A 15-year-old girl in London is hoping for a special gift for her 16th birthday: new breasts. She believes hers are a tad too small. Her parents are eager to grant her wish. The British tabloids are filled with stories of condemnation, the usual societal soul-searching about the objectification of women’s bodies and our culture of superficiality. The interesting part of the story is not that a 15-year-old girl wants bigger breasts. Every teenager wants some body part to be bigger, smaller, rounder or flatter. Teen body angst is a natural state that used to exist in tension with another natural state–call it the Law of Parental Negativity. “No you can’t wear that. No you can’t do that. No you can’t buy that.”
Only now so many middle-class Baby Boomer parents have forgotten how to say no. This might be inexcusable, but in our defense, I offer this rationalization: Maybe we stopped saying no because all our kids want are exactly the same things we want. Namely, the newest, fastest, coolest and biggest. Cell phones, PlayStations, DVDs, computers, cosmetic surgery.
We at least had the self-respect to want things that repulsed our parents: long, greasy hair, loud music, drugs. Our identity was forged in stark relief to the identity of our parents. They wanted things; we wanted happiness. They wanted status; we wanted justice.
Then we had kids. And we understood exactly why mom wanted the newest dishwasher, why dad wanted a new car every two years. Gadgets are the opiate of the adult masses. Ok, so maybe we were a little harsh on our parents. Maybe they weren’t so superficial, after all. But they were so uncool. You would have died if you had to dress like your dad or listen to your mother’s music. Your room had the only cool stuff in the whole house. Our parents had nothing we coveted except power and independence.
Not so today. Our kids borrow our jeans and tennis shoes. They steal our CDs. The stuff we buy at Pottery Barn and Pier I ends up in their rooms. They want to go with us to Starbucks.
They may not think we’re really cool, but we certainly aren’t the embarrassments our parents were. And therein lies the problem. We’re just a little too cool to be parents, whose job description requires the ability to say no without even listening to the question. Repeatedly. Not us. We listen. We talk. We process. We discuss. We understand. We, too, questioned authority once upon a time. And we wanted explanations. So now we feel compelled to provide them. Or simply to abdicate our authority altogether. And we do so at great risk. Not to ourselves but to our children, who are growing up without anything to rebel against.
We have duped them with our Baby-Boomer-pseudo-cool. They’ve been seduced by our TV shows, our easy acceptance of alternative music, our history of experimentation, our love of the quick fix. They’ve failed to see that we’re just as shallow as our parents were. Maybe more so. Our kids don’t know how much we need them to shake up society as we did in the ’60s and ’70s–before we sold out. Or bought out. Every generation is given the power to change the world for just a brief moment before the world swallows them whole. If they spend that moment worrying about plastic surgery, cell phones and money, they will have missed the possibilities of youth.
