Teen-Demon Tracts

Why baby-boomer parents fear their children.

Chris Lehmann from the February 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

More often, though, Apter proceeds by the more familiar, if no less insidious, logic of obsessive self-reference. Gently part the veils of most young adult malaise -- be it career or money trouble, marital-cum-relationship strife, depression, or suicidal feelings -- and there, majestically, is the calm deliverance of parental love, a magically intact All Powerful Oz. Even hostility or resentment explicitly directed at one's parents is really a masked plea for more nurturance: "Parents often respond to constant criticism of what they do and what they say as a form of rejection," she counsels. "But young people want to feel their parents' involvement. Quarrels are a way of soliciting a parent's help in being centred. They involve a plea for acknowledgment of feelings....It would be an enormous help to look on these quarrels in a new light, to take new pride in their battles, to feel more positive about the contributions they are making to a young person's development."

This prodigious cognitive bait-and-switch -- whereby statements of dissent and criticism become cry-for-help speech-acts signifying the diametrically opposite point -- contrasts sharply with Apter's de rigueur tour of pop culture, that shape-shifting, omnipotent, seductive force that reduces young brains to bare functionalist rubble. Plunge these complex, parent-longing souls into the giddy ferment of celebrity culture and they suddenly become quite distressingly uncomplicated. "The lives younger people compare theirs to are not the lives of people they sit next to in church, on the train, in the office," Apter writes, donning the well-worn hairshirt of the moral scold, "but rather those that they read about or watch on television....Awareness of these distant and idealized figures sets up comparisons that leave [some young people] feeling unimportant and left out of the first rank of human beings."

Got that? Young adults transmit secret messages of desperately longed-for submission beneath their consciously expressed frustrations and resentments, but can't be counted on to grok that media celebrities are not, you know, real. It's actually this very sort of psychic profile -- a weak, decentered self, sporadically awash in the superluminary thrills of mass spectacle -- that forms the nexus of what that arch-disciplinarian Theodor Adorno termed the authoritarian personality. Lest you think this a rhetorical exaggeration, consider the curious cult of parental personality that Apter urges on the confused young adult: "Thresholders often have an epiphany about a parent that forever changes their perspective. Suddenly the complaints and recriminations that formed the repertoire of teenage conversation ('She always wanted me to be something I'm not' or 'She never listened when I said what I wanted') dissolve into thin air, and a young adult is left staring at the simple, dazzling love a parent has always had." The tableau furnished by this life-transforming "epiphany" is discomfittingly close to that experienced by a raw Party recruit before the towering authority of a Great Leader; we should remember, in the face of such self-flattering cant, that the final horror of Nineteen Eighty-Four was that Winston Smith loved Big Brother.

Actual maturity, on the other hand, proceeds along the bumpier, conflict-ridden path of testing such authority -- even when doing so incurs new psychic costs, financial hardships, or blows to one's cherished self-esteem. These are the rather unexceptional trials awaiting any inchoate self making the acquaintance of a basically indifferent world; one of the first, unforgettable lessons of maturity is that, far from redounding to your own needful child-self or your parents' "simple, dazzling love," the cosmic order of things proceeds with little concern for your well-being. Only a generation as terminally solipsistic as Apter's could cast itself as saviors in this situation -- or deride both the idea of maturity and the notion of the spoiled child as a "myth." The not-so-hidden message beneath these pronouncements is just as troubling as Apter's calmly polemic vision of arrested development as the norm, nay the desideratum, of young adult experience: a transparently hysterical rejection of the maturity of the boomers' children as an augur of the boomers' mortality or (worse, from their perspective) their own historical obsolescence.

