Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (18 page)

[Adulthood] has to do with whether or not you dare to express your own opinions and how you relate to others, whether you can . . . well . . . take care of yourself. That means eating healthy and eating on time. It means that you keep an eye on things like, “Now I am tired, I should go to bed a little earlier,” or, “Now I am having a good time, now I am going to make a night of it.” It means you can correct yourself and have your own opinions. [My daughter, Fleur] can take care of herself very well. She can spoil herself and she can also work very hard.

In other words, Dutch parents make the criterion for adulthood exactly the type of autonomous self-regulatory capacity they believe teenagers are developing. But unlike the definition of self-care and autonomy that American parents use as the criterion for independence, the independence that Dutch parents describe does not require
onafhankelijkheid
, or non- dependence on others. In fact, a critical part of
zelfstandigheid
, or indepen- dence in regulating one’s affairs, involves other people—and learning how to independently manage one’s own affairs in relationship to the needs of other people.

When they talk about the criteria for moving out of the parental home, Dutch parents do not talk about the need to be driven by strong passions and interests, as do their American counterparts. Instead of the excitement that American parents associate with “striking out on one’s own,” Dutch parents speak of the mundane. Katinka Holt says that to be ready to move out, one has to be able to take care of oneself: “Eating dinner on time,

cooking . . . maintaining things, keeping up your room.” Loek Herder says that to move out, her son Paul “needs to be able to regulate his affairs. . . . For instance, he has forms from school that he needs to send in. Right now, we do that together [because otherwise he’ll] forget that. He is very messy. He always leaves things lying around.” To move out, a person must “be well organized, not be impulsive,” says Corrine van Zanden. Her own seventeen-year-old daughter is almost there, she thinks. “She really thinks about things before she does them, like when [her friends] call her and she needs to do her homework first, she’ll do her homework first and only go out after.”

In fact, the strong passions that American parents believe will lead their children toward the autonomy required for adulthood might well hin- der the kind of self-care that Dutch parents believe is necessary for adult- hood. Perhaps because it is indicative of the capacity for self-regulation, Dutch middle-class parents are more likely to emphasize the importance of knowing how to spend wisely than knowing how to generate an in- come. Helen de Beer says her daughter must grow more independent before she can move out, like learn how to “do the small grocery shop- ping, buy food, [and] keep her finances under control.” Being indepen- dent has less to do with bringing in money, says Hannie de Groot, than with knowing how to manage expenses, knowing “what can I spend, what can I not spend? I have so much student stipend. What can I do with it, what can’t I?”

There is one aspect of the process of children becoming adults for which Dutch parents use dramatic, emotionally loaded language. Compared to their American counterparts, Dutch parents are more likely to talk about anticipating feelings of loss. Dirk de Groot hopes his daughter will elect to study in a city nearby and live at home: “You always hope that they stay home as long as possible.” But his wife adds, once that moment comes, “as a parent you must say, ‘I step over [my own feelings of loss] and I go along with it.’ And then I will really support her, even if you find it really hard and sad.” Jolien Boskamp is glad that her daughter Natalie has declared that she wants to stay home while she goes to college. “That is
gezellig
” (cozy), Natalie told her mother. Jolien does not understand why others move out: “Maybe some children don’t like it at home—you know, maybe it is
gezellig
and good with their parents, but there is some reason why they don’t feel free. Maybe that is why they want to leave.” Luckily, her daughters don’t feel that way: “I wouldn’t mind if they always stay with me.”

Children too are expected to miss the
gezelligheid
of home. Loek Herder thinks her son is too messy to move out on his own, but she also doesn’t

“know whether he is emotionally ready.” That is even more important “than all those other things I mentioned because [those practical matters] will turn out all right eventually. Emotionally, I don’t think he’s ready be- cause, well [laughing], then I won’t be able to sit and talk with him any more at night.” Anne van Wijngaarden is more confident about her son’s capacities. But when her son moves out, Anne says, he will miss his par- ents’ company. “He could leave today,” Anne knows. “He can take care of himself. He is so critical of himself already. He would miss the
gezelligheid
, but he loves being alone. [Then] he can regulate everything, he likes that. But he will miss the
gezelligheid
.”

