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The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis
of Adolescence
Posted January 19, 2005 thepeoplesvoice.org
By: Elliott Currie, author of Crime and Punishment in America
Published by Metropolitan Books (February 1, 2005)
(ISBN: 0-8050-6763-9) $26.00 US / $36.95 CAN
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a sharp and compassionate investigation of the root causes of the epidemic of drug abuse, violence, and despair among "mainstream" American teenagers
In the past few years, it has become painfully clear that all is not well with the children of middle-class America. Beyond the shootings at Columbine, hardly a day goes by without stories of drug use, binge drinking, fatal accidents, and senseless suicides among middle-class adolescents. But the "why" of these tragedies has eluded us.
In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed sociologist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliott Currie rejects such predictable answers as TV violence, permissiveness, and inherent evil. Instead, drawing on years of interviews, he links this crisis to a pervasive "culture of exclusion" that has left young people facing an ever more unforgiving world. Currie describes a society in which severe punishment and "zero tolerance" of adolescent misbehavior have become the norm, where "tough love" and medications have replaced engagement and guidance. Broadening his inquiry, he dissects the changes in middle-class life that have enforced newly rigid divides between winners and losers and imposed an extraordinarily harsh culture-and not just on kids.
Vivid, compelling, and deeply empathetic, The Road to Whatever is a profound investigation of what has gone wrong for so many American teenagers and a stark indictment of a society that has lost the will-or the capacity-to care.
Elliott Currie is the author of Confronting Crime, Reckoning, and Crime and Punishment in America (0-8050-6016-2). An internationally recognized authority on youth and crime, he is a professor of criminology, law, and society at the University of California, Irvine.
Excerpt,
from 'The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence'
© 2004 by Elliott Currie The belief that teenagers are adrift because something has gone wrong with the traditional family has been prominent in the popular discussion of youth problems for generations. But in recent years the lament about the "breakdown" of the family has increasingly centered on the idea that parents have lost the upper hand--that we have become a society that is too lenient and indulgent with children. We are far too tolerant when they break the rules, far too forgiving of their "bad choices." As a recent bestselling book on raising children in "an indulgent age" puts it, "Parents give their children too much and expect too little." To drive home its point that parents are besieged today by "an overall sense of entitlement" among their children, the book's cover features a picture of a bratty child making a face at the reader. The idea that youthful entitlement and a lack of discipline are at the root of the problems of American families has stimulated a host of self-consciously "tough" social policies in recent years, from "zero tolerance" of student misbehavior in the public schools to the growing use of adult courts to sentence juvenile offenders, and it has become the mantra of a nationwide movement for "parents' rights." Dale's mother's enthusiastic support of "the tough-love thing," for example, is widely shared: the International Tough Love organization, which claims more than five hundred "support groups" in the United States (as well as Canada, Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa), is based on the "core belief" that "parents have rights too"--among them the right to "stop helping your child and start taking care of yourself."
But the idea that teenagers get into trouble because they feel too entitled and their families too solicitous fits badly, as Dale's story suggests, with the real-world experience of many American teenagers, including those in this book. Far from being lenient or indulgent, their parents were often simultaneously punitive and heedless. The inner culture of their families embodied a harsh and neglectful individualism that worked in multiple ways to breed the problems that ultimately overwhelmed them. Their homes were not places where they could feel progressively more competent and self-assured but arenas where they came to feel progressively worse about themselves and less certain that they were, at bottom, worth very much.
Typically, my interviewees grew up in families in which it was easy to fail and difficult to find either sustained attention or consistent approval. To an unusual degree, moreover, they were left on their own to deal with life's uncertainties and attend to their emotional (and sometimes even practical) needs. Many grew up within what we could call a high-demand, low-support environment. At worst, their parents' approval was contingent on their meeting rigid standards of competitive performance that were hard, if not impossible, to meet--all the more so because these parents often did little to help their children develop the emotional or intellectual tools that would have enabled them to perform on the level expected of them.
