Reviving Ophelia (12 page)

The trip went well. They walked around the three-story brick building and peeked through its dusty windows at the old sewing machines and work benches. Later they ate roast beef sandwiches in the main street café and talked about other places to visit. They traveled to powwows and to a conference for Plains tribes entitled Healing the Sacred Hoop.

Over the next few months Franchesca visited the Native American Center and volunteered to work part-time. She was assigned the job of making coffee and serving cookies to the senior citizens. She joked with them and listened to their stories. From them, she learned many things about the Sioux nation and reservation life. She learned to make fry bread.

Some of our sessions were family sessions. We distinguished between adoption, race and adolescent issues and talked about the adolescent concerns first. Francie thought her father was too strict and her mother too intrusive. She felt that Lloyd and Betty still saw her as a little girl, and Lloyd struck her as rigid and inflexible. Betty got on Franchesca’s nerves. “For no reason, I just want to yell at her.”

Lloyd compromised with curfews, but remained firm about knowing where Francie was. Betty agreed to stay out of Francie’s room and respect her meditation time. After these talks, Francie began to joke with Lloyd again. After school, she sat in the kitchen and told Betty about her day.

We stopped pretending that the family had no feelings about adoption. Everyone had feelings. Lloyd worried that Franchesca might be more vulnerable to alcoholism the way so many Native Americans are. Betty was fearful that someday Franchesca might find her real mother and abandon them. Franchesca felt she lived in between a brown and a white world and wasn’t totally accepted by either. She loved Lloyd and Betty, but she could not look to them for clues about her identity. As we talked about these issues I remembered something Wendell Berry said: “If you don’t know where you are from, it’s hard to know who you are.”

Franchesca told Betty and Lloyd that she wanted information about her biological mother. They were ambivalent, but agreed to allow Franchesca to look into her health and tribal background. Franchesca was glad to have some information, but she wanted more. She told Betty and Lloyd, “Someday I will have to find her.”

In our individual sessions Franchesca grappled with many issues. She was uncertain who to befriend. “My old friends are shallow, but my new friends are getting into trouble.”

I suggested she consider making one or two close friends and not worry about belonging to a crowd. I reminded her that the people at the Indian Center were her friends.

Franchesca learned to center herself by meditating. She prayed to the Great Spirit for guidance before she began. She had two worlds to combine, two histories to integrate. She made conscious choices about what she would keep for herself from both worlds. She would keep her home with Betty and Lloyd, but she would visit the reservation and learn more about the Sioux. She would return to her parents’ church, but she would worship the Great Father as well.

As she worked on her issues, Franchesca became an advocate for the Native American students at her mostly white junior high. She decided to challenge all racist remarks. She pushed for more Native American literature and history.

At our last meeting Franchesca was dressed in blue jeans and a woven Native American blouse. Betty and Lloyd sat proudly on either side of her, Lloyd in his white pharmacist jacket and Betty in a polyester pants suit. Lloyd said, “I’ve learned to speak a few words of Lakota.” Betty said, “This research has opened a new world for us.”

Franchesca said, “I belong to two families, one white and one brown. But there is room in the sacred hoop for all my relatives.”

Franchesca is an example of how complicated family life can be in the 1990s. At fourteen she was dealing with race and adoption issues as well as issues around alcohol, sex, religion and school. She was searching for an identity and distancing from her parents by rebelling and keeping secrets. Yet she loved her parents and needed their support. She looked mildly delinquent, but her behavior was really a signal about the struggle within to find herself.

So Franchesca and her family were “up to their ears in alligators,” as Lloyd put it. Fortunately the family sought help. They turned out to be an affectionate family with about the right mix of structure and flexibility. The parents had rules and expectations and the energy to enforce them, but they also had the ability to grow and change as their daughter changed. When they realized that Franchesca needed more contact with her people, they developed an interest in Native American customs. They had some tolerance for diversity, even of religious beliefs. With time and effort on everyone’s part, things settled down. Franchesca was on her way to having her own identity and yet she remained connected to her parents. She explored who she was, but not in ways that were self-destructive.

 

At the Whitney Biennial Art Show, I stood before a tableau entitled “Family Romance.” Four figures—a mother, father, son and daughter—stood naked in a row. They were baby-doll shapes of spongy tan material and real hair. They were all the same height and the same level of sexual development. I interpreted this work as a comment on life in the 1990s. To me it said: “There is no childhood anymore and no adulthood either. Kids aren’t safe and adults don’t know what they are doing.”

When we think of families, most of us think of the traditional family, with a working father and a mother who stays home with the children, at least until they go to school. In reality, only 14 percent of our families are this way. Family demographics have changed radically since the 1970s, when less than 13 percent of all families were headed by single parents. In 1990, 30 percent of all families were headed by single parents. (Mothers are the parents in 90 percent of single-parent homes.)

Our culture has yet to acknowledge the reality of these figures. In the 1990s a family can be a lesbian couple and their children from previous marriages, a fourteen-year-old and her baby in a city apartment, a gay man and his son, two adults recently married and their teenagers from other relationships, a grandmother with twin toddlers of a daughter who has died of AIDS, a foster mother and a crack baby, a multigener-ational family from an Asian culture or unrelated people who are together because they love each other.

Whatever the composition of families, in this last half of the twentieth century, families are under siege. Parents are more likely to be overworked, overcommitted, tired and poor. They are less likely to have outside support.

Money is a problem. We have become an increasingly stratified society with some children living in a luxurious world of designer clothes, computer games, private schools and camps, while other children walk dangerous streets to inadequate schools.

