences. 

This is one of the reasons why I tend to be quite skeptical of anyone who brags about their high school academic performance, especially after graduating high school.

jennygadget:

a bedroom of one’s own is not necessary for jilling off

Not to get all language police, but you complain about “peeping tom” being dismissive and yet you write “jilling off”? That always sounds to me like something less real, somehow, than the spear counterpart, and heaven knows female sexuality gets enough of that already.

I agree with you on “peeping tom,” though. And “stalker” is so misused that it also sounds dismissive by now.

Hershele, “jilling off” is usually anything but dismissive. It came into being, I think, as a way to explicitly acknowledge that masturbating is a female activity as well as a male one.

“That always sounds to me like something less real, somehow, than the spear counterpart, and heaven knows female sexuality gets enough of that already.”

Really?  Why? and wtf?: “the spear counterpart”

It always seemed to me to make perfect sense.  And really, what else is one left with?  Jacking off feels so wrong I don’t even have words for how wrong it feels to says that about anything I do.  And masturbating is just too damn clinical sounding for some conversations.  Which, I think, in turn contributes more to the feeling less real than “jilling” does.  As if female masturbation is something people only discuss in the abstract.

I suppose the ideal term would be parallel to one used of men but not derivative of one used of men (as “jilling off” strikes me). I have no problem using the same term regardless of the shape of the bits involved, provided the term isn’t about the shape of the bits involved; that’s parallel, so it doesn’t suggest an entirely different activity. “Diddling,” perhaps. You’re right that clinical terms, particularly used skew, are worse.

And yeah, “male version” would have been a better word choice on my part. Sorry.