Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (24 page)

And sometimes, they go
too
far. But especially in Corona, where a loose so- cial fabric typical of American suburban communities does not provide the social control typical for small communities like Tremont, young people may never get caught or not care when they are. Several Corona boys de- scribe being undeterred by being caught. Michael, for instance, who tried to shut his parents out when he was sixteen and “didn’t even want them in [his] life,” simply stopped caring whether he got caught drinking and also stopped complying when he got punished. Having maintained decent grades, not gotten arrested, nor having impregnated a girl, Michael prides himself on his responsibility. Responsible or not, he has come of age, view- ing adulthood as a matter of being able to do “whatever you want” as long as you avoid causing major trouble.

Likewise, when Jesse’s parents caught him smoking marijuana as a fourteen-year-old, he says, “that didn’t really stop me.” Their response did not matter: “It was just something else we fought about.” But when Jesse came home with D’s, his father gave him “a ton of rules,” which Jesse “just hated” because “I’m a kid . . . I want to go out and play and do what I want to do.” When he upped his grades, his father let go of control. Looking back a few years later, Jesse says, authority is “totally a necessity” because “if there was not authority, I don’t know how we’d get along here. Just terrible, people would be doing whatever they want.” Authority got Jesse to improve his grades. But it is his girlfriend, with whom he is “totally in love,” whom he credits for turning around his drug habit. He hated being “stoned out of [his] mind” because he was not being himself or able to re- ally connect with her, “so that pretty much got me out of that phase.”
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If “bad boys” like Jesse and Michael seem at least temporarily to stop

caring about what their parents want, good girls like Kimberley seem to have the opposite problem: they care so much about what their parents want that they keep them in the dark about important parts of their lives. Girls may carry around the weight of a secret sex life or dangerous drink- ing spells, leaving them, in certain fundamental respects, unknown by their own parents. Laura presents herself as a classic good girl: “I just don’t have the desire, I guess, to be rebellious and stuff toward my parents. I mean we get in fights every once in a while, but it’s just—I’ve been raised, you’re not disrespectful to your parent.” Laura can tell her dad “anything” and she is “really honest” with her mom too.

One would never have guessed that Laura began drinking when she was fourteen: “We would just go up to the market and find like some random person [to buy us liquor].” Laura stopped drinking after a close call: “I don’t remember throwing up [because] I was passed out.” Laura has seen worse: “A friend of my sister’s got alcohol poisoning and almost died.” Laura has “never been in trouble” for drinking because her parents do not know about it: “I always stay at a friend’s house.” If they found out, they would be very disappointed. Her mother views teenage drinking as “inap- propriate.” She has good reason for concern. Her own mother was an alco- holic who died after collapsing in the kitchen, says Laura: “I have the risk of being an alcoholic in my blood.”

Getting caught can be a relief, especially when it forces a more open dia- logue. Janine’s parents used to be working all the time, “So I wasn’t really like connected and I hated them for it.” Janine kept secret that she was hav- ing undesired sex with an older boyfriend. She still keeps sex a secret from her father: “If my dad ever found out, I’d literally be disowned. He cannot find out about that.” But her mother did find out, and Janine says, they have become “real good friends” now that her mother supervises her more:

Kind of a mutual talk [was] going on. [My mother] asked me questions and I gave her an answer and one thing led to another . . . other questions came up and other answers were told. . . . [I felt] nervous. I was like, “Oh, my God.” I thought I was going to be disowned. I really thought they would not stand for that. . . . [Instead, my mother said], “Are you being careful? Are you using protection?”

While Janine was able to reconnect with her mother through coming clean, getting caught did not heal Michelle’s relationship with her par- ents. Her premature sexual debut, along with alcohol and drug use, put Michelle squarely in the “bad girl” category. “I went from 12 to 20 in like

three years,” she says. When her parents stumbled on a box of condoms, “obviously, they probably didn’t look at [her] the same way, [like] a lit- tle girl.” Her mother wants “a straight-A student” and “this perfect little girl.” But, says Michelle, “I can’t give her that,” acutely aware that she is disappointing:

We’ve been really close all my life. And after I started doing things and I wasn’t a little girl anymore, like I stopped playing soccer. . . . And I wasn’t home as much and it’s just been really hard for her to handle. I’ve changed a lot, and like my attitude and everything since I was like a little girl, and they want that back and I can’t give it to them. And I don’t want to try to lie to them like I’m pretending to.

