Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [40]
The great respect that Americans have for independence creates certain difficulties in families. A philosopher friend said to me recently, “Aren’t you proud of your daughter? She’s turning out so differently from you and your husband. What better definition could you have of successful parenting?” When I bemoaned the distance between Sara and me, another friend said, “Would you want it any other way?”
Our nation began with a Declaration and a War of Independence. We admire feisty individualists, and our heroes are explorers, pioneers and iconoclasts. We respect Rambo, Jack Kerouac, Clint Eastwood and Amelia Earhart. We love Walt Whitman with his famous dictum “Resist much, obey little.”
The freedom that we value in our culture we also value in our families. Americans believe adolescence is the time when children emotionally separate from their parents, and this assumption becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Daughters behave as they are expected to behave, and ironically, if they are expected to rebel, they will rebel. They distance from their parents, criticize parental behavior, reject parental information and keep secrets.
This distancing creates a great deal of tension in families. Parents set limits to keep their daughters safe, while daughters talk about their rights and resent what they see as their parents’ efforts to keep them young. Parents are fearful and angry when their daughters take enormous risks to prove they are independent. For most families, the heavy battles begin in junior high.
Parents who grew up in a different time with a different set of values are unhappy with what their daughters are learning. They feel like they are trying harder than their parents tried, and yet their daughters are more troubled. The things that worked when they were teenagers are no longer working. They see their daughters’ drinking, early sexualization and rebelliousness as evidence of parental inadequacy. They see their own families as dysfunctional. Instead I believe what we have is a dysfunctional culture.
My experience is that most parents want their daughters to develop into healthy, interesting people. They are hindered in their efforts to help their daughters by the dangerous culture in which we live, by the messages that our culture sends young women and by our ethic that to grow up one must break from parents, even loving parents.
My family lives in a neighborhood filled with three-story houses and lovely oak and maple trees. Most of the parents have worked hard at parenting, yet their teenagers are driving them crazy. As an attorney said to me at a block party, “Parenthood is the one area of my life where I can feel incompetent, out of control and like a total failure all of the time.”
At a New Year’s Eve party, I asked another couple how their teenage daughters were. The husband said without a smile, “I wish they’d never been born.”
Another thing that separates girls from their parents is their own unhappiness. With junior high, many girls lose their childhood gaiety and zest. Because of their developmental level, girls hold parents responsible for this. They are still young enough that they expect their parents to protect them and keep them happy. When they crash into larger forces and find themselves miserable, they blame their parents, not the culture.
Parents are not the primary influence on adolescent girls. Instead girls are heavily swayed by their friends, whose ideas come from the mass media. The average teen watches twenty-one hours of TV each week, compared to 5.8 hours spent on homework and 1.8 hours reading. The adolescent community is an electronic community of rock music; television, videos and movies. The rites of passage into this community are risky. Adulthood, as presented by the media, implies drinking, spending money