Laura House and her pals, most of them 16 at the time, decided they didn’t really want their trip to the Grateful Dead concert at Alpine Valley in southern Wisconsin to end, so they hatched a plan: Why not call home to the North Shore, say the station wagon gave up the ghost, and stay in a motel for the night — all 10 of ’em, girls and boys.
Too bad they decided to go out for burgers in the allegedly dead car, forgot to use the turn signal, got pulled over by the cops and wound up with tickets that got mailed home to Mom and Dad.
Jarod Kelly, a mere 15 last summer when he hatched his tongue-piercing plan, figured he’d just go out, get the stud jammed through his tongue, and when it was healed, let his mom and dad in on the plot. Too bad his tongue swelled and got ugly. Too bad his mom hit the roof. Too bad, after days of screaming at each other, she made him take out the stud — once he could pry it from his double-sized tongue.
Megan Mead Brehman, 15 that fateful day, still can’t figure out what she was thinking the February afternoon of her sophomore year in high school when she and a friend wandered into a Sportmart, and — never having done anything like it in her life, before or since — decided to sneak a pair of $20 Umbro soccer shorts into her shopping bag. She got nabbed the second she set foot outside the store. But the worst part was that after a silent ride home from the police station, her father looked at her and told her there was no punishment to fit the crime. She was left to wallow in unpunished guilt.
So much for teens trying to stake out a piece of life independent of their parents.
Not always do they get caught. In fact, in every adolescent life — even the three aforementioned fallen angels — there are always chapters best described as fill-in-the-blank. While Mom and Dad might have sketchy outlines, they don’t necessarily know — or even want to know — all the gory details.
It’s a fact of life: Kids in adolescence, that murky time teetering between hold-on-tight childhood and you’re-on-your-own adulthood, stake out their identity by keeping a chunk of their lives separate and secret from their parents.
“One of the first signs of adolescence,” says adolescent therapist Leslie Cleaver, a licensed clinical social worker and mother of a 19-year-old, “is that kids who’ve always talked to their parents suddenly stop. Parents who were once perceived by their kids as interested are now seen as nosy.
“It’s a very important sign of growing up: to keep some things to themselves.”
Just how much kids keep to themselves, and how much parents need to know, is an issue that’s constantly scrutinized. Questions are raised about the secret lives of teenagers: How much do they not tell their parents? How much do their parents not know?
So we went out to talk to kids still in or recently finished with high school. We talked to them about the chunks of their lives they kept from their parents, found out what they were thinking and what got them in trouble. We talked to their parents too.
What we heard were the stories of essentially good kids who once in a while did dumb things. We heard stories of parents who really tried hard to know what their kids were doing, who tiptoed that fine line between trust and fear, and finally accepted the fact that some of what their kids were doing was out of their control.
We heard stories of regrets; we heard stories of forgiveness. We heard timeless truths; we heard new twists on old tricks. Mostly, we heard stories of love. Parents who wouldn’t give up on their kids, kids who wouldn’t want their parents any other way.
Barbara Schneider, senior social scientist at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, who has been studying 7,000 American teenagers for the last five years, wants to make one thing clear: “I don’t think there’s this big adolescent culture withholding stuff from their parents. The good news is we’ve got good kids.”
The No. 1 thing teens try not to tell their parents, Schneider says, is anything about drinking and drugs. “There’s a huge burden with drinking. The others pale by comparison.”
The other issues, way down the list, would be sexual identity, sexual relations and emotional issues, such as, “I just had a fight, I’m feeling lonely, I have self-doubts, or I don’t feel comfortable with my life,” Schneider says.
“Children need their parents not to know everything, but they also need their parents to know things of vital importance, even if they can’t tell them directly,” says Cleaver, the therapist. “Often they won’t say so directly, but they’ll leave big clues out. A diary left open in the kitchen or in their room when they know Mom is coming in to clean. Basically they’re saying, `I’m scared. I need you to be scared; I need you to take reasonable action.’ My advice is to pay attention to the clues. Don’t freak out, don’t blame. Take it seriously.”
“It’s not like I hide stuff, it’s like, it’s my life,” says the formerly tongue-pierced Kelly, a sophomore at Francis W. Parker School, a private school on Chicago’s North Side. “She knows I do occasionally (drink alcohol), but it’s not like, `Hey, guess what I did last night.’
“Yeah, she’s pretty cool,” he says of his mother, Lorna Brett, a former aldermanic candidate on Chicago’s Near Northwest Side and former president of the Chicago chapter of the National Organization for Women. “I mean every parent has their one odd, weird strictness.”
His mother’s, he says: “Not being late, and she really, really wanted to know where I was.”
