Control Leak

I don’t know what happened on December 6, 1941. I don’t know what led up to all that unpleasantness between the Hatfields and the McCoys. I don’t even want to think about what happened between you and your ex in the years leading up to the dissolution of your marriage.

I do know that the Mad Magazine headline–“Mom gives birth to teenager; no telling what these kids will do next”–notwithstanding, there is always a day before when it comes to kids. They don’t arrive, like Minerva born fully grown out of the brain of Zeus, as oppositional, defiant, snarky, non-communicative, sneaky, unpleasant high schoolers. You don’t need a Master’s in Developmental Psychology (aka “home economics with numbers”) to know that infants become babies who turn into toddlers who go to kindergarten before starting middle school and pretending not to hear when asked repeatedly to take out the garbage.

I’ve written a lot about how hard it is to raise healthy kids in this toxic culture. The ubiquitous dangers of process addictions–drugs, alcohol, video games, gambling, and Internet pornography–are familiar themes in these columns. The first thing I try to do for the lost parents of out-of-control teens is to assure them that they didn’t create the problems in their homes and communities all by themselves. The parents of an angry, depressed, anxious, acting-out, pot smoking tenth grader who refuses to go to school ask me what they did wrong. I tease mom by inquiring if she is an Afghan drug lord responsible for importing tons of heroin into our country. I joke with dad about whether he is guilty of inventing the billion dollar video gaming industry that is designed to keep children playing frenetically. I am convinced that the first step to healing for parents is to understand that they themselves are not wholly responsible for their children’s issues.

Because nothing is worse than the blame heaped upon the parents of children with “problems.” If your kid don’t look a stranger in the eye and say, “Nice to meet you, Sir,” it is the parents who are thought to have failed to instruct their child in proper behavior. If your one-year-old isn’t sleeping through the night, if your three-year-old isn’t sitting still on an airplane, if your tenth grader isn’t taking four AP courses and acing them all, somehow you, the parent, are at fault. Somehow you managed to take time off from hiding Jimmy Hoffa’s body to also irreversibly mess up your child.

The logical outcome of the pointed fingers and whispered remarks about your misbehaved child is that YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN MORE CONTROLING. “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” “If my father had acted like that, my grandfather would have knocked half his teeth out before whipping him with a belt.” “In the old days, children were seen and not heard.”

Well, in the old days a cure for many medical ailments was to allow leeches to suck blood from the ailing patient. Women were routinely tortured and burned for having caused the crops to die. The “old days” may have had advantages-no reality TV shows comes to mind-but our understanding of how to raise healthy children wasn’t among them.

There is tremendous pressure on families in this generation to have their children COMPLY. Power and control issues are rampant in families and reaching epidemic proportions in the culture. The academic pressure on kids is unbearable. (If I may speak frankly, I’d like to see YOU study successfully for three AP classes as a junior after coming home from rowing practice having gotten only five hours of sleep the night before.) Parents ask me all the time how to get their children to study more. I try to redirect the conversation: what would happen if your children were to study LESS? How can we tone down the risk of your kids turning to drugs to self-medicate? Is there more than one way to define success?

“Let them be who they are” and “love your kids for who they are, not what they do” are my recurrent themes. The other side of the argument is to try to force your kids to comply with vacuous rules that will doubtless look ill-advised in a generation or two. Just as every rational person is aghast at leeches as medicine and burning of witches, historians a few decades hence will be horrified at how parents in 2014 tried to control their children. The lack of compliance and the rampant drug use of our kids are due, in no small part, to how much their parents obsess over their every move, action, thought, and high school course selection.

What happened the day before your daughter started cutting herself? What happened the day before she started smoking pot morning, noon, and night? What happened the day before your son refused to go to school for the first time?

It is possible that you have been telling your kids how to behave in so many trivial ways that they are unable to distinguish that what is practically meaningless–finish your spelling homework, for example-from that which is life threatening–stay away prescription painkillers?

The time to start relinquishing control is now. Because today could very well be the day before it’s too late.