|
Her Parents Look
at Her As a Problem
(By David L. Marcus)
Dave@DaveMarucus.com
[David
L. Marcus, an Education Correspondent for U.S. News and
World Report, is on leave to write a book about adolescents
in trouble. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University,
he is now a Research Associate at Smith College. More
Information]
Who cares about a few spoiled kids getting into a jam
with Mummy and Daddy’s credit cards? That’s what I thought when an
editor at U.S. News & World Report asked me to write an
article about boarding schools for adolescents struggling with drugs,
alcohol, and other problems. It would be an understatement to say that
I was skeptical. I knew from my days as a teenager at a suburban New
York public school that troubled teens have been around as long
as there have been teens. Back then, in the 1970’s, drinking, pot smoking,
and careless driving - or a dangerous combination of all three - were
fairly common pastimes. Really, how much worse could things be now?
My initial research surprised me. There are at least two dozen so-called
therapeutic boarding schools, and several are so deluged with applications
that they reject most prospective students. From the outside, the schools
look like Spartan versions of traditional boarding schools,
but their daily schedules are packed with therapy and behavioral modification
exercises. After interviewing educational consultants, parents, and
graduates of the programs, I decided to visit the Academy at Swift
River, a school in the hills of western Massachusetts. Swift
River interested me because it starts with a wilderness program on
the 630-acre campus and concludes fourteen months later with a service-learning
project in Costa Rica. In addition, it is owned by a for-profit
company, which raises questions about who is treating our teenagers.
After my U.S. News article appeared in fall 2000, teachers, parents,
and even high school students called to talk about the difficulty of
raising, or being, a teenager. I started to sense there was a vast
subculture around us - in basements, in school cafeterias, and in malls
- that most adults didn’t fathom. Things are changing so fast that
one of the best books around, A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the
Heart of American Adolescence, is already outdated. The author
delved into the teenage tribe in prosperous Virginia suburbs,
but she doesn’t even mention Internet addictions, something that is
increasingly worrying parents.
I decided to take a leave from my job to write a book about teenagers
in twenty-first century America. Last summer, I returned to
Swift River to observe a group of fifteen students in the wilderness
camp. Since then, I’ve joined them in group therapy and classes, wiffleball
games, and careening down icy slopes on sleds. I spent five or six
days a week at the school, and I’ve met the parents of the fifteen
kids. Twenty years of journalism had trained me to be fairly dispassionate
in war zones and cities torn up by earthquakes and hurricanes, but
it’s not easy being detached on this project. I like these kids - they’re
witty and sensitive; they can be savvy and naïve at the same time.
Quite a few are also lucky they’re alive.
Sometimes it seems like teens are floating along, oblivious to everything
as they wait for the next feeding, or the weekend, or spring break.
But the kids are keen observers. Get them talking - about their parents’
relationships, burned out middle school teachers, social-climbing neighbors
- and you’ll be in a seminar with some truly insightful anthropologists.
While volunteering as a teacher at Swift River, I’ve asked students
to write about friends back home who are floundering. They’ve channeled
their fears into heart-wrenching essays. One student succinctly got
to the heart of the matter when describing his heroin-abusing ex-girlfriend:
“Her parents and teachers look at her as a problem, not as someone
who can be helped.”
Often, hearing the summaries of troublemakers being sent to Swift River,
I expected to see knife-wielding ogres. But the old saw held true:
these aren’t bad kids, they’re kids who behaved badly. I spent time
with a seventeen year-old whose grades plunged as he took ecstasy and
made the rounds of late-night rave parties. Only after I’d known him
for four months did I hear him play an incredible riff on the piano.
Who, I asked, was the composer? “Oh, I wrote that,” he said. While
hiking with another boy, I learned that he had hacked a telephone company
computer, then turned off the switchboard of a municipal police station.
I kept thinking it was too bad that someone hadn’t found a way to encourage
him to use his computer skills productively.
Every few weeks I bring my own rambunctious children, ages two and
five, to Swift River campus. I marvel when I watch them drawing or
pretending to play Monopoly with the teenagers - teenagers who
have committed credit card fraud, hocked the family jewelry, abused
every drug imaginable, and even hit their parents. Not long ago, a
fourteen-year-old who was no angel back home calmly explained to rebel-with-a-stuffed-rabbit
son why it’s important to obey rules. My son was transfixed. And I
wondered about the way we Americans segregate the different generations.
Wouldn’t it be smart to insist that teens read regularly to toddlers
at day-care centers near high schools, or help build playground equipment,
or do something to either inspire little kids or pay back old folks?