In these families, too, children's behavior was often viewed in stark black and white. children were quickly defined as either "in" or "out"--either basically OK or, in some fundamental sense, damaged goods. These families, in other words, tended to be remarkably intolerant of deviance on the part of their children--even if the parents themselves struggled with serious problems of their own, such as heavy drinking or drug abuse. They were also highly punitive families, in which the rules of acceptable behavior were narrowly drawn and the reaction to breaking them unusually severe or rejecting. In most of these families, it was easy for children to "mess up" but hard for them to get help when they did. And when, as often happened, they began to get into more serious trouble as a result, the family's response frequently set in motion a downward spiral. Further evidence of failure or bad character was met with still more punishment and rejection, which, in turn, plunged ado- lescents deeper into a sense of failure and alienation and confirmed their sense of themselves as flawed and unworthy people. As the cycle progressed, they were pushed farther away, emotionally and sometimes physically, from the family, and they slid or stumbled more and more definitively into a world mainly populated by others in the same boat--kids who had begun to be defined, and to define themselves, as outsiders or "screwups."
In these families, adolescents were not reliably contained, cared for, and guided through the trials of growing up: they were forced to sink or swim on their own and punished or abandoned if they sank. Many of them swam--and their resilience is both impressive and encouraging. But many sank, and they sank in ways that put them in grave danger. Their families, in short, reflected a broader culture of neglectful and punitive individualism--a modern social Darwinism in which those who are able to do well on their own, meet expectations, play by the rules, and play successfully are generally able to get along and even to prosper, while those who cannot do so face what is often an escalating process of abandonment, punishment, and exclusion. It is that culture--not "indulgence" or entitlement-that helped to propel these teenagers into the perilous state of not caring very much about what happened to them.
Four themes are especially important in understanding the character of this culture and its fateful impact on children and adolescents in America. I call them the inversion of responsibility, the problem of contingent worth, the intolerance of transgression, and the rejection of nurturance. In the real world, these themes are rarely found in isolation. I've teased them apart here, somewhat artificially, to show how each contributes to an environment that makes growing up unduly difficult for teenagers in the American mainstream. They represent a kind of mosaic, a pattern that, in one combination or another, turns up repeatedly in the lives of troubled adolescents.
On Their Own: The Inversion of Responsibility
One of the most common laments among troubled middle-class youth is that they were saddled with too much responsibility for managing their lives as they were growing up. They experienced childhood and adolescence not as a time when they were "brought up" in any meaningful sense by competent and admirable adults but as one when they had to figure out how to navigate life on their own. Often, they will say that, even when they were small children, they "had to be the adult" because no one else was. This is a problem with many shades: the degree of parental abdication ranges from the subtle to the glaring. Some describe their parents as having been basically AWOL--as having, for all practical purposes, abandoned (or never taken on) anything resembling an authoritative and nurturing role in their lives. They speak of parents almost wholly absorbed in their own "issues" or, at the extreme, in a state of something like serial collapse. In these circumstances, some teenagers wind up having, literally, to take care of their parents; at the very least, they are forced to conclude, early on, that if they do not learn to take care of themselves, it is not certain that anyone will take care of them at all. At worst, they may be essentially discarded by their parents--something we once assumed happened only in lower-class families.
Sometimes, their parents seem simply overwhelmed and unable to cope--and, as I'll suggest later, the social and economic situation of the middle class today has made this a disturbingly common condition. But there is often more involved. For many of these parents, this inversion of responsibility is not simply a reaction forced on them by external pressures: it is what they believe is right. It reflects their broader views about responsibility and mutuality, and they justify it in a variety of ways. On the simplest level, parents may explain their willingness to abandon the parental role on the ground that the child is just too much trouble for them to handle-even the cause of the family's problems. The parents may complain that they are too fragile to deal with a child who is so burdensome. More frequently, the justifications draw on deeper cultural themes-ideologies about the proper role of parents and, beyond that, the proper place of "help" and support in general. The withdrawal from commitment to their children is rooted in a thin and ultimately self-serving individualism: they believe that children need to learn to "make good choices," and making good choices is not something that anyone else can do for them. They believe that it is bad for children (as for adults) to be given too much help in dealing with life, and they often complain that their own children make demands for nurturance and tolerance at a level that, in their view, parents should not have to provide.
The inversion of responsibility is linked to adolescents' descent into serious trouble in several overlapping ways. Part of the problem is practical: the parents' abdication exposes children to the multiple perils of an increasingly risky world, without the reliable supervision or assistance that could help them navigate it safely. Since they are not provided with clear norms or expectations to guide them or with strong models of adults who themselves navigate their worlds honorably and competently, teenagers must construct working guidelines on their own, which necessarily involves a good deal of trial and error. But relying on trial and error in a dangerous world can get you in trouble very quickly. The problem with having to take care of yourself as a child, in other words, is that you probably can't, at least not without running some very serious risks and enduring some very hard landings.
