I Hate You--Don't Leave Me - Jerold J. Kreisman [46]
Many parents overcompensate by lavishing attention on the child’s practical and recreational needs, yet providing little real warmth. Narcissistic parents perceive their children as extensions of themselves or as objects/possessions, rather than as separate human beings. As a result, the child suffocates in emotionally distant attention, leading to an exaggerated sense of his own importance, regressive defenses, and loss of a sense of self.
Geographical Mobility: Where Is Home?
We are moving more than ever before. Greater geographical mobility can bring rich educational benefits and cultural exchange for a child, but numerous relocations are often also accompanied by a feeling of rootlessness. Some investigators have found that children who move frequently and stay in one place for only short periods of time often have confused responses, or no response at all, to the simple question, “Where is your home?”
Because hypermobility is typically correlated with career-oriented lifestyles and job demands, one or both parents in mobile families tend to work long hours and so are less available to their children. Having few enough constants in their environment to provide ballast for development, mobility adds another disruptive force—the world turns into a menagerie of changing places and faces. Such children may grow up bored and lonely, looking for constant stimulation. Continually forced to adapt to new situations and people, they may lose the stable sense of self encouraged by secure community anchors. Though socially graceful, like Lisa they typically feel they are gracefully faking it.
With increasing geographical mobility, the stability of the neighborhood, community school systems, church and civic institutions, and friendships are weakened. Traditional affiliations are lost. About 44 percent of Americans profess affinity to a different church from the one in which they were raised.30 Generations are becoming separated by long distances, and the extended family is lost for emotional support and child care. Children are raised without knowing their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, losing a strong connection to the past and a source of love and warmth to nurture healthy emotional growth.
The Rise of the Faux Family
With society fragmenting, marriages dissolving, and families breaking up, it is no coincidence that the decade has given rise to the “faux family,” or virtual community, to replace the real communities of the past. This yearning for “tribe” affiliation manifests in a variety of ways: football fans identify themselves as “Raider Nation”; 30 million people wait for hours each week to vote for their favorite American Idol, simply to be a part of a larger group with a “common” purpose; and millions of young people join Facebook and MySpace to be a member of a vast electronic social network. Fifty years ago in his novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut playfully (but prophetically) called these “connections” a “granfalloon”—a group of people who choose, or claim to have, a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is actually meaningless. The author offered two examples, Daughters of the American Revolution and the General Electric Company; if Vonnegut wrote the novel today, the examples could just as easily be Facebook or Twitter.
Since 2003, social networking sites have rocketed from a niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of Internet users. More than half (55 percent) of all online American youths ages twelve to seventeen use online social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace.31 The initial evidence suggests that teens use these sites primarily to communicate, to stay in