But when I talked to parents of older teenagers, they practically laughed in my face, saying things like “Ha! Wait until he takes the car without your permission and you have no idea where he is!” or “You think it's bad now, in a few years you'll be up at three a.m. every night, just like you were when they were babies, only this time you'll be waiting up for him, thinking he's been murdered outside a dance club.”
The parents whose kids were in their early twenties also told scary stories. High school was ancient history to them; they were more interested in college nightmares and postcollege horror stories.
There were the Kids Who Refused to Graduate, who just kept enrolling semester after semester at colleges around the country, generating tuition bills from New Hampshire to New Mexico.
And there were also the Kids Who Came Home After College, who couldn't— or wouldn't— get jobs to match their degree in obscure things like ceramic arts.
Even some of the success stories were hard to bear, like the twenty- three- year- olds who were already earning twice what I earn or more. Inevitably, they worked at Wall Street firms, in jobs with titles like “trader” and “consultant.” What exactly they did every day when they got to their offices, I had no idea.
There was one story of an older kid, though, that did make me feel better— enormously better— and I held his mother's words in my mind for months after Taz got the Bad Report Card. This mother's son was in many ways far more difficult than mine. He was a brilliant boy, but he couldn't cope with school. He eventually dropped out and got his GED. I had long admired the fact that rather than excoriating the kid, his parents had recognized how unique his situation was, supported his decisions, and never wavered in their love for him.
Both parents have advanced degrees from prestigious universities, so I could only imagine how hard it was for them to explain to friends and relatives that their son was not going to college. Their faith in their child was eventually rewarded, however. He was a computer whiz, and at an age when most kids are still working on getting a degree, he got a job at a high- tech firm where what you know is far more important than how you did in school. In short order, he was earning a good salary, had a nice lifestyle, and loved his job. His parents were bursting with pride, and rightfully so.
I wondered if I'd have the mettle to stick up for Taz, the way they did with their son, if he didn't end up taking the conventional path through school.
But something the computer whiz's mother said stuck with me. She and her husband had sought help from a therapist in dealing with their unusual son, and she told me that the therapist had convinced her that it was not the parents’ job to serve as rules enforcer for the school.
Yes, you can help with homework if your son asks, and you can create a schedule that sets aside a reasonable amount of time each day to do homework, but you are not the homework policeman, this mother explained. Your job is not to check each night to see that it is done. If they don't do their schoolwork, they have to deal with the consequences, even if the consequences mean failure.
What is the parents’ job, she said, is to make sure that kids grow up to be decent, independent, fully functioning human beings.
So simple, and yet so overwhelming. It's actually easier to be the homework policeman than to play Pygmalion and shape a soulless lump of clay into a good person. How had I done so far? I asked myself. Well, Taz was definitely independent— I had succeeded a little too well in that department— but was he a decent human being?
I thought so. I hoped so. I know that he gives his seat up on the subway to old people and little children. I know that he is kind to animals. I know that he would give his last dollar to a homeless person, but is that good or naive? He was sometimes mean to his brother, but on the other hand, if Sport was having a problem with a kid on the playground, I could always dispatch Taz to go down there and straighten out whatever it was. He did call that teacher in middle school a retard, and that wasn't very nice. But maybe that was an isolated incident? Maybe he'd matured a little since then?
Either way, I thought about that mother's advice for months after the Bad Report Card. I wasn't the Homework Policeman, I reminded myself. I was merely in charge of raising a good person. You could say it was an epiphany.
I could only hope Taz would have his own epiphany about his mad fun school. He might be a decent human being, and maybe I Am a Terrible Mother, but if he was going to stay at this school, he was going to have to start checking the homework assignments on his own.
One night, there was a meeting at his school about how parents could help new students adjust. I told him, quite innocently, that I was planning to go to it, only to see a look of utter panic on his face.
“OH MY GOD, Mom, PLEASE, please, promise me you won't go,” he responded. “That would be SO embarrassing!”
“How would that be embarrassing? I already went to your school one time to talk to your adviser about your grades, remember? Think about how embarrassing that was for me— my son, the kid with all the Cs and Ds! So why would it be embarrassing for you if I went to one of these meetings where nobody's even going to know I'm there?”
“Well, you know, because you're my MOTHER! Don't you get it?”
No, I didn't get it. He also didn't want me to go to the school auction, or the school play, or the school “get to know the principal” breakfast. Apparently, merely having to acknowledge in a public place that I exist, that he is not an orphan living in a cardboard box under the West Side Highway, but that he in fact has a mother who cares deeply about his future, would be enough to cause him complete and total humiliation.
Then I remembered that after Taz was born, Elon called his own mother up and apologized for refusing to walk next to her when he was an obnoxious teenager who didn't want anyone to know that he had a mother. Holding his newborn son made him realize how hurtful it must have been to be rejected by the child you devoted yourself to all those years. Maybe, if I am very lucky, some day Taz will have that same epiphany when he is a father— many, many years from now.
