Michael Williams scoffs at the parent in this article who allows her teenage daughter to wear a t-shirt bearing a sexually suggestive statement. As Michael sees it:
As I’m learning with dogs and dominance challenges, if you expect to lead the pack then it’s important to win every single time. Parents who aren’t willing to fight and win every battle probably discover soon thereafter that they aren’t able to lead and control their child. I suppose that this dominance role should diminish as the child gets older and takes control of her own life, but I don’t think that transition should be allowed to complete until the child is self-sufficient.
I disagree. The difference between a child and a dog is that you expect the child to grow up into a man or women. I’ve seen pushover parents ruin their children with too much permissiveness, but I’ve also seen parents destroy their children with too much control.
In the minds of these over-controlling parents, growing up is always something that the child will do out in the future sometime, but never right now. Right now the imperative is always to keep the child on a tight rein. Then these parents are astonished to discover that their heavily controlled 18-year-old has the mind and impulse control of a 12-year-old.
If you want your child to grow up, then she needs to be in the habit of making decisions for herself and experiencing the consequences. If you don’t give her a steadily increasing diet of decisionmaking authority over her own life, then of course she’ll go out of control when she gets full authority dumped on her around 18.
What control-oriented parents get wrong is the assumption that the child is a wild animal constantly on the verge of doing something horribly wrong. That assumption makes itself true. Children naturally tend to agree with their parents. So if the parents believe that the child is basically a wild animal, then the child will probably believe it, too. She will believe, as her parents do, that she is incapable of self-control. And she will act accordingly, prompting the parents to exert even more control, and so on.
It doesn’t have to work that way. The amazing gift that children give their parents is an immense store of credibility. The little tykes will believe whatever you tell them—as long as it’s consistent with their reality. Many, perhaps most, parents destroy this wonderful asset by directly contradicting the child’s daily experience, usually by stating wishes as facts, or by making impossible demands, e.g.:
- “Some day I’ll take you to Disneyland.” And then there’s no trip on the child’s very short time horizon.
- “You better stop that or I’ll come over there and . . .” And the parent drifts back into the TV show.
- “That retarded child is really just like everybody else.” Except for all the obvious ways in which he’s totally different.
- “If you’re just friendly with other children, then they’ll be nice to you.” Even that kid who beats you up after school every day.
And to the teenage girl: “You don’t need to be thinking about boys. Just focus on your schoolwork.” Even though her raging hormones are forcing her to think about boys, sex, babies, or marriage several times an hour—including while she’s asleep.
From a very early age, you have a chance to present your child with your worldview, and the child is naturally inclined to accept that worldview—but only if it makes sense in the child’s world. So the real challenge of parenting is a challenge to the parents’ worldview. You get to put on a sales pitch, as it were, trying to convince the child to see the world as you do. And if your vision is incomplete or incoherent, then how can you blame the child for not adopting it?
The linked article provides a dramatic example. Sure, adults cringe when teenage girls wear slutty shirts. But should we force them to wear demure pants and long sleeves every day?
The reality is that those girls are full of estrogen, and at a very deep level they want to make babies. They know that they shouldn’t, and they generally don’t. But the desire, the pressure, is always there. That is their reality. That is their subjective experience morning, noon, and night. Adults who try to chase away the manifestations of that very natural desire seem to think that they can make it go away. But all they accomplish by denying reality is to make the adults’ worldview less appealing to the teens.
It’s stupid to tell a teenage girl that she can’t try to attract the attention of boys until she’s 18—you might as well try to hold back the tide. And it’s reasonable to discourage her from acting on that interest on the basis of the practical dangers involved. But it’s best to say: “Of course you want to attract boys. And that’s great. So let’s talk about how you can do that while being safe and without coming across as a slut.”
When you leave the adult’s reality and speak from within the child’s reality, then you’re making it possible for her to agree with you and share your worldview. But if you stay in the adult’s reality and insist that your little girl not think those dirty thoughts about boys—well, you might as well try to convince her that grass is purple and the sky is green, because you’re directly contradicting a basic fact of her daily life.
You can cling to the adults’ idealistic notion of what a teen’s life ought to be like, or you can view the teen’s life as it really is and influence it. But you can’t do both.