It Takes a Village (16 page)

People berate children, or strike them, when they don't know what else to do. Sometimes they are reacting the way their own parents did. What they may not know, or may forget in the heat of the moment, is that they are passing on a message of disappointment and low expectations. Whether they say it out loud or not, they are conveying, “You're a bad person, and you shouldn't expect good things to happen to you.”

It may help to think of discipline not as a fixed, unbending recipe but as a continuum. As Dr. Brazelton explains in
Touchpoints:
“Discipline means ‘teaching,' not punishment.” Instead of just telling children what they can and can't do, we should be teaching them to weigh their options and to make responsible choices—first by making choices for them and explaining our decisions, then, little by little, by letting them choose for themselves. The goal is self-disciplined autonomy.

Experts may differ on the nature and timing of discipline, but they agree that it must begin with clear expectations and should be tailored to the child's stage of development and particular temperament. They also agree with Dr. Brazelton that “love comes first, and discipline second.” He elaborates:

My parents divided between them the task of disciplining my brothers and me. My mother's method relied on pointing out the pluses and minuses of our behavior. When we behaved thoughtlessly, she would force us to consider why we had acted as we did.

My father, not one to spare the rod, articulated and emphasized his expectations for us. He told us repeatedly that he would always love us but would not always like what we did. We used to test him by asking if he would still love us if we murdered someone. He would reply that he would never stop loving us but would be deeply disappointed and hurt by what we had done. Occasionally he got carried away when disciplining us, yelling louder or using more physical punishment, especially with my brothers, than I thought was fair or necessary. But even when he was angry, I never doubted that he loved me. The message I heard loud and clear was, “You have a lot going for you—you'd better not screw it up.” For the most part, the balance my parents used with me was an effective one.

When I began studying child development, I learned about three approaches to discipline, characterized by psychologists as “authoritative,” “authoritarian,” and “permissive.” This distinction is difficult to apply as a formula to every dealing parents have with children, even within the same family, since most of our actions do not fall into neat categories. But my husband and I have found it useful as a general guide in our own parenting.

Authoritative parents try to do what Brazelton and others recommend: to strike a balance between control and autonomy by sending clear and consistent messages about what is right and wrong and what behavior is expected, backed up by discipline that suits the child and the occasion. Saying this is a lot easier than doing it. The tension between freedom-giving and limit-setting is constant and may be exacerbated by disagreements between parents, as was sometimes the case in my family. But being aware of that tension and need for balance helps adults to weigh the alternatives when confronted by the daily challenges children—and especially teenagers—pose.

Authoritative parenting stands between the extremes of authoritarianism and excessive permissiveness. It acknowledges that, looking ahead to the time of independence, a gradual increase in children's freedom and the permission to make their own choices is necessary. Such discipline might be called “explanatory,” in the sense that it is aimed at encouraging children to articulate why something is bad or dangerous, to help negotiate rules and penalties, and to develop their own sense of what is appropriate.

Authoritarian parents don't see alternatives. To them there is only one way—their way. They try to control their children's thoughts and actions with persistent verbal and physical discipline that does not distinguish between important and minor infractions. The novelist Pat Conroy's father, as depicted in Conroy's novel
The Great Santini,
is a classic example of an authoritarian. Overbearing, harsh, even sadistic, he justifies his behavior by believing he is creating tough kids who will be able to go toe-to-toe with a cruel, harsh world. Conroy vividly captures how children either mimic the behavior of authoritarian parents or grow up anxious and insecure.

Overly permissive parents lean to the opposite extreme. Because of their uncertainty about parenting, or perhaps because of difficulties in their own past or present lives, such as abuse or divorce, they can't seem to muster the consistency needed to set and enforce limits. Mothers—single mothers in particular—can be especially vulnerable to this dilemma, which Bill's mother eloquently conveyed in her autobiography. Discussing how she came to realize, after Roger was arrested for selling cocaine, that she had overlooked his problems for years, she observed:

Many intact couples also abdicate their responsibilities when it comes to discipline. They may be confused about their own values or the values they think are appropriate to teach to children, or they may be unwilling to make the effort. They may be afraid that if they impose rules and limits, their children won't like them. A parent who fears that discipline will alienate children is heading for trouble. What begins as “permissiveness” too often ends in negligence and confusion.

I am continually amazed by parents who know about their teenagers' drinking or cigarette or marijuana smoking and rationalize it, even going so far as to announce that they are glad their kids do it at home, where it's “safe.” Is it “safe” to permit children to break the law and to engage in potentially self-destructive behavior anywhere? Each of us adults did things as a child or teenager that we are glad our parents didn't know about. We were testing their limits, which helped us to define our own. Today's children do the same—it's part of growing up. But when they push against a boundary that keeps collapsing because no one pushes back, they fall into uncharted, and often dangerous, territory.