Brett, who at 37 is not so far removed from her high school memories in Traverse City, Mich., has this as her guiding principle of parenting: “It’s like fishing. When you have a big fish on the line, if you give them too much of a line, they fall off. If you hold it too tight, they start fighting and then you’ll lose them. You have to give ’em just enough slack so you tire ’em out, and then you reel them in.
“It’s an incredible balancing act that changes from week to week. Something can be okay one week, and then the next week, as hormones surge, maybe they meet a new friend, maybe it’s summer. You have to be very vigilant.”
Diane House, mother of the motel-seeking Laura as well as two other girls, the youngest of whom just turned 20, says, “Poor Laura, she was my first; I was probably a lot like the FBI and the CIA for her and her friends. On the one hand, I knew they had a really good background, but kids will be kids.”
That’s why she got really involved at their school, Regina Dominican High School in Wilmette, “so I could hear the scuttlebutt. I thought it was a good opportunity to know as much as a parent could possibly know.”
Still, she admits she was outwitted. At least once or twice.
Once: Although she insisted on knowing when Laura was going to a party so she could call the house and make sure the parents were going to be home, it didn’t take Laura long to figure out that if she forgot to mention where she was going, her mother and her friends’ mothers couldn’t make those calls.
Twice: House says she was such a nut about curfew with Laura it’s probably what prompted her second daughter to frequently sleep over at her best friend’s house where, she later found out, they often sneaked out a window to visit a boy down the block.
Looking back, though, there were two little things that might have made a big difference in keeping her girls on the right track: She insisted they always come in and kiss her good night, which afforded her the chance to look them in the face and know what kind of shape they were in.
And even when words were exchanged and sometimes things got heated, House would write a note and leave it in the girls’ room.
“I’d say, `I’m sorry I have to be this way, but I’m your mother. . . .’ And then they’d always write me back and come in my room, and there’d be tears on both sides. It kept the line of communication open. Even when it wasn’t easy.” Kelly Mead, mother of five, including Megan, now a freshman at the University of Maryland at College Park, says that the best time of day for her to talk to her kids is when she’s tucking them in bed at night.
“They’ll open up,” she says, even her big kids. “With teenagers, how their day was is sort of how their whole world is.”
The shoplifted soccer shorts aside, Mead, of Chicago’s DePaul neighborhood, says she has never really worried about what her kids do when she’s not looking.
“Maybe foolishly, but I felt we raised them right, that they’d level with me. If I had a concern, I’d ask Megan point blank.”
And then there’s Kevin McLaughlin, father of 20-year-old Brenna, a sophomore at Columbia College in Chicago who, except for smoking behind her father’s back, steered clear of most trouble back in Point Pleasant Beach, on the New Jersey shore.
McLaughlin had this as his operating principle for Brenna and her brother, who is now 16: “I trust you as far as your first mistake.”
“She would probably tell you I kept her on a pretty short leash,” says McLaughlin, who has been a single dad since Brenna’s high school years. It wasn’t easy, he said, to let the kids know he meant business. When he grounded them, he effectively grounded himself too, he says. “I’d be passin’ up the tickets to the Yankee game, because I go to the Yankee game, they’re out the door the minute I’m gone.
“But it was worth it,” McLaughlin says. “Brenna turned out to be a good person.”
And that, after all, is what it’s all about.
Isn’t it?
Well, Brenna herself offers this bit of teenage truth: “I realized this in high school: It goes both ways for parents and children. The kid’s gonna do what they wanna do, whether the parent likes it or not. And the parent’s gonna find out what the kid’s doing whether they like it or not.”
Maybe that, in the end, is the thing worth remembering.
HOW TO KNOW WHAT YOUR TEEN IS UP TO
Maryse Richards, professor of clinical and developmental psychology at Loyola University Chicago and co-author of the 1994 book “Divergent Realities: The Emotional Lives of Mothers, Fathers and Adolescents,” (Basic Books, out of print) has a handful of ideas, from the sweeping to the specific:
Talk, talk, talk: Keep open communication between you and your child. “That means real openness to what your child is doing, a real interest in what’s going on in your child’s life. Not just a surface interest,” Richards says.
As part of that dialogue, she says, be sure there’s a clarity about values, a clear stating of what’s acceptable, what’s not, and what life principles matter. “It’s sort of a combined, `This is how I believe life should be lived; but how are you living your life? I really care about that.’ “
Walk the walk: Modeling healthy behavior is key. Live your life the way you expect your kids to live theirs. “It’s not appropriate to expect a kid not to smoke when you smoke; it’s not appropriate to expect a kid not to abuse alcohol or even drugs when you do.”
Richards thinks the European approach toward alcohol is “not a bad approach.” That is, the gradual introduction of teenagers to, say, half a beer with a burger, or the occasional small glass of wine with dinner. That way, in the company of their parents, teens learn about alcohol use, they begin to know what it feels like, and the urgency to binge may be nipped, he says.
