Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [70]
These last decades have been rough on families, and many have broken under the stress. Most adults experience at least one divorce, and many children spend some time in single-parent homes. Single-parent households are tough on everyone. Often the parents are chronically tired from “double shifts.” They have no time for themselves—for exercise, friends, intellectual life or even sleep—and they often complain that their lives are not in balance. They are alone when it’s time to make tough decisions about their children. When they must enforce rules and consequences, there’s no one to back them up. Children in single-parent homes have no court of appeal when their one parent is tired, cranky or arbitrary. They miss the chance to observe in close quarters how couples function in relationships.
Divorces almost always make women poorer. Often families must move and teenagers find themselves in new schools surrounded by strangers. They have left their longtime friends, who could have helped them through this. Often they worry about money for clothes, cars and college.
Divorce is particularly tough for adolescents. Partly that’s because of their developmental level and partly it’s because teenagers require so much energy from parents. Teenagers need parents who will talk to them, supervise them, help them stay organized and support them when they are down. Divorcing parents often just don’t have the energy to give. Adolescents feel an enormous sense of loss—of their parents, their families and their childhoods. And, unlike younger children, when they express their pain, they are likely to do it in dangerous ways.
Adolescents’ immature thinking makes it difficult for them to process the divorce. They tend to see things in black-and-white terms and have trouble putting events into perspective. They are absolute in their judgments and expect perfection in parents. They are likely to be self-conscious about their parents’ failures and critical of their every move. They have the expectation that parents will keep them safe and happy and are shocked by the broken covenant. Adolescents are unforgiving.
Just at a time when feeling different means feeling wrong, divorce makes teenagers feel different. If a parent wearing the wrong kind of shoes can humiliate a teenager, a parent who is divorcing causes utter shame. Teenagers are so egocentric that they think everyone knows about the divorce in all its details. They are ashamed of their families, which they see as uniquely dysfunctional.
Adolescence is a time when children are supposed to move away from parents who are holding firm and protective behind them. When the parents disconnect, the children have no base to move away from or return to. They aren’t ready to face the world alone. With divorce, adolescents feel abandoned, and they are outraged at that abandonment. They are angry at both parents for letting them down. Often they feel that their parents broke the rules and so now they can too. They no longer give their parents moral authority. Instead they say, “How dare you tell me what to do when you’ve screwed up so badly.”
Until late adolescence, children don’t think of their parents as people with needs separate from their own. Rather they are seen as providers of care. Most teens aren’t able to empathize with their parents and prefer their parents to be married even if they are unhappy. They find it frightening that parents can break their bonds to each other. If parent-parent bonds can be broken, so can parent-child bonds.
Often there’s bitterness between the parents that makes it difficult for them to discipline their teenagers. Teens can and do manipulate divided parents. They pit them against each other or live with the one who has the fewest rules and the least supervision. Teenagers are not always good judges of what they need and often choose to live with the parent who promises to buy them the new stereo or take them on vacation. The parent who insists on schoolwork and chores