Today’s comes from an understandably anomymous correspondent via the Independent’s letters section and is aimed at all those who’d punish today’s parents for the actions of their children:
The plight of parents when teenagers get out of control
Sir: Much has been made of poor parenting (letters, 18 August). No doubt there are parents who do not care, but it is a complicated situation. You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. My daughters were brought up to respect us and the law, work hard and invest in their own futures.
At the age of 12, both became foul-mouthed, aggressive strangers, who swore at us, refused to divulge their whereabouts or come home to agreed deadlines. Our 13-year-old often stayed out all night. We had no idea where she was or who she was with, and she refused to tell us anything. There is no lawful tool for parents to deal with this; good behaviour depends on mutual trust and respect. When this disappears, parents are backed into a corner where they have used all sanctions as punishment, and the teenager has no incentive to behave well.
The suggestion that such children be taken into care is not the answer. Our younger daughter has been in care for most of the past 12 months, but far from helping her, she lost the security of a loving home, gained a criminal record, was seriously sexually assaulted and, despite much work from the staff in her present children’s home, has absconded 22 times in three months. So parental influence, or lack of it, cannot be the whole story.
I was forced to attend patenting classes (because of a crime my daughter committed in care). These were an abusive, humiliating experience which did nothing to help our situation and much to exacerbate it. Any remaining tatters of confidence I had as a parent were destroyed.
Our older daughter is now 17, stable, personable, working hard towards a university place, taking part-time jobs and living happily with us. She cringes at her earlier behaviour (and is highly critical of her sister). In fact, her past mistakes spur her on to make a success of her life and make us proud of her.
The past couple of years have put an intolerable strain on our health, our marriage, our careers and our lives. If we could have avoided or shortened our nightmare we would obviously have done so.
Name and address supplied
I know that’s a true story because I’ve been there – as have thousands of other parents whom the Daily Mail would make homeless, bang up or fine, whether they’re lone or partnered, rich, poor or middling, black or white; though it’s undeniable that to be poor and/or a visible monrity is to have more chance of it happening to your family.
We appear to have come to a point in our developed and developing cultures where the governments that we’ve elected are entirely focused on compelling every single member of society to be a financially productive unit, regardless of all else. This means that a generation is bringing itself up alone and indeed a generation that has already brought itself up alone is now producing another to do the same.
Consistent parenting and boundary setting for adolescents has become a luxury: when one parent is trying to do two jobs, or two parents are working back-to-back shifts for minimum wage, who has time to do much else than a pile of laundry, a quick vacuum and a scan of homework schedules? Short of electronic tagging (and even that’s evadable) what’s a parent to do whan a child is determined to go entirely off the rails?
Unfortunately ‘going off the rails’ nowadays doesn’t just mean making a couple of stupid mistakes: when even the smallest of infractions leads to criminal sanctions, a criminal record and your DNA added to the database. If you’re already an outlaw why not be hung for a sheep as well as a lamb?
All that our offspring see and hear teaches that they are living on a dying planet anyway, so what the fuck. It teaches that greed is good, that everyone’s a hypocrite and no-one, least of all politicians, can be trusted, especially not about drugs, money or sex, since so many are using themselves or creaming off a few quid or getting some on the side, whilst condemning those very activities in the young.
If our children learn nothing else from globalisation and 24 hr media access it’s that they are tiny and a it’s a big cruel world that they’re powerless to do anything about. They also learn that their parents, instead of being the rocks of authority and strength they should be, are shown every day to be as utterly powerless as anyone else. Imagine what that does to fragile adolescent confidence and a fatalistic nihilism seems a totally understandable response.
When our children can see with their own eyes that even supposedly fair and democratic governments can kill, torture, steal and lie with impunity and nothing will happen, or that the police can shoot a man in the head seven times for no good reason then walk away and nothing will happen, it tells them that these days you can just about do anything and nothing will happen. But since to be young is to be prejudged criminal anyay, like the ad says, why not just do it?
What can your Mum and Dad do, lock you up?
The magnet for rebelling adolescents is of course their peer group and as in the wider world local hierarchies are built on money and force. It’s just ‘doing business’, other children have little choice but to go along and the police are largely an irrelevance. No-one grasses, not if they want to have a life. Pull your hood up, keep your head down, safe.
How has this come about? After Thatcher’s welfare reforms of the mid-eighties to mid-nineties, state support for unemployed parents and lone parents was sharply reduced. In a time of rising unemployment, benefit cuts and high taxes the underground economy boomed – with no jobs to be had the only way of making a little school uniform or Christmas money was and still is selling goods cheap, no questions asked, or looking after or selling a bit of dope – just ‘doing a bit of business’. But of course like any developing economy ‘a bit of business’ has grown and diversified and become a criminal way of life that has turned some areas of our towns and cities into virtual tribal fiefdoms.
The thug life is now a generational klifestyle and is pimped as the cool lifestyle of choice to the young by boomer ad execs and trendmakers who should know better.
The surroundings may be suburban and prosaic or urban and hellish but in their head everybody’s a Soprano or 50cent, even if only pimp-rolling their merry way along the street in say, Budleigh Salterton. To them even a boardedup post offifce is turf to be defended and marked: stomping on the head of a complaining neighbour – perfect! Instant, underground fame. A drive-by? Even better.
Disaffected adolescents used to dream of when they were King of Acacia Avenue – now, with the culture of impunity and the easy availability of guns. they actually can be. This makes us scared of them and they know that. That gives them power over us that adolescents should not have. But then again, with 2, even 3 greedy generations ahead of them determined to keep a tight grip on power and the world’s wealth while it still lasts, how else are they ever to get any power except by force?
It seems as though our children are taken from us by the world at earlier and earlier ages, to be returned to us refashioned, in an image we dont recognise. This I suppose has been the refrain of every parent ever and it may be it’s something that has to happen in order for our children to lean the skills to cope in the future world.
What’s different now is that it’s uncertain whether there will be a world to have a future in and thus iit may well be that callousness, greed and brutality are the skills they’lll need to learn to survive.
What to do? I don’t know what the answer is, I wish to God I did; I’m still working on it myself.