(Oh, how naïve! I’ve been told that would create all kinds of insurance
and liability issues. I guess we ought to forgo creative problem solving
and simply let teens live in their own world.)
Swift River, like other therapeutic boarding schools, starts by removing
kids from their wheeling-and-dealing friends, impersonal high schools,
or tension-filled homes. The school has dozens of rules, beginning
with the three fundamentals: no sex, no drugs, no violence. The kids
don’t have access to e-mail, video games, cell phones, pagers, or other
gadgets that American adolescents take for granted. It’s no coincidence
that when the school launched a literary magazine it was called Fourteen
Months without Cable. No one is locked in the school, so several times
a year someone decides to run away - though, in a region of dairy farms,
there’s not a lot to run to.
Friends who hear about my project often wonder whether it’s worth generalizing
about all American teenagers from the experiences of the relatively
small number who get into serious trouble. Besides, some people ask,
aren’t most teens doing fine in school, thriving in after school clubs
or pouring their energy into sports? Despite all these months of immersion
in the world of teenagers, I am still far from an expert. But I can
say that many teens are trying to cope with depression, learning differences,
academic pressures, sexual identity issues, and family situations that
are dysfunctional or down right dangerous. Given the chance to take
hard drugs, misuse prescription pills, or get into relationships with
older predatory partners, the kids at Swift River made the wrong choices.
We can learn from their mistakes.
I’ve heard another objection to my project: therapeutic boarding schools
are beyond the reach of many teenagers. Fourteen months at Swift River
cost about $80,000, far more than the same amount of time at Harvard.
Still, not all the families are wealthy: many parents take out second
mortgages or deplete college savings to pay for what seems to be the
last chance to save their teenage children from self-destructive behavior.
An expensive, for-profit treatment program offers examples of what
parents and public schools with limited budgets can try. Some features
of therapeutic boarding schools are quite basic: providing students
with structure, clear and strict rules, role models of peers who have
over come problems, plenty of contact with adults, and a chance to
appreciate the wilderness.
I’m still trying to figure out why things go awry for a considerable
number of teenagers. A few scholars blame “affluenza”: this generation
simply has too much money and freedom. But that doesn’t explain why
some teens repeatedly risk their own lives or imperil others as their
siblings and best friends cruise through adolescence unscathed. There’s
a theory that today’s college-educated parents have such high hopes
for their kids that many boys and girls - such as those with learning
disabilities or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder - simply feel
they can’t make the cut. As the kids’ self-esteem craters, they find
outlets for their frustrations. The same goes for adopted kids, whose
sense of isolation and abandonment heightens just as normal adolescent
angst hits.
I’m dismayed by the way many of my old colleagues denounce the parents
of these teenagers with vehemence - vitriol, really. Never mind that
they have never met the parents and know nothing about them. I call
it BtB, Blame the Boomers. There’s an assumption that anyone
who was born in the two decades after World War II is impulsive,
self-involved, and career-obsessed. Come to think of it, that pretty
accurately describes me, but it doesn’t mean I’m a lousy father. It’s
true that many Baby Boom parents harm their kids by failing to establish
boundaries, but sometimes the opposite is true: parents put up too
many boundaries, thus overprotecting their kids and denying them a
chance to make errors.
I don’t deny that some people make rotten parents: they disappear and
abandon their children for years, or they treat their kids as trophies
to be trundled out for social gatherings. Still, I’m not ready to condemn
a whole generation. Many of the Swift River parents toiled at stressful
jobs to pay for good schools, music lessons, and summer vacations.
Several thought they were doing the right thing by moving to tranquil,
far-out suburbs and enduring long commutes, spending hours and hours
away from the very children they were trying to help. Quite a few mothers
and fathers never experienced good parenting themselves, or they suffered
from depression or anxiety disorders. Maybe they were reeling from
financial setbacks or layoffs. In their own mudding ways, they did
their best for their children.
So although I don’t have the answers yet, I can share the following
observations.
It’s more difficult to be a teenager now than a generation ago. I
know, it wasn’t a picnic being a fifteen-year-old in the 1950s or the
1960s, but kids in the twenty-first century face a more complicated
world. Not long ago, public high school teachers worried about gum
chewing and cutting in line. Now they fret about guns, bombs, suicide,
and rape. Thanks in part to the proliferation of television channels
and Web sites and the last economic boom, teenagers have more temptations
- and they all hit at an earlier age. Parents who faced the choice
of whether or not to smoke pot in eleventh grade now have to deal with
kids who see cocaine and methamphetamines in middle school. Some drugs,
such as ecstasy, weren’t even around schoolyards a decade ago. At the
same time, it’s astounding how many teens are growing up without the
supports we used to take for granted: two parents; aunts, uncles, and
grandparents; a community where adults are present after school; a
family that sits down for dinner every night.
