Teen Angst and Summer Movies

The following article was originally published the the Austin American Statesman.

JC Shakespeare, LPC, of Austin counsels teens, young adults and their parents in private practice. Find out more at jcshakespeare.com.

BY JC SHAKESPEARE – SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

“You’re on the road to Hell!”

Those words nearly 40 years ago ended the discussion and set the tone for the next four years of my life. My father, glowering at the other end of our dining room table, had just asked if I had ever tried marijuana, and I had answered honestly. He told me to look him in the eye and swear I’d never smoke it again; I didn’t.

I was 13 and depressed. A few months earlier we moved from South Carolina to New Jersey. My dog had been killed by a car. Bullies at school were making my life miserable. My dad didn’t ask me about any of that.

Today we have a great relationship. Once I was out of the house, we were able to re-establish the emotional connection that is always the foundation of any healthy relationship. But adolescence was brutal for both of us. The poor choices I made, the anger and despair I felt and a deep wish to find a different way to parent than my father’s all contributed to my current work with teens and their parents. What teens need to become healthy adults is a balance between emotional connection with caring adults and the space to find and develop their authentic selves.

Recently I watched “The Way, Way Back,” a Fox Searchlight film that brilliantly mines the rich vein of adolescent anxiety, and cringed at the opening scene. We see Duncan, the 14-year-old protagonist, sitting in the rear-facing back seat of a station wagon driven by Trent, a self-important car salesman who has been dating Duncan’s mother, Pam, for nearly a year.

Trent strikes up a conversation with by asking, “How would you rate yourself on a scale of one to ten?” Duncan tries to deflect the question, but Trent is relentless until Duncan answers, “Six.” Trent then bluntly tells Duncan he is a three because he doesn’t “put himself out there.” Duncan responds the way many teens would: he puts in his earbuds and retreats into his own world where music is his friend.

Trent is establishing the “one-up” relationship so many of us take with our teens, essentially telling them that until they conform to our program, they will be failures. I remember a father in my office saying to me, while his son sat right across the table, “If he doesn’t get these grades up, he’s going to end up flipping burgers.”

First, such comments simply aren’t true. A semester of low grades doesn’t condemn you to the fast-food industry. Painting a negative picture of your teen also destroys emotional connection. Teens already have doubts about their self-worth, and when those are reinforced by an adult, it hurts. We are not talking about constructive criticism but comments that directly degrade the personal value of the teen. Rather than shaming him or her into motivation for change, it fuels the will to resist and rebel.

An illuminating contrast to the relationship between Trent and Duncan can be found in the 2007 Fox Searchlight film “Juno.” A teen girl, Juno, gets pregnant after her sole sexual encounter with a boy she likes. Juno is a different creature than Duncan; she is self-assured to the point of being cocky, has a laser-sharp wit and is comfortable with her identity as a quirky outsider. She handles the burden of responsibility for another life with resilience and grit, qualities that have been at least partially instilled by her parents.

Mac, her father, is a heating and air-conditioning contractor who is comfortable in his own skin and energized by his unassuming competence. Brenda, Juno’s stepmother, is a sharp contrast to Trent. She is patient and tolerant with Juno and willing to sacrifice her own wishes when necessary. These are simple, stable, working-class Minnesotans, and they do not pretend to be anything they’re not.

The strength of their relationship with Juno is evidenced by the fact that she almost immediately sits them down to tell them she is pregnant. These conversations don’t happen in families where no lines of communication exist. The news is received with a minimum of fuss by the parents, and the conversation immediately turns to problem-solving. The freedom Juno has enjoyed in this relationship has given her the ability to make some mature decisions. She owns up to the fact that she made a mistake and has found adoptive parents who are willing to cover medical expenses. More importantly, the calm response from the parents keeps the emotional bond with Juno intact, and because she is sure they love, respect and support her, she can navigate a terribly difficult situation with confidence and grace.

I have encountered two pervasive mindsets in parents that most often block this type of honest, healthy communication. The first is the expectation that we can guide our teens into some inspired level of ambition and purpose in which they will understand the connection between academic success and future earnings, throw themselves with boundless energy into a well-rounded slate of activities and emerge with a plan for life that would make Tony Robbins proud – without even checking to see if our own lives bear any resemblance to this ideal at all. As a spiritual teacher once told me, “Our children will walk where we walk, not where we point.”

The second is the notion that having survived adolescence ourselves, we must spare our teenagers from all the loss, disappointment and negative emotions of that age by making their decisions for them. Unfortunately, that parenting task is not just impossible, but harmful to the teen’s healthy development and to the family’s mental health.

A conversation near the end of another Fox Searchlight film, “Little Miss Sunshine,” about a wildly dysfunctional, oddball family, sums up adolescence beautifully. Dwayne, a surly teen who worships Nietzsche and hasn’t spoken a word in nine months, has just had his dream of being a fighter pilot shattered by the discovery that he’s colorblind. He tells his Uncle Frank, “I wish I could go to sleep till I was 18. Just skip all this crap. High school and everything, just skip it.”

Frank, who believes he’s the number one Proust scholar in America, responds with a story about how the French author, near the end of his life, reflected on his youth: “All the years he suffered, those were the best years of his life. They made him who he was. They forced him to think and grow, and to feel very deeply. So, if you sleep till you’re 18, think of the suffering you’ll miss! High school is your prime suffering years. You don’t get better suffering than that!”

Adolescence is suffering. Teens are stretched between the deep, often hidden grief at saying good-bye to the innocent ease of childhood, and the awesome freedom and terrible responsibility of adulthood zooming toward them like a freight train. Parents must stay connected. The knowledge that you love them, and maybe more importantly, like them, is the most valuable knowledge you can impart. They won’t remember your lectures, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

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