Restrictions

I am 14. My parents are very strict and will never let me do what I want to. They forbid my boy friends from coming to the house. What can I do?

I think I have had at least 50 letters from American adolescents in this strain. Well, what can you do? Who can make your parents realize that they are unwittingly con­verting your love into unconscious hate?

Every second American I meet seems to be in therapy; and to judge from the mail I get from boys and girls, I am not surprised. So many American adolescents feel them­selves coffined by parental taboos and demands. “You must study and go to college, or you won’t get a good job.” Un­fortunately, American freedom, granted to the slaves in 1865, was never extended to the ordinary American child.

Defiance

I am utterly dismayed because my daughter of 14 is so unfeeling. At her age, I would expect a child to have some concern for her mother who has loved her for many years and has given all her best to her. Although we get on out­wardly, she does not communicate with me in the true sense of the word. I sense overwhelming narcissism. She does not care a hoot about my feelings, or what happens to me or her brothers and sisters. Do you think that a child is born with lack of feeling, or do you think something happened within the family that made her turn out this way? Is there any hope?

There is always hope.

In any family, there comes a stage in a child’s life when she has to untie the family apron strings. The situation is, of course, worse in an authoritarian family. Self-regulated children do not have so much necessity to break away. In this case, it does not mean that the girl has no feeling; it means that all her feeling has turned negative,

But why? Have you, her parents, bound her with hoops of steel? Have you lectured her, “You should be an example to your brothers and sisters?”

Lack of feeling? I am inclined to think that the cause is environmental rather than hereditary. I suspect your daughter feels she has not been loved enough; perhaps she fancies that some of the other children have had more mother love than she has had. There in hope, but only if you, her mother, do something to change your attitude.

I have had girls who have come to Summerhill with hate in their faces. They were impossible at home. Yet they all changed. It was a delight to see how their faces altered and showed tenderness. I gave them no therapy; I only stood back and allowed them to be their true selves. Gradu­ally, their bitchiness disappeared.

The same result can be achieved at home if a girl feels she is free to be herself without nagging or criticism or lecturing.

But if the parents are not inwardly free enough, they will not succeed. The parents have, first of all. to be con­vinced that their former ways were wrong. In the newly given freedom, they must act wholeheartedly, without res­ervation, and unplagued by doubt. The girl must feel that she is not the subject of an experiment, but that her parents’ attitudes have fundamentally changed forever.

My daughter is 14 and unusually hostile to me. I haven’t any idea why. My wife agrees that I have always treated her with kindness and consideration. Can you offer any ad­vice to a baffled father?

Most every child seeks at one time or another to break the emotional chains which bind him to his parents. Most children have some sort of shame about their parents. A girl may be ashamed of her father—he spits on the street, he makes a noise with his soup, he says things in company that embarrass her. Most children grow out of the shame stage; and most children iri the end get over their annoyance with the backward parent.

Try to relax and try not to impose your personality or your viewpoints on your daughter. Had I a daughter in a rebellious, faultfinding stage I would refrain from saying to her anything other than little things—Pass the salt, please.

One feature may be important: whether it be conscious or unconscious, nothing dies in a child’s memory. The girl may be reacting to things that you said or did when she was four. Nothing can be done about this; the past is past. Yet a parent can profitably ask himself: Was I too demanding, too strict, too frightening when she was a baby?

There are other aspects, too. Do you and your wife quarrel? Has love flown from the home? Does this lassie feel that things are not right between her parents? Is she on the side of her mother—against her father? Or has she so strong a fixation on you, that to over-compensate, she has to express hate instead of the love she is suppressing? A fair guess is that your girl feels that you do not love her deeply enough, and that your consideration for her feelings is only a substitute for love.

In any case, leave her be. She will probably work out of it in time.

My son Bob is 17. He seems to resent his home. He never tells us a thing about what he is doing. If he comes home at two A.M., and I ask him where he has been, he just scowls and grunts. My husband and I feel that we have lost him.

I fear you have, good lady, but you lost him years ago. Both you and your husband failed to make contact with him, failed to make him feel he could trust you.

I suspect that he has lied to yon all the way. “Where were you tonight?” Son has been out with a dame, but he cannot tell his parents that—so he lies. “I went to the movies with Jim.”

Children always lie to “bad” parents, to parents who have tried to fashion their children, to parents who teach them manners and behavior and obedience and what not. In Britain, about 25 adolescent girls run away from home each week and are not traced.

My dear lady, it is too late.

Was your boy beaten, or raged at, or circumscribed by all sorts of moral taboos? Did you force him to be religious?

But do not blame yourself too much. You believed you acted for the best; you naively thought that experience can be handed on from the old to the young. It cannot! Your own parents, maybe, kept you at arm’s length, treated you as something to be shaped by the parental potter’s hands. You survived; but every child does not take kindly to be­ing spun on the potter’s wheel.

Anyhow, cheer up! It does not mean the end of the world—either for you or for your son. Many a lad has been reticent with his parents; many a lad has lied to them stoutly; all such boys did not end up as gangsters or dope fiends. It looks to me as if your son is now trying to fashion his own life. In your place, I should not interfere. I should cease to ask him where he has been, or what he has been doing.

To his father I say: Try to get in touch with your son emotionally. Drop being the heavy father. You can try to make him your chum—even at this late date. Yes, your chum! If you condemn him and lecture him, you will lose him forever. Why not try a way that is different than your old way. At this point, you’ve nothing to lose. It may be cruel to say it, but I make the guess that the hid has been starved for love at home arid now seeks love elsewhere.