Yet for truly rudderless, kitchen-sink hysteria, drunk on its own unassailable righteousness, it's hard to beat James Garbarino and Claire Bedard's Parents Under Siege: Why You Are the Solution, Not the Problem, in Your Child's Life. Garbarino and Bedard, proprietors of Cornell University's Family Life Development Center and partners in what can only be one of the most jittery and suggestible marriages on the planet, dutifully hit most of the key points of dial-a-scare bombast that fuel the long-running culture war on American kids: the glib treatment of pathology as the governing model of youthful behavior; the lurid demonization of all pop culture, video games, and the Internet (or, in the authors' preferred shorthand for all of the above, "the dark side"); the purely anecdotal tales of teen misconduct (lacking even the notional honesty of a researcher like Apter, they don't even appear to have spoken with any actual teens here); and of course the steadfast conviction, conveyed in their subtitle, that parents, in their grandiose moral serenity, possess in their very persons the stirringly simple solution to all this fictively skyrocketing pathology and anarchy.

Like every other contemporary teen-demon tract, Parents Under Siege is empirically challenged. Garbarino and Bedard's laundry list of phony behavioral epidemics is even more cursory than Apter's: "The 1990s threatened the American Dream of Parenting as never before," they announce in typically grammatical unrestraint. "The problems surrounding our children and youth became increasingly more serious: rising suicide rates, drug abuse, explosive youth crime and increasing rates of depression." None of these charges is specified to any age group or region or income level. None of it is sourced, for the simple reason that, as Mike Males has tirelessly demonstrated, none of it is true.

Indeed, quite tellingly, Garbarino and Bedard's only mild concession to evidence is a citation of a 1999 USA Today poll of American parents. The authors report in all due shock that a resounding 90 percent of this poll sample, when asked whether raising kids to be "good people" was more difficult now than it was 20 years earlier, replied yes. Never mind, of course, that 20 years past the respondents themselves were either in their teens or recently departed from them, and that the effective brunt of this particular question was, "Were you successfully raised as a good person?" The faint whiff of hysteria has been serviceably raised, so we're off and running.

Why fuss over numbers, in any event, when Garbarino and Bedard can speak with utmost authority on the most solemn phrase in the whole kid-baiting catechism: "post-Littleton"? As they rather breathlessly inform their readers, Garbarino published his last jaunt through the adolescent "dark side," Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them, on April 20, 1999, the day of the Littleton massacre. Eventually, the family of Littleton shooter Dylan Klebold came to them for assistance; for these boomer parents, this is equivalent to having been at Woodstock, and the authors are certainly not above milking it for all it's worth.

Parents Under Siege is, indeed, dedicated to "Tom, Sue, and Byron Klebold and....all the families who have lost children." The book's preface opens by announcing, in an outburst of weirdly pornographic nonsense worthy of Alfred Jarry, "On April 20, 1999, the world of American parenting changed forever....That day, as never before, parents learned that their kids could begin their day normally, as just kids going off on the bus, but end it shattered -- physically or psychologically -- or dead."

There's something more than a little shameless in such flourishes. Indeed, the authors demonstrate a taste for the lurid and the shocking that rivals that of any trenchcoated, Goth-addled teen. They recount in extended detail, on two separate occasions, a horrifying episode in which a 7-year-old Chicago child was gunned down by a gangster as he left his parents' supervision and walked the 75 feet to his school doorway, where his teachers were waiting to escort him. (Never mind that the episode occurred in 1992, or that their context-free account, in any time frame, tells us precisely nothing about the state of present-day parenting or teens: It's a frightening story, and will command the rapt attention of anxious parents.)

They also reprint an entire extended e-mail report, running five pages in Parents Under Siege, from a mother whose middle-school child was being stalked by a classmate who kept an obsessive log of his activities and reportedly maintained a Web site called "Ten Ways to Kill Tyrone M." They also see fit to make repeated reference to this episode, as evidence of rapidly spreading (and Internet-enabled!) social predation among teens. Of course, they are compelled to acknowledge, in passing, that no authorities managed to find the alleged inflammatory Web site, but you get the idea: Kids are scary!