Often, children in these AWOL families are physically on their own at some point because their parents have put them somewhere
else to live--anywhere from grandparents to neighbors to the street. They wind up living all over the place, partly because their families tend to move a lot and partly because their parents tend to shunt them off if they become problematic--which can be often, given how easily these parents define their children as too much to handle. This can sometimes be mistaken for leniency but is better understood as a kind of neglect.
The parental abdication may also be combined with the message that the child, not the parent, is the problem; the child is responsible not only for his or her own troubles but for the family's as a whole. It is all too easy, in that situation, for children to internalize that message, to come to think of themselves as unworthy, even fundamentally bad, and to feel guilty over the damage they have done. And if that is how you think of yourself, at least some of the time, you will be less inclined to shrink from doing things that the world defines as bad: you are already bad, and so you have little to lose.
There is another side to this. For some adolescents, the experience of being
attended--or largely unattended--by self-absorbed or dysfunctional
parents leaves them with a certain strength that, though unsolicited, turns out
to be of great help later on, as they try to forge a more centered and
productive life on their own. Some of them say that this kind of upbringing
either kills you or makes you stronger; if you survive it, you come out having
learned much that is of value in coping with life. We will come back to this
phenomenon in looking at how some troubled adolescents manage to turn their
lives around after a period of crisis. Suffice it for now to note that the
experience of parental fragility or withdrawal often has a dual effect: it loads
adolescents with a great deal of troublesome baggage that can help to
precipitate serious problems, but it can also give them a capacity to handle
themselves in difficult situations, to find inner resources when they are most
needed, and to arrive at a sense of themselves as unusually capable and
resilient people.
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Copyright © 2004 by Elliott Currie, author of
Confronting Crime, Reckoning, and Crime and Punishment in America, a finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize. An internationally recognized authority on youth and
crime, Currie has taught at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, and
is currently a professor of criminology, law, and society at the University of
California, Irvine.
The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence
By: Elliott Currie From
one of America's foremost experts on adolescence and crime, a sharp and
compassion that investigation of the root causes of the epidemic of drug abuse,
violence, and despair among “mainstream“ American teenagers.
In the past few years, it has become painfully clear that all is not well with
the children of middle-class America. Beyond the shootings at Columbine, hardly
a day goes by without stories of drug use, binge drinking, destructive violence,
and senseless suicides among middle-class adolescents. But the “why” of
these tragedies has eluded us.
In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed sociologists and Pulitzer Prize finalist
Elliot Currie rejects such predictable answers as TV violence, and inherent
evil. Instead, drawing on years of in-depth interviews with troubled
adolescents; he links the crisis of today's youth to a pervasive culture of the
exclusion and neglect that has left young people with diminishing supports or
options as they face an ever-more unforgiving adult world. Currie describes
society in which severe punishment and zero tolerance of adolescent misbehavior
have become the norm; where “tough love” has replaced engagement, and where
medications readily stand in for guidance. Broadening his in inquiry, he
explores the worrisome social changes—the strains on the family, the erosion
of supportive communities—that have contributed to the growing vulnerability
of the young. And he dissects the increasing rigidity of a competitive
middle-class that is quick to reject those who do not fit in, and whose sharp
divide between winners and losers and narrower definitions of success reveal a
culture that is extraordinarily harsh and not just on kids. Vivid, compelling,
and deeply empathetic, The Road to Whatever is a profound investigation of what
has gone wrong for so many American teenagers and a stark indictment of a
society that has lost the will or the capacity to care.
Advance Praise For
The Road to Whatever
-
”This book will worry you and
make you think hard about the collapse of a caring environment in America.
Drawing on the vivid firsthand accounts of adolescents themselves, Elliot
Currie shows us how the harsh cultural and institutional environment even of
the American mainstream leads to the punishing neglect of our
children.”
—Francis Fox Pippen, author of regulating the poor
Praise For
Crime and Punishment in America
By: Elliott Currie, (ISBN:
0-8050-6016-2)
-
”Ernest, free of jargon,
lucid. A book and that ought to be read by anyone concerned about crime and
punishment in America.”
—The Washington Post Book World
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”If legislators and citizens
absorbed Currie’s sound policy alternatives, they might stop lurching down
the path he shows is departing more and more from both science and common
sense.”
—The New York Times Book Review
-
”Important and
Thoughtful”
—Chicago Tribune
-
”Accessible and the astute, a
must-read. Curie's analysis sorts through realms of statistics to debunk
many of the myths and much of the hysteria that surround the
discussion.”
—San Jose Mercury News
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