In the meantime, I was going to go to that meeting whether he wanted me to or not. I wimped out on telling him about it, though; I pulled a Jackie O, wore big sunglasses and a scarf around my head, and slunk into the cafeteria without signing the parent attendance sheet. As I arrived, a mother was relating to the dean a story that sounded like it could have come from the Annals of Raising Taz.
“My son seems like a fairly smart boy, and so do most of his friends,” she said. “But they keep getting Cs on everything. They just don't want to seem to work hard enough to do well. What should I do?”
The dean said this was a phenomenon that he'd often seen, especially among male freshmen. He counseled that the first year of high school was a difficult transition for many kids from middle school, and that even most of the underachieving boys did much better as time went on.
Well, at least I wasn't the only one with this problem, and maybe, if the dean was right, I had reason to be hopeful that things would improve.
ne of my favorite conversations to have with other parents is about how they did all sorts of bad things when they were teenagers, and their parents never knew.
But now that they are parents, they are certain that their own teenagers never do anything wrong.
This makes getting real advice about how to deal with a teenager who is doing something wrong next to impossible, because nobody will admit to having that sort of teenager— unless, of course, they get a call from school or the cops. At which point it's too late to get advice from other parents because the way forward will pretty much be mandated by a judge or a principal.
Are teenagers really that good at keeping secrets, or are parents just good at deluding themselves? Or do we all want to hold on to some vision of ourselves as young smart- alecky renegades, bad boys and bad girls, who weren't so nerdy that we never sneaked a cigarette, a beer, or a joint, but who were smart enough not to get caught?
Not long after the B
ad Report Card from high school, that smell— the smell that drove us nuts when Taz started using Axe— had returned to our house, and with it all of our old suspicions that he was smoking. What exactly he might be smoking, we weren't sure.
Of course, as usual, Taz insisted that he was innocent of all accusations. We knew that he was hanging out with a kid who did smoke, and, of course, that could explain the smell of cigarettes on Taz's clothes. We talked ad nauseam about the dangers of secondhand smoke, and we told him to tell his friend, “You can't smoke around me,” for both their sakes, but we doubted that he would. And even if he did say something to the other kid, we realized it probably wouldn't do any good.
Taz also pointed out that he didn't need to hang out with this kid to be around smokers— if he wanted, he could get his own cigarettes, and pot, too, and anything else he wanted, for that matter. He said it was “all over his school, all over the neighborhood, all over the freaking world, and you're living in a dream if you don't think so.”
I mentioned the names of a couple of kids his age who I was sure didn't smoke, who I was sure were perfect role models. “They're not tempted by all these bad things,” I said.
He looked at me and grinned.
“What, what's the grin for?” I said.
“I'll never tell,” he said, and walked away, suggesting, without saying as much, that even the kids who seemed perfect had their secrets.
But that crazy smell kept haunting us, and when he wasn't blaming his friend's cigarettes, he blamed eau de Axe. Finally, in a fit one day, I threw away all the Axe. He had quite a collection in there— three or four cans. I told him he could use the Ban Roll- On like me and his father.
And then I set out to discover if I really was living in a dream world. Am I hopelessly naive, or is every teenager in the world really doing bad things in secret, and none of us is willing to acknowledge reality?
My friend Barbara, a perfectly upstanding suburban mother whose daughter has been shuttled in a large air-conditioned SUV from lesson to lesson from the time she was two, often laughs about the sex and drug adventures she had in high school. But she's certain her teenage daughter is chaste.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I just know,” she said. “I can tell.”
Which reminded me of when I was in high school and my best friend Susan and I were trying to figure out which girls were still virgins and which weren't.
“They walk different afterward,” Susan assured me. “You can always tell.”
Well, I tried to figure it out just by watching people walk down the hallway at school, but honestly, all I could tell was that some girls had big butts and some didn't.
Then there are all the people I know who spent half their teenage years stoned. One friend from when I was a kid, Cindy, wasn't exactly hiding it— the red eyes, the smell. She was so addicted that once she tried to give pot up for twenty- four hours on a bet and couldn't.
I sometimes imagine calling Cindy's mother up and saying, “How could you not have known what a pot-head Cindy was?”
But maybe she did know. Maybe she just didn't know what to say.
But while some mothers deny the possibility that their kids could be doing all the bad things they did when they were teenagers, others say the opposite.
“They all do it,” one mom told me matter- of- factly. Her son was a few years older than Taz, and he'd admitted to her that he and his friends do occasionally smoke pot. She told me she smoked when she was a teenager but eventually stopped.
“But what about the ones who don't stop?” I said.
“My opinion?” she said. “They're self- medicating. They have other problems, and they're smoking because they can't deal with their lives.”
Did Taz need to self- medicate? I decided to find out.
“Taz,” I said one day when the time seemed right, “is something bothering you?”
He was listening to his iPod, writing on his Facebook page on his laptop, had the TV on in front of him, and also had the house phone and his cell phone nearby just in case he needed more stimulation. Not surprisingly, he hadn't heard a word I said.