Being able to manage the loss of the
gezelligheid
that the parental home provides, and substituting self-generated
gezelligheid
for it, is critical to be- ing able to move out. To make that transition, one needs to be able to manage loneliness. Margo Schutte thinks the main thing her daughter needs to learn before she can leave home is to “accept that you are alone. I think that that will be the biggest problem for her. That is what she is most reticent about. At home you are seldom alone. Sure, when you are in your own room, but there is always someone else around. And I think that is the difficult step of leaving home, and of being independent, that all that [be- ing alone] costs a lot of energy and emotions.”
40
Karel Doorman describes poignantly the loneliness he expects his daughter to encounter on the road to adulthood. To move out, Karel says:

You need to have a good sense of what it means to really be alone . . . to spend a whole week alone: those evenings, when you don’t get visitors you know coming by for a cup of coffee. Really, you can’t be ready for that. You just need to do it. You need to learn that, experience it. . . . [And I wonder,] “What is she going to do with her laundry, what happens if she has to work, and study, and what time does she come home at night and so forth.” But I imagine that just like most children she’ll push through that, but also that she’ll spend some nights in bed crying, thinking, “It was not quite what I had imagined it would be.”

It is exactly when Heidi will have managed to create a “home place” for herself, both practically and emotionally, that Karel will consider her “eco- nomically independent” and an adult. Economic independence means not financial self-reliance but mastery over, and comfort within, an indepen- dent household. Karel will consider Heidi
zelfstanding
“when, as a twenty- year-old, she has lived for two years in Utrecht on her own.” Then, “I will still financially support her in large measure. She will be an adult then,

but not financially self-reliant (
onafhankelijk
).” Though not financially self- reliant, Heidi will then surely have learned to make and drink her cup of coffee alone.

American parents typically report a fair amount of explicit conflict with their teenage children over everyday matters. Thinking back to the time when her daughters were sixteen, Flora Baker says they would have con- flicts about “anything: curfew, shopping, if I wouldn’t drive them some- where, if they talked back—and they did, a lot.” They attribute these con- flicts to the “rebellion” that is a normal part of adolescent development. Flora thinks conflict during the teenage years is inevitable: “To some degree I think everybody experiments. They rebel. They want to do something dif- ferent, something fun.” Looking back at the arguments with her two oldest children, Nancy Beard says she always believed they would “turn them- selves around and come back to what they know is right. Jodi and Art have done that. They have done their little teenage rebellious thing, but they have come back and are becoming responsible, loving adults.”

If a certain amount of rebellious energy is a natural part of adolescent development, then, American parents suggest, forcefully opposing that en- ergy on critical issues is a key component of properly parenting teenagers. To describe such confrontations, American parents often use the metaphor of the
battle
. Harold Lawton is among the parents who use the most com- bative language. If, in conflict with Jesse, “the issue was unimportant or we were tired, we would let it slide.” However, “if it was important or we had the energy, we would press the issue until he complied with our point of view.” This meant “making it progressively more difficult for him not to comply, until he finally realized that we will prevail and it is useless for him to press the issue any further, [and he realized that] it is a continuous
tug of war
. We
win
all the issues we think are important and the other ones, sometimes we don’t.”

Jennifer Reed’s son, Daniel, was “very rebellious” as a young teenager. “He’s always been very strong-willed, and he went through puberty at a very young age. . . . He would get these emotional surges of anger; every emotion was this surge and there were times when he was uncontrolla- ble.” When Daniel was most “uncontrollable,” there were times when she thought, “Okay,
military
academy. There’s a reason for those places. Put the boys in there, and let them go through all this stuff.” These days, Jennifer sees her son as “a nice young man,” but, to get to this point, she had to

work through things like, “No, you’re not going to get everything you want. Yes, you do have to call if you’re out.” But when Jennifer held firm, her son came around. “And [now] he’s actually very responsible.” Her younger sons learned from their older brother’s conflict, and know they won’t “be able to just run loose, and boys want to do that. They think they should have total control over their lives and that nobody should be telling them what to do.”

