Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [41]
The mass media has the goal of making money from teenagers, while parents have the goal of producing happy, well-adjusted adults. These two goals are not compatible. Most parents resist their daughters’ media-induced values. Girls find themselves in conflict with their parents and with their own common sense.
For example, Jana was the petite only child of older, professional parents. Until junior high, she had loved and felt loved by them. But in junior high she faced the choice of being the good daughter her parents expected or being popular and having a boyfriend. She said, “All through junior high, I’d do anything to fit in. I tried out friends like flavors of ice cream, but eventually I settled in with the popular crowd. I went to a Catholic school where the nuns told us that we would go to hell if we swore. But to be cool I had to swear. So I had the choice of eternal damnation or being unpopular.”
We laughed at her rueful tone. “In junior high this guy in math class liked me and I liked him. But he wasn’t popular, so I didn’t go out with him.”
Once her dad caught her sneaking out late at night to meet her friends. Jana said, “He sat on the couch and cried. He lectured me about rape and all that stuff.” Another time she came home drunk on “purple passion.” As our interview ended she whispered to me, “My parents have no idea all the trouble I’ve been in. They’d be blown away.”
Adolescents and their families are a challenge to mental-health professionals. We need a balance between respecting parents’ responsibility to protect their children and supporting adolescents’ need to develop as individuals and move into a broader world. Not every girl who is suffering comes from a troubled family. In my experience, parents are often desperately fighting to protect the authenticity of their daughters.
Psychologists who study what kinds of families produce what kinds of children have focused on two broad dimensions. The first has to do with affection. At one end are parents who are accepting, responsive and child-centered; at the other end are parents who are rejecting, unresponsive and parent-centered. The second dimension has to do with control strategies. At one end are parents who are undemanding and low in control, and at the other end are parents who are demanding and high in control.
These two dimensions interact to produce different outcomes for teenagers. Low-control and low-acceptance parents produce teens with a variety of problems, including delinquency and chemical dependency. Parents who are high in control and low in acceptance (authoritarian parents) have children who are socially inadequate and lacking in confidence. Parents who are low in control and high in acceptance (indulgent parents) have teenagers with high impulsivity, low responsibility and low independence. Parents who are high in control and high in acceptance (strict but loving parents) have teenagers who are independent, socially responsible and confident. According to this research, the ideal family is one in which the message children receive from parents is: “We love you, but you must do as we say.”
LUCY (15)
As a teenager, Lucy was recovering from leukemia. She, like many young people who have been ill, was close to her parents in ways that were adaptive when she was fighting the disease. Now that she had recovered, the closeness was keeping her from developing her own sense of self. Doing exactly what her parents and doctors said had kept her alive. With her recovery, she needed to learn that it was okay to make decisions independent of the well-meaning advice of adults.
Lucy was chubby, with the soft, pale skin of the chronically sick. Her radiation and chemotherapies had caused her hair to fall out and just now she was growing stubby new hair. When she went to school or shopping she covered her head with a knitted purple cap, but today in my office I could see her scalp.
Lucy sat placidly between her parents as they explained her medical history. Two years ago she had been diagnosed with leukemia and