It’s X o’clock, do you know where your kids are? There’s no substitute for good monitoring, whether it’s making sure your kids come in to say good night to you, face to face, before hitting the pillows, or after school, if parents work outside the home, making sure there’s always a phone call to find out how the day went and what’s happening before Mom and Dad get home.
Spell it out: Set limits. Kids, especially teens, need to know what they can and can’t get away with. “Let them know they’re not allowed to hang out at the mall, except for once in a while,” Richards says. “On the whole, kids need activities that are more structured than that. Kids definitely need downtime, but they don’t need it all afternoon or all weekend.”
Recruit a village: Help your kids develop a network of caring adults; don’t underestimate the value of what sociologists call “extra-parental figures”: coaches, teachers or just a great neighbor down the block who happens to be great with kids, or at least with your kid. “If your kid comes home and says, `I really like this teacher,’ why not say, `Let’s invite them over for the next barbecue.’ Or if you’ve got an adult friend who gets on well with kids, have that friend over. Promote the relationship between these adults and your child.”
Check it out: If your teenager says he’s going to a party at so-and-so’s house, call the parents at that house to make sure they’ll be there. Or if your kids say they’re going camping and everyone else’s parents said it was okay, call the other parents and find out if that’s the story. “It does take the extra 10 to 15 minutes to make sure what’s going on, but it’s worth it to check in with another parent and then decide what you feel comfortable with.”
Know thy teen: “You need to be very thoughtful about your child. If you have a child who toes the line, then you can probably trust that child more. If you have a child who pushes the line, then you need to check in more.”
And don’t forget to let up as teens grow older. “Parents have to gradually adjust their expectations to allow more independent behavior and autonomy. If you don’t, then that causes problems too. Kids start fighting against that and can get into trouble because of that battle.”
SO, HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR CHILD?
When your child was an infant or toddler, you knew what made her happy (some loving attention, a dry diaper and her favorite toy) and what made her sad (the arrival of the baby-sitter and any trip to the doctor that ended with an immunization). As children grow older, it’s natural that they develop full lives away from their parents, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK for parents to be in the dark about that life.
To find out how well parents actually know their youngsters, Gretchen Sauer, a counselor at Downers Grove South High School, offers this quiz.
For those who have more than one child, Sauer recommends jotting down your answers on separate pieces of paper. Then schedule a time to sit down with each of your children to see how well you did. Not only will the quiz give you an opportunity to grade yourself, but it also can serve as a tool to learn more about your family. Like this little guy below…
1. Who is your child’s best friend?
2. What color would he/she like his/her room to be?
3. Who is your child’s greatest hero?
4. What embarrasses him/her most?
5. What is his/her biggest fear?
6. In gym, would your child rather play basketball, do exercises or run relays?
7. What is his/her favorite kind of music?
8. What person outside the family has most influenced your child’s life?
9. What are his/her favorite and least favorite subjects in school?
10. Of what accomplishment is your child proudest?
11. What is your child’s biggest complaint about the family?
12. What is his/her favorite television show?
13. What sport does your child most enjoy?
14. If you could buy your child anything in the world, what would be his/her first choice?
15. Who is your child’s favorite teacher?
16. What really makes your child angry?
17. Does your child feel liked by the children at school?
18. What would your child like to be when he/she grows up?
19. What has been the biggest disappointment in your child’s life this year?
20. Does your child feel too small or too big for his/her age?
21. What gift from you does your child cherish?
22. What would your child’s choice be for a vacation: a camping trip, a visit to a big city, or a boat trip?
23. Which of these chores does your child dislike most: drying dishes, cleaning his/her room or taking out the trash?
24. What non-school book has your child recently read?
25. What is his/her favorite family occasion?
26. What foods does your child like and dislike most?
27. What nicknames is your child called in school?
28. When does your child prefer to do homework: after school, after dinner, before bed, or in the morning before school?
29. Which would your child prefer to have as a pet: a cat, a dog, a bird, or a fish?
30. What is your child’s most prized possession?
Scoring
25-30: You are a top-notch observer and listen well to the likes and needs of your children. Keep up the good work.
14-24: Although you know quite a bit about your child, perhaps you need to tune in more closely.
0-13: You haven’t been communicating as much as you should. Perhaps you have been preoccupied with your own concerns, or your child may be very unexpressive. Now’s the time to begin talking, perhaps over dinner, while doing dishes or when you take a walk together.
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E-mail us at fam-ctc@tribune.com–or write to us at Family Section, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave. 5th Floor Features, Chicago IL 60611–and let us know how your session went. What was the biggest surprise? How well did you do? We’ll print some of the best responses in a later issue of Family.
