Cathie Looney

Teens have more power than discipline, more weapons than shields. They demand more respect from their parents and show them less. At this stage in their lives they are making more decisions and taking fewer orders. The term “teenager” is believed to have been coined in1941when it appeared in print in an article in Popular Science Monthly.

When parents lament that today’s children “grow up too fast”, it is worth asking “Compared with when?” For centuries, children were valued more for their economic than emotional contribution to family life. As late as 1708 in Britain, a child of 7 could be hanged for stealing, and some of the most dangerous factory jobs could be performed only by children because of their size. The whole idea of adolescence as a period of turmoil and rebellion, historians note, could take root only once children were safe from the fields and factories and were growing up in a sheltered setting.

Childhood used to end more abruptly than it does now. The biggest year for teenage births in U.S. history was 1957---not because of some epidemic of premarital sex but because the median age for marriage was 20, and many brides were teenagers. A 13-year-old leafing through the pages of Seventeen Magazine in the mid-1950s would have been paging through ads for furniture because she reasonably expected to be married and starting a family within a few years. So while today’s 13-year-olds are exposed to “adult” images earlier, they often delay actual adult experiences and responsibilities until much later than their parents and grandparents did.

Today parents are obsessed with worry and are powered by fear. They worry in whole new ways about kids of this age and wonder if their moral moorings will protect them from gusting temptation. 


These are the parents that grew up largely ignorant of car seats, bike helmets, antibacterial soaps and childproof locks and who certainly misbehaved in far greater numbers than today’s teens. Today’s 13-year-olds are less likely to smoke, drink, do drugs, get pregnant, commit a crime or drop out of school than those of their parents’ generation of the 1970s. The birthrate for girls under 14 has been cut in half since 1953 and alcohol and drug use in down for teens and up for the “Baby Boomers”. But that record does not prevent every new generation of parents from fearing the worst. We seem to have moved, without skipping a beat, from blaming our parents for the ills of society to blaming our children. We want them to embody virtues we only rarely practice. We want them to avoid habits we’ve never managed to break. We want to lecture but rarely change our own habits.

Yes, children are growing up faster physically. For the girls, the age of menses has dropped and as for boys they are reaching their adult heights at younger ages. The kids today are introduced to adult material earlier and are more connected to the outside world than ever before. But before we despair about the models kids absorb from the culture, parents can take heart from the fact that teens report that their relationship with their parents is excellent. Teens also report that however grown up they wish to appear, they don’t yet want to act the way they look. Even as kids are exposed to more adult messages, they seem to be acting on them less. For example, in a PEOPLE/NBC NEWS poll of teens, conducted in 2006, found that 12% of 13-and 14-year-olds said they’d had oral sex, but three times that many admitted they didn’t know what oral sex was.

Anne Frank wrote in her diary in 1944, “Parents can only advise their children or point them in the right direction. Ultimately people shape their own characters.”

Today’s teens, growing up in a world more connected, more competitive, more complex than the one their parents had to navigate as kids, so far show every sign of rising to the challenge. I am worried about the parents. We have the most highly educated mommy force ever. When it comes time to have children many career-oriented women still end up putting their career on the backburner and their children on the front. It should be documented at this point that the mother always takes the lead in the parenting department and “if mama is not happy, no one is happy’. Dads are following the Moms----they bring the same work ethic to parenting as they once did or do to their career; they are willing to work long, hard hours, they are ambitious and competitive, and they have a desire for accomplishment, control and results. Parents become competitive and create this never-ending spin cycle of “have-tos” try to keep up with all those parents who negotiate with the soccer coach, challenge poor grades, wait in line all weekend to sign up for a certain ballet or music class. By our actions we tell our children that being their parent is a drag and we are powered by fear, self-doubt and conformity, all the things we are supposed to teach them to overcome.

Parents have bought into the false notion that they can and should control all aspects of child-rearing from conception to the child’s post-doctoral work. We have made parenting so complicated. We complicated parenting beyond what most of us think we can handle. When anything becomes this complicated, we become uncertain. Uncertainty leads to anxiety and anxiety leads to fear. Fear is the stuff over-parenting is made of. Parents are over-parenting out of fear and the children as well as the parents suffer.

Parents are even worked up about which preschool their child gets into. They see it as a very competitive world and they introduce this to their children right away. By the time the children are ready to try to get into college the parental anxiety---as well as the child’s----is often out of control.

In our society a child’s success in school has become emblematic of your success as a parent. In other words, a Harvard decal on the back of your Hummer is a stellar performance review. While over-anxious parenting may make us feel better in the short-term, there are long-term consequences. Over-anxious parents raise emotionally fragile kids---kids who can’t stand on their own. They don’t know how to make sound decisions, work with difficult people and they aren’t equipped to deal with failure and frustration. The over-parented children are at a higher risk for anxiety and depression.

Relax, parents. Calm down and enjoy your children. Use humor and remember when. Take the pressure off yourself and allow your child to learn as much on his own as possible. What you do for your child, your child will never be able to do on his own. Love your child, not be your child. Love them more and give them less. Allow them to fail, experience frustration and negotiate his or her own way in school and life---suffering consequences and reaping the benefits---it is not only wise, it’s essential.

One of our hardest tasks as parents is to stand by and watch our kids experience frustration and failure, but it’s one of our most important tasks as well. Protecting your child from disappointment creates an incompetent child. It stops him from developing the skills necessary to overcome life’s natural challenges. It’s by facing, and sometimes being defeated by, these challenges and through the lessons we learn from our disappointments that forge our character, or beliefs, and our ability to be in meaningful relationships with others. If you don’t learn how to struggle, then you leave as soon as it gets hard. You leave a job, you leave a relationship. Parents who overprotect their children also send them the implicit message that they aren’t capable of handling these challenges, which in turn teaches children to be helpless.

When your child is little your job is to comfort him---to kiss is boo-boos. When your child gets older your job is to validate and affirm his experience and his pain. You’ll encourage him to face fears and difficulties by showing him that you have confidence he can do it. Your job is to be there every step of the way as he does it on his own.

Know where you end and your child begins. Researchers found that parents who base their self-worth on their children’s accomplishments have worse mental health than those who base their self-worth on other factors. Over involved parents report more sadness, crying and negative beliefs about themselves and less joy, contentment, and life satisfaction. There is no upside. Parents whose children did well showed no improvement in well-being. Instead, they continued to score lower than the other parents on measures of mental health. Apparently the ever present threat of a child’s failure looms so large that it blots out the joy over successes.

All parents feel bad when their children don’t do well, but over-involved parents feel bad about themselves.

Signs you are over-involved:

· You get a case of the blues when your child doesn’t perform at expected levels and you can’t shake it.

· You begin sentences about your child’s endeavors with “we”. “We have a test tomorrow.” “We have a game tonight.” “We are applying to college.”

· Preoccupation with the details of a child’s activities, practices, schedules and performances.

· Other spectators stare at you when you yell from the sidelines at your child’s game.