“Huh?” he said when he realized I was trying to get his attention.
“Is there anything we need to talk about? Any problems you might have? Because you know that Dad and I are here to listen. And if it's something serious, or something you don't want to tell us, you have an aunt who loves you, too.”
He looked at me like I was out of my mind. “What are you talking about?”
“I just want to make sure that you're not smoking because you're, I don't know, depressed, or worried, or you think you have to smoke to be cool or something.”
“Mom, I told you, I don't smoke!”
“OK, just checking!” I said cheerily. “Just making sure you're not, you know, self- medicating!”
He gave me another one of those “I have no idea what you're saying” looks, shook his head, mumbled, “Whatever,” and went back to the computer.
It's strange comparing my attitudes about all this to my parents’. Both of them smoked several packs of nonfilter cigarettes a day, and I don't remember either of them ever lecturing me about cigarettes. Smoking was so widely accepted when I was a little girl that if you ask anyone my age what they made in kindergarten as presents for Mother's and Father's Days, a significant proportion will rightly recall making ashtrays out of modeling clay.
Yes, ashtrays were a de rigueur item in every household then. Even if your parents didn't smoke, they needed ashtrays in the living room for when company came, and it was considered perfectly appropriate to have five- and six- year- olds making these items in school to bring home as gifts. Sure, we made pot holders from those little colored loops, and yarn- embossed picture frames, too, but it's the ashtray concept that seems mind- boggling now. If you told this to kids nowadays, they'd never believe you.
And, by the way, in a lot of schools and day care centers nowadays, they've given up the concept of celebrating Mother's and Father's Days altogether. There are so many kids being raised by single parents, grandparents, gay parents, foster parents, and other unconventional households, that acknowledging Mother's and Father's Days makes some kids feel left out and sad. So some schools have banned both holidays.
I just hope that every kid has someone in this world who's crazy about them, whether it's a mother, a father, a grandparent, a second cousin twice removed, or even just the dog. Maybe schools that are worried about hurt feelings on Mother's and Father's Days could just substitute a random day and call it Someone Who Loves You Day. And instead of making ashtrays for the person, maybe six- year- olds could just sign a pledge on a drawing of a big heart that says, “I promise not to drive you crazy when I turn thirteen.”
The other thing that's changed since I was a kid are the legal ramifications of smoking pot. It didn't used to be all that unusual to find people walking down the street smoking pot. You'd go to a concert in the park and the air was thick with it. When I got to college and settled in my dorm, who was living down the hall from me but a guy who was putting himself through school by selling pot. But nobody got arrested for these things.
Now we know plenty of instances of kids Taz's age getting busted for pot. The cops see them in the park, or someone at school finds out they have something on them, and the next thing you know, their parents— normal middle-class, law-abiding people who care about SAT scores and dental floss— are in court begging the judge to expunge their kids’ criminal records.
The school I attended as a teenager even had a smoking bathroom for the kids. The thinking was, you can't stop kids from experimenting with cigarettes, so just contain it. It was considered a progressive concept, believe it or not, and sometimes kids would smoke pot in there, too, to which the school administration turned a blind eye. Now you couldn't even get away with a smoking bathroom for grown- ups, much less for kids.
I decided to ask my friend Linda for her take on all of this. She has no ch
ildren but for some reason seems to have more common sense about raising children than any mother I know, maybe because she has nothing at stake.
Or maybe it's because of the jobs she's had. She's been a professor and she's worked at a zoo. Dealing with college students and wild animals is probably not that different from dealing with adolescents.
She herself doesn't smoke pot, but she told me she thought that “probably there is nothing really wrong with smoking pot except that it's illegal. But no one trusts adolescents to deal with nuance, I guess.”
She pointed out, and rightly so, that “the illegal part should be enough by itself— I mean, isn't ‘don't do illegal stuff a pretty straightforward thing to demand of your offspring? You don't feel the need to justify why stealing or any number of other things are illegal, right?”
She added that it should be a given that kids are not allowed to break the law— at least while you are still providing food and shelter to them— no matter what people think of the particular law in question.
For the record, I smoked pot maybe a couple of times (though I was older than Taz). Looking back on it, let me just say it was mostly a waste of time, hanging out with moronic people doing idiotic things. And PS: My mother definitely never, ever knew.
Well, OK: Maybe she knew one time, after I'd spent the weekend at a friend's house when, you guessed it, her parents were away. I came home, and, well, let's just say that I was not in good shape.
But my mother never said anything to me about it. Instead, she called my sister, who was older and no longer living at home. My sister refused to confirm my mother's suspicions, and my mother was too chicken, or too befuddled, to mention it directly to me.
But now that I'm the mother, see, it's different.
I mean, I completely understand the need for both parties to deny and obfuscate. It's a natural reaction. From the kid's point of view, not only do you not want to get in trouble, but you also actually think you're doing the parents a favor by protecting them from something they wish with all their hearts wasn't so. It's a strange sort of reverse paternalism.
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