The troubled-teen trap

Ragging on teenagers has become a sanctioned sport of late, with some of the most aggressive bashing coming from an unlikely sector -- the middle and upper-middle classes, who are proving the Beatles right. Money can’t buy our kids love. Privileged parents too often seem to regard their adolescent offspring as though they were holdings in the family stock portfolio: Either they perform or they’re out.

For the last several years, the trend among the well-to-do has been to blame the teenager. Gone are the warm and fuzzy days of the early 1990s when we talked about how best to build our daughters’ self-esteem and encourage our sons’ empathy. Those fairly civilized concerns were eclipsed by the 1999 Columbine school shootings in Colorado and a rash of books in 2002 that took girls to task for almost everything. Forget nurturing; boys were murderers and girls were murderous, and a parent’s best hope was merely to survive until they left home.

After all we’d done for them, we were not entirely pleased with our adolescent children.

Now comes Elliott Currie, author and UC Irvine professor of criminology, law and society, who wants to turn the tables; his energetic condemnation of parents and members of the helping professions may single-handedly lure the nation’s teens back to reading, so relieved will they be to see someone else taking the rap.

The thesis of his “The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence” is that our children did not spring full-blown from the elbow of some alien monster sent to Earth to drive parents toward a collective nervous breakdown. No, Currie reminds us that these are our kids, our DNA, products of home environments we created. He would like to lay blame at the well-shod feet of parents, many of whom are not doing a very good job.

We’ve gotten off easy for years, taking refuge in the irresponsible notion that teenage drug addiction, drunk driving and careless sex are things that impossibly bad or misguided children decide to do in a vacuum. Currie sees such behavior instead as an inflamed response to an uncaring universe. In somewhat jargon-y prose, he defines four categories of parental travesty: the inversion of responsibility, the problem of contingent worth, the intolerance of transgression and the rejection of nurturance.

Loosely translated, he thinks that today’s middle-class parents make the following mistakes:

We expect our kids to grow up too fast, either because we don’t have time to be responsible parents or, worse, because we’re too distracted by our own activities. Our children may be barely into puberty, but they ought to act like adults. We give them things instead of companionship, as though an iPod, a laptop and a new car were enough to make any child happy and well-behaved.

We define “good enough” too narrowly, which may sound familiar to any parent who thinks that the only good university is an Ivy League one. It’s an unfortunately understandable urge: Baby boomers know too well what it’s like to be part of a population blip, facing competition for everything from college admission to Social Security dollars, and we want to make sure our kids, as members of the new boomlet, will have an advantage. We’re old enough to know that life isn’t fair, yet we scramble for the quantifiable edge in amusing ways; some parents hold their children back from kindergarten out of genuine concern for their developmental readiness, but others do it as part of a long-term strategy for success, figuring that the extra year’s maturity will translate into better grades. Life is measured in hits and misses, making it far too easy for our children to feel like failures.

We set equally out-of-reach standards of personal behavior; for too many parents, there are no misdemeanors, only felonies.

We frequently punish by turning our backs -- by denying troubled children the very support and affection they probably need. New research shows that the part of the brain that craves adventure matures before the part that exerts judgment, that children are to some extent held hostage by physiology. True, not all kids behave the way Currie’s subjects do -- in fact, most of them don’t -- but parents who reject their difficult children fail to recognize that the kids often feel out of control and want a guiding hand.

The middle class may be able to provide all the trappings of the good life, but the shell, Currie says, is fairly empty.

He extends his indictment of adults to condemn members of the helping professions for everything from overmedicating to over-diagnosis. Not every kid who has a sullen afternoon requires professional help, he says -- unless, of course, the parents want a quick fix.