Some children receive few explicit messages at all from their parents. Whether they are middle-class “latchkey” kids, ghetto kids, or kids whose parents are too wrapped up in their own lives to pay attention to them, they are raising themselves, like the band of stranded schoolboys in
Lord of the Flies.
And in the absence of parental guidance, children turn to other authority or pseudo-authority figures—to gang leaders, to older children who are also adrift, and to the dubious role models popular culture provides.

The teenage years, we all know, pose a special challenge for parents. The developmental changes of adolescence are second in pace and intensity only to those of infancy, and teens' need for parental supervision is second only to toddlers'. (A lot of parents would add that dealing with the fiery fifteens is a lot more stressful than coping with the terrible twos.) But telling a three-year-old not to play with matches is an unassailable decision. Figuring out whether to ignore your thirteen-year-old's emotional outburst or trying to arrive at a reasonable weekend curfew with your sixteen-year-old is another matter. And the difficulty of setting limits for adolescents is compounded by the growing pains we may unconsciously relive as we watch kids go through theirs.

Adolescence—as Bill and I are observing—is a time of approach and retreat, when young men and women insist on making their own choices regarding behavior, appearance, and values. It often demands not so much discipline from adults as self-discipline; we need the wisdom to anticipate errors that could be devastating, the restraint to pick our battles carefully, and the trust that, with what we have taught our children, they can handle the rest. Teenagers have the right to make decisions and make mistakes.

A couple I know who live in the public eye went away one weekend and returned to find their daughter in the kitchen—with a new Technicolor hairdo. They blew up. Suddenly the girl looked at her parents in that whimsical fifteen-year-old way that can stop you in your tracks. “Mom, Dad,” she said, holding out a strand of her hair, “
this
is ruining your life?”

But teenagers often turn back to their parents when the temptations they confront today—drugs, alcohol, and sex, to name a few items at the top of most parents' worry lists—and the pressures to give in to them are overwhelming. The choices and consequences they confront are more complicated than those faced by earlier generations. Yet the biology of adolescence has not changed as much as our attitudes about what is and is not appropriate behavior. Adolescents want adults to reassert authoritative control over their lives—and much of their behavior is a plea for predictable rules to help them restructure their lives in the midst of great change.

I recently read a newspaper story in which teenagers, many from affluent neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., explained why they sneak out of the house at night to go to parties or to meet with friends. It was clear that in many cases the children did not take seriously the rules their parents set, or did not think their parents were going to check up on them anyway. As one psychologist explained in the article: “These kids are telling their parents, basically, ‘To hell with the rules. I'll do what I want.' The parents are feeling too inept or too busy to say no, and want somebody else to fix the problem.”

When parents are willing to take a “nonnegotiating posture” on the word “no,” to be strict on curfews and appropriate discipline, children are less likely to be confused about the choices they confront.

At a recent gathering of journalists who cover family and children's issues, a reporter asked me how I felt, as the mother of a teenager, about sex education in the schools.

I said it would be great if we could get kids to postpone any decision about sex until they are over twenty-one, which provoked a round of nervous laughter from my listeners. In a culture that shouts sex from every billboard, movie screen, radio station, television set, and magazine (and now even computer monitors), they—and I—know that kids are confronted with sex every time they turn around, and they have to decide about it, early and often.

After many years of working with and listening to American adolescents, I don't believe they are ready for sex or its potential consequences—parenthood, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases—and I think we need to do everything in our power to discourage sexual activity and encourage abstinence. Young people can learn to value the intimacy of friendships with the opposite sex as well as their own, can enjoy being in groups as well as couples. Those kinds of relationships need adult support, including the time it takes to organize gatherings for kids, instead of turning them loose in malls, video arcades, or the streets. Homes, schools, churches, and communities should provide havens for kids who want an alternative.

These same entities have to pitch in when it comes to educating kids about sex. The Institute of Medicine, the health policy advisory arm of the National Academy of Sciences, recently published a scientific review of what is currently known about unintended pregnancy in our country. It concluded that families, schools, and religious and community institutions are all responsible for educating young people about sex, and it recommended that schools continue to develop comprehensive, age-appropriate programs of sex education, which emphasize teaching abstinence. The available evidence does not support fears that direct discussion of sexual behavior increases sexual activity; rather, it suggests many adolescents become sexually active without having had any formal sex education at all.

No matter how great an effort adults make, however, there will be some adolescents who are determined to embark on sexual experience. They, too, need straight talk about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases to help them deal responsibly with the consequences of their decisions.

As anyone who has studied the incidence of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases can tell you, many adolescents are woefully ignorant about the physical and emotional aspects of sexuality. I have interviewed pregnant teenagers who, impossible as it seems, could not explain exactly what they and their partner had done to cause the pregnancy, despite all the half-clad bodies and heavy breathing they have seen on television.