It is possible that today’s teens have too many choices. Kids who live
on the same block and attend preschool together end up fragmenting
as they head to an array of public, charter, magnet, vocational, private,
and parochial schools. Old friendships dissolve, and communities have
less sense of community when children, not just adults, are sprinting
off in different directions each morning.
The pressure to fit in is extraordinary. It’s never been pleasant
to be a portly boy or girl, but now the mass media makes over weight
kids feel like pariahs. In some extreme cases, slim mothers who are
masters of the stomach crunch fret when their daughters weigh more
than ninety-five pounds or so. I’ve met at least a dozen kids who existed
on a diet of Adderall, Ritalin, or other prescription drugs (along
with caffeine and cigarettes) that, besides providing a high, suppress
the appetite. While I assumed I’d meet many girls with eating disorders,
I wasn’t prepared for the talks with boys who purged. It’s alarming
to hear how many boys and girls have seriously contemplated suicide,
or attempted it, because of their desperation about family rifts, lover’s
quarrels, bad grades, or incessant teasing.
Adults don’t understand their world.
Time and again, I hear parents say, “Johnny is a handful, but he doesn’t
use drugs” or “Suzy doesn’t have sex.” Soon after the parents are out
of range, Johnny is calmly relating stories about his coke dealer or
Suzy is reeling off names of boys who ditched her after intercourse.
I also meet students who appear to be one extreme or another - high-achieving,
say, or socially inept. The more I get to know them, the more I discover
their nuances. Take the girl who appeared to be Miss Perfect because
of her stellar grades, cheery demeanor, and involvement in extracurricular
activities: After her mother’s death, her world fell apart. Her relatives
didn’t know it, but she was sexually abused by a boy. Ask socially
awkward boys how often they were bullied or ridiculed, and be prepared
for an earful. Or consider the students who, starting in middle school,
have skipped classes and smoked pot every year on April 20. Although
many parents haven’t caught on, for years that occasion has been known
in scores of public and private schools as National Stoner’s Day.
The date, 4/20, has evolved into a buzzword, redolent with images of
the teenage underground. In many parts of the country, “to 420” means
to smoke a joint. Same with “get blazed.”
The lack of understanding often leads to mistrust. Consider the titles
of recent books about adolescence, as mentioned by the Washington
Post: Parenting Your Out-of-Control Teenager and Yes,
Your Teens Is Crazy! Also: Now I Know Why Tigers Eat Their Young: Surviving
a New Generation of Teenagers. And this: Unglued and Tattooed:
How to Save Your Teen from Raves, Ritalin, Goth, Body Carving, GHB,
Sex and 12 Other Emerging Threats (GHB is gamma-hydroxybutyrate,
also called the date-rape drug).
Do a survey at your school: Ask parents to define “420” or “get blazed.”
You’ll see quite a few befuddled expressions. Then ask teenagers, even
those who never use drugs. There’s a good chance they’ll know precisely
what you mean - though by the time you pose the questions, those phrases
will probably be outdated. No matter. By bothering to ask, you’ll show
that you see teens as people worthy of being heard, rather than problems
to be solved.
References:
Patricia Hersch, A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of
American Adolescence (New York: FawcettBks., 1998).
Scott Sells, Parenting Your Out-of-Control Teenager (New
York: St. Martin’s Pr., 2001);
Michael J. Bradley, Yes, Your Teen is Crazy! (Brooklyn, M.Y.:
Hanging loose Pr., 2001);
Peter Marshall, Now I know Why Tigers Eat Their Young:
Surviving a New Generation of Teenagers (Rocklin, Calif.:
Prima Pub., 1993);
Sara Trollinger, Unglued and Tattooed: How to Save Your Teen
from Raves, Ritalin, Goth, Body Carving, GHB, Sex and
Twelve Other Emerging Threats (Washington, D.C.: Lifeline
Pr., 2001).
["Reproduced by permission of the American Library Association from
“Her Parents Look at Her As a Problem”, by David L. Marcus, in “Knowledge
Quest”, Volume 30, Number 5, May/June 2002, pgs 19 – 21, copyright © 2002
by the American Library Association."]
|