And those computers! Most of the time, the mere existence of the Internet seems intolerable to these culture marms. They repeatedly recount the horrifying revelation that Whitehouse.com is a gateway to a softcore porn site. Beside themselves over the Net's continual overtures to the culture's "dark side," they offer up this thumbnail account of how things have changed: "Thirty years ago, if you were the most alienated kid on your block...you would have a hard time finding other kids like yourself. As a result, there was a pull back to the mainstream, the normalizing influence of social support. But now? Today you can log on to any number of Web sites and chat rooms and find validation for your alienation, your rage, and your antisocial fantasies. How about logging onto alienation.com? It's a real site we visited in an effort to see just how bad things are. They are that bad."

Set aside, for argument's sake, the fact that 25 years ago, I was the most alienated kid on my block, and I had no trouble whatsoever finding others like me, seeking out crude music, being titillated with popcult prurience, skipping school, and worse. (And rest assured that this was not because of any especially energetic effort on my part, since I was also spending much of my time getting high.) Set aside, as well, the small epistemological difficulty that once you have your alienation and antisocial fantasies "validated" by other alienated souls, they pretty much, by definition, cease to exist, at least in their most painful forms. Even set aside the consideration that seeking something out "in an effort to see just how bad things are" is not exactly a preferred model of social scientific inquiry.

Consider instead the shudder-inducing site Alienation.com, whose name alone apparently has the talismanic power to summon forth visions of endlessly indulged evil teen impulses. Garbarino and Bedard may have "visited" Alienation.com, but they clearly didn't stay long enough to read the thing. Log onto it and you will be greeted by a posse of blue-tinted spirit-beings, cross-legged and meditating around an orb suspended at eye-level. This, evidently, is an iconic representation of the seekers invited to share their all-too-literal reveries of alienation: "spiritual people whose interests may include new age spirituality, channeling, reincarnation, 4th density, 3rd density, paranormal, metaphysical, altered states of consciousness, spirits, inspiration, psychic ability, prophecies, revelations, spiritual growth, and possibly alien interests such as abductions, ETs, extraterrestrials, ufos, sightings, star child, and starpeople." In other words, not a baggy-trousered or Goth-addled teen in sight -- unless, of course, you count the star children.

There's a very particular irony to this clumsy oversight (in addition, that is, to the troubling one of a pair of self-styled researchers in a prestigious Ivy League school not bothering to deploy their own powers of literacy). All of the pseudoclinical forays into alleged teen ghastliness in Parents Under Siege are set quite didactically in relief beside the authors' serene Buddhist spiritual pretensions. Garbarino and Bedard have much more in common with the keepers of Alienation.com than they would ever imagine: It seems that they spent two weeks in a workshop with the Dalai Lama, and are deeply impressed with the notion of applying the Buddhist principle of "mindfulness" to the rounds of parenting and family life. This is one of the less objectionable detours in Parents Under Siege, though it does inspire a certain inadvertent sympathy for the Dalai Lama, who, Lord knows, has troubles enough of his own.

Yet you desperately wish, across the many alarmist pages of Parents Under Siege, The Maturity Myth, and their many literary cousins, that there was a different sort of "mindfulness" at work on behalf of younger Americans. Teens and young adults do have legitimate troubles, after all, but most of them have more to do with the behavior of the adults in their world. In addition to child poverty, two of the most salient "risk factors" that can determine teen maladjustment -- child abuse and divorce -- show no signs of a long-term downturn.

For all the hysteria over schoolyard shootings and the death-dealing culture of Goth rock and video games, 16 school-age victims were killed in violent crime incidents (including suicides, and one victim of something called "Fragile X Syndrome") on or near schools over the 2000�2001 academic year; 19 violent deaths, including suicides, occurred on or near school grounds the year before. Meanwhile, abusive adults still kill children at the remarkably high rate of five fatalities a day -- and even so, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found in 1999 that deaths stemming from child abuse were being underreported by an estimated rate of 60 percent. A curious time, all in all, for Garbarino and Bedard to insist that the "socially toxic environment" of North America mandates that kids be subject to "more rather than less adult supervision, more rather than less intensive parenting, to reduce susceptibility to negative peer influences, to negative mass media influences, to the low self-esteem generated at school." To quote a non-Buddhist homily, charity begins at home.

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