It’s a provocative idea, and a troubling one. Currie based his findings on interviews with what can only be called white kids in trouble -- an array of thrill-seeking druggies and drinkers who make “The Lost Weekend” look like a drawing-room comedy. One girl reminisces about a drug-induced evening when “[t]his one guy was threatening to kill me with a screwdriver in my face if I didn’t have sex with him....” But the common denominators, in story after story, are parents who are quick to distance themselves from their floundering children; parents who manage to rationalize -- even glorify -- their tough-love decisions, even though it means their kids are sleeping in cars or hanging out with people who share their particular addiction.

The adolescents who talked to Currie speak time and again of absent parents who respond to escalating problems by cutting ties to their children, which makes me wonder: Did these people think they had struck a special deal with God to provide them with easy kids or they’d get to quit their parenting job?

I understand that those of us who debate only which prom dress to buy or whether to bend the no-TV-on-a-school-night rule have no idea what these parents have endured, nor do we know what we’d do in their weary shoes. But Currie takes them to task, so the question is not how they could have behaved better but whether they and their support teams have, in fact, failed.

That’s where the author gets into trouble: The limitation to sweeping social theory is that it often doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Currie takes therapeutic institutions to task for their “thin and impatient commitment” to young patients -- although he acknowledges that “[s]ome of the problem ... had to do with the absence of sufficient resources to take on the more difficult cases in a serious or long-term way.” But because he isn’t writing a book about federal budget priorities, he quickly returns to his thesis, that “there was more to it than resources alone.”

Surely true -- but summarily dismissing the significance of slashed social program budgets by several presidential administrations betrays a rigidity of thought. Who knows what kinds of help we might still be able to offer the walking wounded, in all age groups, if support programs had not fallen under the budgetary ax time and time again? Currie goes most of the way when he exhorts parents and therapists to alter their approach; the rest of the equation requires the sort of renewed interest in a social agenda that we are unlikely to see as the federal budget deficit approaches the stratosphere.

The shortcoming of Currie’s book, ironically, is what gives it narrative strength: He sticks close to his subjects, whose lives have been so horrific as to almost defy belief. They testify, with born-again zeal, to lives ripped not from the headlines but from the pages of the Bartender’s Guide and the Physician’s Desk Reference. A kid who uses heroin is too young to drive; another consumes incomprehensible amounts of liquor; there’s the death-defying driver, the thief, the crank and crack users. Their parents aren’t much as role models, even though they have all the material comforts that are supposed to buy happiness. Or maybe that’s the point: Having purchased the American dream, they intend to live it. If the kids can’t get with the program, their parents dump them on the street, lock them out of the house, turn their backs in all sorts of creative ways.

But Currie is too quick to draw sweeping conclusions from a bad-apple sampling. In fact, “The Road to Whatever” is the latest in a string of books that pre-select the bad kids and then imply that teen alienation is a global issue. It doesn’t work, on two crucial levels. First, it isolates decent kids whose greatest crime is to be in thrall to surging hormones, kids who might respond to the generous understanding Currie prescribes if they weren’t so tired of adults categorizing them as a general pain in the neck. Second, it gives the parents of those fairly reasonable kids a comfy place to hide, called Denial. Their kids aren’t as bad as the ones portrayed in these pages -- so by extension, they must not be as bad as the parents they’re reading about. No need to work on their act.

Yet it is the vast majority of adolescents, the ones whose antics are more likely to lead to gray hair than to 911 calls, who deserve more attention and respect than they’re getting. “The Road to Whatever” is a much-needed slap in the face for parents whose kids are way over the edge -- but its most important message, hidden under the hyperbolic surface, is that all of us need to remember that parenting is a life’s work. It has its challenges. Checking out is not an option. *

*

From The Road to Whatever

B.J. went into drug rehab for a few weeks but started using again even before she left the program. Yet her mother continued to persuade herself that nothing was the matter: “She did the denial thing again. Like ... ‘She didn’t smell like pot when she came home. Her eyes were not dilated.’ You know?” When further denial became impossible, her mother kicked her out of the house for the weekend:

“[S]he finalIy said, ‘You know what? This is gonna stop.’ And I went out the next night and ... I don’t remember what drugs I did.