Sexuality presents American middle-class girls and boys with different di- lemmas: girls must conform to the notion of a little girl who is not sexual, keep sexual activity a secret, or physically and psychologically bifurcate their family and their sexual lives. Boys are expected, and sometimes explic- itly encouraged, to feel driven by sexual desire, but they are also taught that sexual activity could end their adolescence and ruin their life. Not unlike their female counterparts, most middle-class boys are taught that sexual activity requires them to command the full social attributes of adulthood. Thus, although the icon of the “good girl” who is untainted by sexual expe- rience, and that of the “bad boy” who is reduced to his sexual drive, exert different pressures, they also have a shared effect: both make sexual activ- ity into a sign, as well as a test, of young people’s capacity to separate and maintain themselves independently from parents and home life.

Sexuality is but one among several “bad” things that produce a psycho- logical break between the family togetherness of childhood and the conflict with parents that many American teenagers experience or anticipate upon venturing into adult territory. A common sequence runs through their narratives. Young people typically start their teens not having questioned the received wisdom about “right” and “wrong” behavior. Soon enough, however, that wisdom tends to collide with another certainty, namely, that experimenting with sex, drinking, and drugs is part of claiming one’s right to personhood. When, depending on temperament and opportunity, teenagers start breaking the rules and sneaking around, the challenge is to explore without doing major damage in the process. And unless teen- agers get caught—as they frequently are but often are not—one of the li-

abilities of such sneaking around is a disconnection in the parent-teenager relationship.
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Through sneaking around, young people who break their parents’ rules can and do carve out a significant social and psychological space that is free from adult intervention and norms. Although some may be troubled by having to keep things hidden from their parents or worried about the consequences of getting caught, they often relish the freedom and fun of the furtive and forbidden. As Jeff says about climbing out of the house, “It’s going to be scary, but it will be fun.” But at the same time that prohibitions and hiding entice young people to pursue adolescent experimentation in- dependently from adult support, they also require that youth “get caught” by their parents so that they can become fully known by them as the per- sons that they are in the process of becoming. This may be one reason that teenagers sometimes talk about leniency as parents’ “not caring” and that boys like Phillip believe it is essential that parenting be “nice and tight.”

This strategy of connection through control has its liabilities. For, when the moment of reckoning arrives, it can be disproportionately severe. Alone at the wheel, American teenagers literally and figuratively risk driving off the cliff.
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With driving crucial to freedom, veering off course becomes all the more dangerous. And with reliable contraception, emergency contracep- tion, and abortion not easily accessible for many teenagers, an unintended pregnancy is, even among middle-class teenagers, a very real risk.
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Finally, the zero-tolerance policies that have permeated both legal and extralegal institutions, such as schools, impose harsh and consequential penalties even for minor infractions.
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As significant as the severity of punishment is the fact that teenagers often lack parental support as they learn about the pleasures and dangers of adolescent exploration, leaving them dependent on institutions that, as we will see in chapter 7, rarely serve them well.

SIX

“At Least They Know Where I Am”

Control through Connection

For seventeen-year-old Karsten, the pleasures of family life and the plea- sures of growing up rarely clash. He goes out on the weekend with his peers for beers, having been introduced to alcohol several years before by his parents: “They try to teach you, very quietly and carefully.” And now when he goes out on his own, they still say, “Try not to go too far, not to get drunk.” Recently, when Karsten wanted to go out two weekend nights in a row, his parents were not pleased. Together they negotiated an agree- ment whereby Karsten was allowed to go out the second night, as long as he came home early. Karsten spends a lot of time with his parents and enjoys their company:

After school, I see my mother. After my father comes . . . we have dinner which is
gezellig
and we talk together. . . . Around 9:00 or 9:30 p.m., we are together [again] and we can talk, or play games, watch television, whatever we feel like doing. . . . We play games at least twice a week for a whole eve- ning and have a lot of fun.

