From the beginning, Bill and I have tried to equip Chelsea with her own batch of shovels. We have tried to help her to develop her own spiritual life. We have also tried to anticipate the challenges she will face and to assist her in meeting them. One of our chief worries, naturally, has been how to protect her from the inevitable fallout of her father’s public career.
In 1986, my husband ran for reelection as governor of Arkansas. During his previous campaigns, Chelsea had been young enough that we could monitor what she heard or saw about her father’s political activities. But now she was six, and much more a part of the village in her own right. She went to school, she could read, and she was generally more aware of what was happening in the world outside our home.
When two combative former governors decided to run against Bill, we knew we had to brace ourselves for a messy campaign. We discussed the situation and decided to prepare Chelsea so she would not be surprised or overwhelmed if she heard someone say something nasty about her father. It is not a pleasant duty, teaching harsh truths to a child, but we wanted her to develop the skills she would need to cope with whatever life sent her way. And we wanted to teach them in a way that would promote her confidence in dealing with the world, rather than making her cynical about it.
One night at the dinner table, I told her, “You know, Daddy is going to run for governor again. If he wins, we would keep living in this house, and he would keep trying to help people. But first we have to have an election. And that means other people will try to convince voters to vote for them instead of for Daddy. One of the ways they may do this is by saying terrible things about him.”
Chelsea’s eyes went wide, and she asked, “What do you mean?”
We explained that in election campaigns, people might even tell lies about her father in order to win, and we wanted her to be ready for that. Like most parents, we had taught her that it was wrong to lie, and she struggled with the idea, saying over and over, “Why would people do that?”
I didn’t have a good answer for that one. (I still don’t.) Instead, we asked her to pretend she was her dad and was making a speech about why people should vote for her.
She said something like, “I’m Bill Clinton. I’ve done a good job and I’ve helped a lot of people. Please vote for me.”
We praised her and explained that now her daddy was going to pretend to be one of the men running against him. So Bill said terrible things about himself, like how he was really mean to people and didn’t try to help them.
Chelsea got tears in her eyes and said, “Why would anybody say things like that?”
Our role-playing helped Chelsea to experience, in the privacy of our home, the feelings of any person who sees someone she loves being personally attacked. As we continued the exercise during a few dinners, she gradually gained mastery over her emotions and some insight into the situations that might arise. She took turns playing her father and one of his opponents, former governor Orval Faubus. She worked on her speeches and asked questions. For example, when she learned that as governor, Faubus had been responsible for closing Central High School in Little Rock in 1958, she mentioned in one of her pretend speeches that he closed schools to keep black children out, while she (Bill Clinton) would never do that.
Bill and I have continued our dialogue about politics with Chelsea over the years, helping her to discern motives and develop perspective so that she can form her own judgments regarding what she sees and hears. Looking back, I am glad that we started to prepare her at a tender age, because by the time her father ran for President, we were even less in control of the messages to which she was exposed. Each time she went out into the world I ached, afraid of what or whom she might encounter. But I reminded myself that we had done the best we knew how to do under the circumstances. We had tried to give her the tools to deal with the hurt from which we could not shield her, and we had to hope that as a resilient young woman, she would know how to use them.
Before and after we moved into the White House, I had the good fortune and honor to spend time with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. I admired the way she had raised her own children under extraordinary circumstances, and I was eager to hear her thoughts on the challenges that come with parenting when it feels like the whole world is watching.
She stressed the importance of giving children as normal a life as possible, of granting them the chance to fight their private battles while protecting them from public exposure. She told me how, when John was a little boy, he had once been harassed by a bully while riding his bike in a park. The Secret Service had stepped in to prevent an altercation. Jackie told them that the next time something like that happened, they should let John fend for himself. He needed to learn how to take care of himself, because there wouldn’t always be a Secret Service agent or a concerned mother two steps behind him.
These may sound like the problems of privileged parents and children, and they are. But they are not so different in nature from the balancing act every parent must attempt: when to protect and when to stand back, when to hold on and when to let go. Much as we want to keep our children from harm, we won’t always be there for them, and sometimes the most sympathetic thing we can do is to let them tough it out for themselves.
When my family moved to Park Ridge, I was four years old and eager to make new friends. Every time I walked out the door, with a bow in my hair and a hopeful look on my face, the neighborhood kids would torment me, pushing me, knocking me down, and teasing me until I burst into tears and ran back in the house, where I would stay for the rest of the day. Such was the fate of the new kid on the block. After this had gone on for several weeks, my mother met me one day as I ran in the door. She took me by the shoulders, told me there was no room for cowards in our house, and sent me back outside. I was shocked, and so were the neighborhood kids, who had not expected to see me so soon. When they challenged me again, I stood up for myself and finally won some friends. It was not until much later that my mother told me she had watched from behind the dining room drapes, shaking with worry, to see what would happen.
Now that I’m a mother myself, I know how hard it is to make decisions like that. My daughter would describe me as overprotective, although she generally indulges me and puts up with my worrying good-naturedly. Of course, there are places where Bill and I draw the line to protect her. We have actively shielded Chelsea from the press, for example, believing that children deserve their childhood and cannot have it in the public limelight. It isn’t fair to let them be defined by the media before they have the chance to define themselves. We have taken some flak for this, but more than a few reporters have privately told us that we are doing the right thing.
When it comes to everyday life, however, parents have to concentrate on instilling self-discipline, self-control, and self-respect early on, and then must allow their children to practice those skills the way they would let them exercise their muscles or their brains. As my mother taught me, even very young children can be given a sense of strength in the face of indifference or cruelty. Part of that strength comes from experiencing appropriate discipline.
THE NEED for discipline usually arises when children hit their “terrible twos.” This is the time when kids begin to test the limits of their powers, issuing endless edicts and vetoes in an effort to control the world around them.
Many parents find themselves unsettled by their new role, which seems to change overnight from all-powerful caregiver to cop. Young parents, in particular, may be frustrated by a toddler’s newfound assertiveness and stubbornness. Frustration can quickly give way to anger, and worse. We have all seen a parent slap a child for a seemingly trivial infraction.
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:
Punishment may need to be part of discipline on certain occasions, but it should follow promptly on the misbehavior, be short, and respect the feelings of the child. After any punishment is over (such as a time-out or withdrawal of a treat), you should sit down with your punished child and assure her: “I love you, but I can’t let you do this. Someday you’ll learn to stop yourself, and then I won’t need to stop you.”
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:
We mothers—maybe especially when there’s no father at home—want so for our children. We want to give them the good things and protect them from the bad things. There’s nothing wrong with that—until it’s carried to such an extreme that it keeps the children from growing up. That’s what I did with Roger, and that’s what I was trying to change when I decided to “stop mothering” him. By then, though, the damage was done. All this became clear to me one day in the spring of 1985. I was working in the yard and I heard a chirping noise. I looked around and saw a baby bird on the ground…. There in the nest was the mother bird, just making an awful racket…. She had kicked her baby out of the nest and was now lecturing him about getting busy and learning to fly. And I thought, who’s the bird brain here? That mother bird is smarter than I am.
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 ret
reat, 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.”
It Takes a Village Page 14
