Being termed by your offspring 'the worst parent ever' may mean you're doing a good job.
SOME THINGS don't change, or not that much. In 1906, in a letter to HG Wells, William James bemoaned "the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease".
It sounds like a pretty fair assessment of the kind of parenting described by Kathy Sheridan in last weekend's newspaper. The parent's principal role is to function as an ATM so that the son or daughter (and it is usually a daughter) can dress and act like a highly expensive clone. Very young teenagers spend unbelievable amounts of money with abandon, because there is plenty more where that came from. Mum or Dad will provide.
Adolescents analyse what is going on with unnerving clarity. A friend of mine is a manager of a supermarket. One of his part-time workers was given an expensive car as an 18th birthday present. When my friend commented on it, the young man shrugged and said: "My Dad doesn't see that much of me, so he buys me stuff like this to make up for it." In common with many others of his age, this lad was working solely for extra drinking money. Perhaps we should be thankful that Dad was not providing all his drinking money as well.
In an era terrified of physical flabbiness, moral flabbiness scarcely gets a look in, yet it is a very good description of the kind of fear of confrontation that rules many parents. They want their children to be happy, and they equate that with an absence of tantrums and slammed doors. Once again, adolescents know exactly what is going on. Girls are experts at manipulating their parents, and in particular their fear that by being too strict, they will make social pariahs of their daughters.
Worship of the bitch-goddess means that parents dread their child being unpopular or not fitting in, more than they worry about the long-term impact on a child of always having to fit in to be popular. For all sorts of reasons, fear, guilt and self-doubt undermine many parents' ability to be authoritative - to set down flexible and reasonable boundaries.
As a result, many young people never develop resilience, the ability to cope with the fact that life is not always easy and that setbacks are inevitable. By being over-protective, we sometimes interfere with our children's abilities to develop coping skills in adversity. We are probably the most risk-averse generation of parents ever. From early childhood, we ferry our children around and protect them from any possible risk, and then wonder why so many move back home or defer entering adulthood as long as possible.
There is no doubt that parenting is more complex than it used to be. Our children live in a world where there are massive industries dedicated to getting them to perceive themselves as autonomous consumers first and foremost. Children who cannot read can identify logos for popular brands with ease.
There used to be a shame associated with admitting that wearing the wrong kinds of labels was social death. Now there is a grim realism that, sometimes, the protective cover of the clone-look may be necessary for social survival.
Over the years I have changed my own opinion somewhat on the brands issue. In an ideal world, it would be great if people could assert their individuality and dress as they wished, rather than swelling the profits of vast corporations. Among other issues, such corporations rarely offer fair conditions to the workers who make the clothes and shoes.
However, the adolescent years are so hard to navigate that if someone chooses to look and dress exactly like his or her peers, but still manages to maintain higher standards with regard to drinking, drugs and early sexual activity, I would consider it a reasonable trade-off. Again, that doesn't have to mean parental abdication, and limits are still important. No parent should be an ATM.
I am a great believer in picking your battles, and some adolescents have decided that they will do exactly that. In other words, they will not attempt to assert their individuality with their peers until it really matters to them.
By not bucking every trend, they will have built up a store of social capital with their friends that will enable them to hold different ideas to their friends without being ostracised. Sound complicated? You had better believe it.
Such an approach is very different to unthinking conformity. Frankly, I believe that you are more likely to find that in homes where the parents are conformists, too. We tend to knock young people for their consumerism, but where do we think they learned it? Middle-class parents have a host of subtle and not-so-subtle ways of letting their offspring know what they really value.
Yet even the most muddle-headed of parents generally want what is best for their kids. The definition of the modern parent is to be guilty and self-doubting a lot of the time. We are now into at least the second generation of parents who wonder constantly whether they are doing the right thing by their children. Mind you, a little more self-doubt might have been in order about parenting methods used by previous generations. Smacking and unreasonable expectations of children were often the norm.
It is a profound irony that in an era when children are rightly given more respect and listened to with care, a significant minority face such difficulties in adolescence. Parents of boys especially are haunted by fears about their child doing something catastrophic, while parents of girls are terrified by the prospect of anorexia or self-harm.
It is important to maintain perspective. The majority of teenagers manage to navigate a much more complex reality than their parents faced, with more than reasonable success. At times, it is a relief for teenagers to be able to cite unreasonable parents when faced with situations for which they themselves are not yet ready. Most parents know instinctively that parental largesse is no substitute for parental presence. Being termed by your offspring "the worst parent ever" may in fact be an indication of success of a more lasting variety than the bitch-goddess kind.