Get Out of My Life . . . but first take me and Alex into town
Tony Wolf and Suzanne Franks Profile Books, 228pp, £6.99
ISBN 1861973411
Ours is a generation of uncertain parents, say the wearily resigned authors of this guide to taming the "new teenager". You can say that again. We are even uncertain about what constitutes a teenager. Officially, a teenager is anyone from 13 to 19, but that doesn't really work, does it? Is the ten-year-old who screams "I don't know why you ever had me" at her mum, because she isn't allowed to buy a padded bra out of the Argos catalogue, not a teenager? Is the nice 23-year-old who lives at home long after he's finished his degree and leaves his dirty washing all over the bathroom floor a teenager? Are the hulking boys and sulky girls who inhabit a culture of casual thievery, bullying, alcopopped promiscuity and tower-block stares the prey that we seek to tame? Or are we after the self-pitying depressives who hate everything, want to die and, particularly if they are male, manage to achieve their ambition in increasingly large numbers? Or is it the Toms and Ellas who, tutored up to the eyeballs, just happen to do very well at school but aren't sure whether Vietnam is too last year for a gap year? Are we really worried about the devil children of the council estates, the shoplifting spawn of the underclass?
Actually, all of this concern is bullshit. Whether we view children as spoilt, rotten little Uber-consumers or as nasty, infantile sociopaths, it is our own little darlings that we fret about. Other people's children are hell. And they can go to it. No one is that concerned about child poverty or the dire emotional and spiritual vacuum in which many children grow up. It is amazing, is it not, that a culture which claims to love children produces so many who feel unloved?
So here they are in our midst - the untouchables - the products of our own dysfunction. Or as one exasperated parent asks in the book: "What are they? Some kind of monsters?" In reality, this book is aimed at the parents of fairly ordinary monsters: the Kevins whom we secretly adore because we know that, one day, they will grow out of it and get to the promised land of University.
The tone of this book is earnest and remarkably useless. Teenagers, we are told, are in constant conflict with their baby selves and their emerging adult selves. The process of individuation is a bit of struggle. So is sex. If your baby is out of control, Wolf and Franks continually tell you, there is very little you can do about it. That's about it. This is not meant to be a book for anyone with a kid who has serious problems. When the going gets tough, the authors merely advise you to look elsewhere. Where exactly? The social services? The police? Drug rehab?
Perhaps this is unfair, but even as a guide for permissive parents, it doesn't answer any basic questions. At what age do you let them sleep together in the same bed when you know that they are doing it anyway? Do you buy them the lump of dope they requested as a birthday present? Do you give them a nice bottle of wine to take to a party, in the faint hope that they will refrain from lovely cocktails of Aftershock with a Baileys top?
The new teenager, it seems, is very much like the old teenager, except with better drinks. I know that we are meant to feign surprise that survey after survey shows a large number of them liking sex and drugs, but when wasn't it like that? We certainly had a fine old time in the Seventies. So how old or how out of touch do you have to be before you come over all nostalgic for the time when teenagers did, er . . . what exactly? Played marbles? Joined the choral society? Got conscripted?
To say that it all comes down to class is, as usual, something of an understatement. But now that we have been forced to accept the Blairite false consciousness that we can have middle-class aspirations without middle-class financial security, we are in the ridiculous situation where kids are forced into education until the age of 18, and are tested endlessly. For whose benefit is this? I have never understood why we should have to spend the best years of our lives at bloody school.
Sure, I may have got things the wrong way around; but I remain as allergic to the caring but feeble parental voice of this book as I ever was. Think Tessa Jowell, without the passion. It is only when the difficulties of being a teenager - the continual fear of missing out, the magical realisation that all adults are flawed, the excitement of creating oneself - are patiently explained that the book comes alive. Sure, the reality mostly involves traipsing around to non-existent parties and lots of down time, but so what? What does the adult world offer that is so much better?
But I can't accept that the real problem about these non-children is that they are a different species. Teenagers are not a generic category. To try to counter the intensities and varieties of adolescence with stolid therapy-lite strikes me as a mug's game, a symptom of the disease of the parents, not the children. If you don't know who you are, how can they know who they are supposed to be? Is it really the case that liberal parenting means not recognising that there must be limits to behaviour? Is it all just a total misreading of selfishness for self-expression? Books like this would lead one to such an uptight conclusion.
However liberal we are about sex, drugs and rock'n'roll - and I am - I still believe that it is the fundamental duty of parents to socialise their children. Is it all right for your children to swear at you and in general be horrible? No, it is not. If you don't know that, and seek advice such as "Perhaps the greatest skill for a parent today is learning not to be hurt", I'd say you deserve whatever your obnoxious, confused teenager will inevitably throw at you.
Suzanne Moore writes a column for the Mail on Sunday
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