Karsten believes his parents have taken “the golden middle road” in rais- ing him. “Our relationship is very free, very open,” says Karsten. “We tell each other everything. . . . If I need to make a decision, my parents will talk to me about it, but they will not force me to make a different decision.” At the same time, there are expectations. The main one is: “When I have made an agreement, then I really have to keep myself to it.” Karsten’s parents al- ways want to know where he is and what time to expect him home: “Espe- cially around dinner. Unless I really call and tell them beforehand, I have to be home at five o’clock.” But Karsten does not feel the agreements he makes with his parents are impinging on his freedom: “I am allowed to do

a lot, almost everything really, but they do want to know that I am doing it. As long as I tell them, they allow it.”

Karsten parents addressed the topic of sex when he was fourteen: “Yes, they explained [contraception] very well. Especially my father, you know it is really a conversation for men among one another. You feel more com- fortable.” Karsten has no doubt that he has been in love: “On the one hand, it is fun. [But] it is a very strange experience. You think about her almost constantly. You start to wonder: ‘What will I say this evening.’” Being in love is “like [having] a warm feeling for someone. . . . [It is] like a special place in your heart.” Before having sex, Karsten wants “to have gotten to know [a girl] and we need to come to the conclusion together that we can do that, more or less according to an agreement. I need to really know that she wants to do it too.”

Karsten lost his virginity with a girlfriend he was with for two and a half months: “We were talking and at a certain point we got onto the topic and more or less together decided to do it, that she was ready for it too.” They spent the night at his house several times, but only after consultation both with his parents and his girlfriend’s parents. “Yes, you have to do that,” Karsten explains. “I wouldn’t want to get into a fight with an angry father. I’ve heard those kinds of stories from my father. That my grandpa went after him with a shotgun.” Nothing so dramatic took place in Karsten’s generation. But a careful dance preceded the sleepover:

We talked about it, kind of very carefully feeling our way: my parents were like, “What exactly do you want?” And I was like, “What would they really allow?” After a while I just asked plainly, would it be allowed? And then they said yes. . . . They’d rather that I am at home when I am going to do some- thing like that, than elsewhere. Because they know: if something is going to happen, it is going to happen. And if it happens at home, at least they know where I am.

Getting a courtship (
verkering
) has made sixteen-year-old Natalie very happy. “It is really very wonderful. I am just really happy about it.” When she and Rob first began their courtship, three months ago, Natalie told him she did not want to have sex yet. “I wanted to really take the time to get to know each other. . . . It is not that I did not want to do it, but I waited, be- cause I thought, ‘If I do it now and things don’t work out, that is a shame.’ You know, you can only give it away once and that is very special.” But

Natalie found that she “was just really happy with [Rob], so . . .” after three months, the couple had their first sexual intercourse. Sex happened “a little early,” but that is not a problem, Natalie believes, given the seriousness of the relationship. Indeed, more than a year after their first intercourse, Natalie and Rob are still together (see chapter 2). The first time “did hurt,” Natalie recalls, “but I don’t regret it in any case. It was pretty fun.”

One reason that Natalie has no regrets about her first time is that she used reliable contraceptives. Hence fears of getting pregnant are completely absent in her account of her loss of virginity. When Natalie started men- struating, her mother explained the basics about puberty and sexuality. A few years later, several months before she had her first serious courtship with Rob and her first sexual intercourse, Natalie was reading about the ad- vantages of the pill as a method for regulating menstruation in a magazine for teenage girls: “I had already been thinking about [the pill]. So I showed the article to my mother and I said, ‘I want that too.’ She said: ‘Sure, that is all right. Go to the doctor, tomorrow. Let’s go together.’ So it was really very easy. [My mother] had no issues with it or anything.” Since starting the pill, Natalie has always felt comfortable approaching her mother about taking it: “My mother also takes it—so I could always ask her questions.”