Time is a problem. Studies show that the average couple talks to each other twenty-nine minutes a week; the average mother talks seven minutes a day to her teenager, while the average father talks only five minutes. Supervision is a problem. The small tight-knit communities that helped families rear children are increasingly extinct. Instead television is the baby-sitter in many homes.

The great respect that Americans have for independence creates certain difficulties in families. A philosopher friend said to me recently, “Aren’t you proud of your daughter? She’s turning out so differently from you and your husband. What better definition could you have of successful parenting?” When I bemoaned the distance between Sara and me, another friend said, “Would you want it any other way?”

Our nation began with a Declaration and a War of Independence. We admire feisty individualists, and our heroes are explorers, pioneers and iconoclasts. We respect Rambo, Jack Kerouac, Clint Eastwood and Amelia Earhart. We love Walt Whitman with his famous dictum “Resist much, obey little.”

The freedom that we value in our culture we also value in our families. Americans believe adolescence is the time when children emotionally separate from their parents, and this assumption becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Daughters behave as they are expected to behave, and ironically, if they are expected to rebel, they will rebel. They distance from their parents, criticize parental behavior, reject parental information and keep secrets.

This distancing creates a great deal of tension in families. Parents set limits to keep their daughters safe, while daughters talk about their rights and resent what they see as their parents’ efforts to keep them young. Parents are fearful and angry when their daughters take enormous risks to prove they are independent. For most families, the heavy battles begin in junior high.

Parents who grew up in a different time with a different set of values are unhappy with what their daughters are learning. They feel like they are trying harder than their parents tried, and yet their daughters are more troubled. The things that worked when they were teenagers are no longer working. They see their daughters’ drinking, early sexualization and rebelliousness as evidence of parental inadequacy. They see their own families as dysfunctional. Instead I believe what we have is a dysfunctional culture.

My experience is that most parents want their daughters to develop into healthy, interesting people. They are hindered in their efforts to help their daughters by the dangerous culture in which we live, by the messages that our culture sends young women and by our ethic that to grow up one must break from parents, even loving parents.

My family lives in a neighborhood filled with three-story houses and lovely oak and maple trees. Most of the parents have worked hard at parenting, yet their teenagers are driving them crazy. As an attorney said to me at a block party, “Parenthood is the one area of my life where I can feel incompetent, out of control and like a total failure all of the time.”

At a New Year’s Eve party, I asked another couple how their teenage daughters were. The husband said without a smile, “I wish they’d never been born.”

Another thing that separates girls from their parents is their own unhappiness. With junior high, many girls lose their childhood gaiety and zest. Because of their developmental level, girls hold parents responsible for this. They are still young enough that they expect their parents to protect them and keep them happy. When they crash into larger forces and find themselves miserable, they blame their parents, not the culture.

Parents are not the primary influence on adolescent girls. Instead girls are heavily swayed by their friends, whose ideas come from the mass media. The average teen watches twenty-one hours of TV each week, compared to 5.8 hours spent on homework and 1.8 hours reading. The adolescent community is an electronic community of rock music; television, videos and movies. The rites of passage into this community are risky. Adulthood, as presented by the media, implies drinking, spending money and being sexually active.

The mass media has the goal of making money from teenagers, while parents have the goal of producing happy, well-adjusted adults. These two goals are not compatible. Most parents resist their daughters’ media-induced values. Girls find themselves in conflict with their parents and with their own common sense.

For example, Jana was the petite only child of older, professional parents. Until junior high, she had loved and felt loved by them. But in junior high she faced the choice of being the good daughter her parents expected or being popular and having a boyfriend. She said, “All through junior high, I’d do anything to fit in. I tried out friends like flavors of ice cream, but eventually I settled in with the popular crowd. I went to a Catholic school where the nuns told us that we would go to hell if we swore. But to be cool I had to swear. So I had the choice of eternal damnation or being unpopular.”

We laughed at her rueful tone. “In junior high this guy in math class liked me and I liked him. But he wasn’t popular, so I didn’t go out with him.”

Once her dad caught her sneaking out late at night to meet her friends. Jana said, “He sat on the couch and cried. He lectured me about rape and all that stuff.” Another time she came home drunk on “purple passion.” As our interview ended she whispered to me, “My parents have no idea all the trouble I’ve been in. They’d be blown away.”

Adolescents and their families are a challenge to mental-health professionals. We need a balance between respecting parents’ responsibility to protect their children and supporting adolescents’ need to develop as individuals and move into a broader world. Not every girl who is suffering comes from a troubled family. In my experience, parents are often desperately fighting to protect the authenticity of their daughters.

Psychologists who study what kinds of families produce what kinds of children have focused on two broad dimensions. The first has to do with affection. At one end are parents who are accepting, responsive and child-centered; at the other end are parents who are rejecting, unresponsive and parent-centered. The second dimension has to do with control strategies. At one end are parents who are undemanding and low in control, and at the other end are parents who are demanding and high in control.

These two dimensions interact to produce different outcomes for teenagers. Low-control and low-acceptance parents produce teens with a variety of problems, including delinquency and chemical dependency. Parents who are high in control and low in acceptance (authoritarian parents) have children who are socially inadequate and lacking in confidence. Parents who are low in control and high in acceptance (indulgent parents) have teenagers with high impulsivity, low responsibility and low independence. Parents who are high in control and high in acceptance (strict but loving parents) have teenagers who are independent, socially responsible and confident. According to this research, the ideal family is one in which the message children receive from parents is: “We love you, but you must do as we say.”