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Editor’s
note: In the second part of Maternal Truths,
published in last week’s weekend issue, the author
reflected on the tightrope parents walk between honesty
and overconfiding with regards to their children. In
this third and concluding installment of the series, the
author consults with experts on the matter.
THE CDC,
which gathers data about risky behavior by teenagers,
pointed out the percent of high schoolers who have had
sex also declined, from 54 percent in 1991 to 47 percent
in 2005. A Child Trends report points out that teenage
smoking, pregnancy and violence also have declined,
noting that most “American adolescents are
psychologically, socially and physically healthy” and
that “parent-child interactions and bonding greatly
influence adolescents’ choices and attitudes.”
This is
heartening news. It also means that many mothers today
are in the odd position of having been more experimental
than their own sons and daughters. Which introduces
another quandary. I talked to two mothers of
high-school-aged daughters, both of whom worry,
sometimes, that their daughters are too straight, and
too intense, and too stressed. The young women are
acutely aware that getting to college is more
competitive than ever, and that life just seems, for
many, a relentlessly serious endeavor. “Loosen up!” one
of these mothers said she wants to tell her daughter.
“Try some drugs!” She was kidding, but only partly. She
does wish her daughter would relax, step out and go to
more parties.
“It
feels so much more polarized now,” said this woman, who
went to college with me. At her daughter’s high school,
she senses, “either people get totally in trouble or
they are totally straight arrows. I was a middle
person—when I was growing up the goody-two-shoes were
small in number, but so were the crazy people. The
distribution of the curve has widened.” Part of this may
have to do with all the consciousness-raising,
zero-tolerance policies and other measures we ourselves
have helped put into place. “The culture now has a
no-false-steps quality to it,” the second mother
observed.
This
seems to be true even for very young children. I was
chatting with Jeff Steele, who helps run D.C. Urban Moms
and Dads, and he pointed out that when his young son got
sent to the principal’s office for some minor
infraction, the child came home convinced his life was
over. “It became apparent that he had the mindset that
this was a... failure that he would never recover from.”
So Steele, who, as a kid, had a smart mouth that
sometimes got him into fights, “mentioned that I went to
the principal’s office a lot of times—he’s only in
second grade, and I had visits all the way through grade
school—and I think what he took away: First, he was
really shocked that I would ever have done that, and
then it did make him feel better.”
It’s
important for us superserious parents to remember that
kids transgress and, when they do, that might be a good
time to console them with one’s own missteps. “Kids mess
up,” reminded Jennifer Manlove, a senior research
associate at Child Trends. “They get into situations
that they’re not able to handle.” In those cases—when
the horse is out of the barn—it could be merciful and
humanizing for a mom to acknowledge that she, too, once
made a fool of herself over a boy, or even vomited out a
car window.
For the
most part, though—let’s face it—anything we did occurred
so long ago that it wasn’t really us who did it. Witness
my stripper friend who, after an hour or so, said she’d
better be getting home. One glass of wine was more than
enough, and there was—as there always is—homework to
supervise, dishes to wash, laundry to fold.
Our
children study us so intently. They notice every facial
expression, mostly to determine if we are cranky or if
they are in trouble. They know us so well, and yet
there’s a part of us they’ll never have access to,
because the truth is, these days, it hardly exists.
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