Like Jennifer, numerous American parents talk openly about feelings of anger and mistrust. When Flora Baker disagrees with her kids, she “yell[s]. I do. It’s terrible.” Then, her children “yell back.” Harold Lawton describes the teenage years as a period when children “start out as vicious animals and end up human beings,” but only thanks to their parents’ hard work. Deborah Langer has always told her kids, “If I can’t trust the choice of friends or I feel that you have told me a lie about something, I thought you were going to be somewhere and you’re not—then your privileges are go- ing to get really small.” Carole Wood’s daughters “have mood swings that are really triggered by something very simple. There are lots of tears that just seem to come out of nowhere. They’re very angry about things that are really not, in my mind, a big deal. Very self-centered, especially my girls and especially at fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen.”

While more conservative American parents have few qualms about regarding adolescence as a battle where parents must exact obedience through sheer use of force, the more liberal American parents describe try- ing to reason and compromise. When he disagrees with his son, Calvin Brumfield makes sure Adam “understands our point of view and I want to understand his point of view. And if I understand where he’s coming from or how he feels about it, lots of times, it’s a compromise, you know, com- promise on both parts, you know, instead of being stuck, you know, on a polar position.” When Iris DiMaggio disagreed with her son Phillip about his hairstyle, she “finally just turned to him and said, ‘Okay, do whatever you want with your hair. Just please humor me and don’t make it blue or green.’ And he said, ‘Okay, fine.’” Then, they “came to that agreement. He could shave it. He could wear it long. He could do whatever he wanted just not color it an odd color, an unnatural color. So we agreed.”

But even liberal Americans occasionally use unilateral force and punish- ment. Asked about conflict resolution, Laurie Williams says laughingly that she and her daughter Margaret “are very good actually.” They can discuss conflicts: “We are both very reasonable. I try to see her side, she tries to see mine. We try to compromise. . . . [But] a lot of times, [Margaret] doesn’t want to give up her stand, and then I just have to make a decision of what

I feel at that point, if there is no compromise.” Rhonda Fursman had made an agreement with her son that his curfew was to be 11:30. But then, “he showed up about 1:00 in the morning, and his curfew got pushed back to ten o’clock for the entire summer, which he did not like at all. But it was. I told him, he violated our agreement and our trust issues.” Sometimes, Rhonda worries that she’s been too liberal with her son, and whether a stricter approach might have been better. When she grew up:

You had definite rules that you didn’t do, there was a lot of “you didn’t do,” and things that you were expected to toe the line about. And so it was easier to rebel because you had all these rules of things you weren’t supposed to do. You were very daring if you sneaked out for a smoke or something like that. I think that because things have liberalized enough, kids don’t have as many clear-cut things that they are not supposed to do. To some extent I see this as escalating. They have got to find new and more shocking things to prove that they are different.

The belief that a certain amount of struggle is necessary for children to prove they are different may explain why even fairly liberal parents of- ten describe their relationship with their teenage children in antagonistic terms. Nancy Beard speaks of having just called a “truce” with one of her daughters. Iris DiMaggio tries to reach agreements when she can: “You have to give them more responsibility, and they have to learn to use that responsibility. It tends to be very difficult: knowing when, as we put it, to
yank the rope
, and when to just let go.” Dierdre Mears explains that being out in the country means her children live in “
a wonderful form of prison
. I mean, my kids live in a
beautiful prison
. I can keep them out of the mall. We don’t get television reception out here without using a satellite dish. I can actually insulate [them], to a certain degree, to stuff I neither believe in or like.” Nevertheless, Dierdre suspects her son recently drank alcohol. She told him: