Chapter 4
Their Responsibilities…and Yours
As an adult, you often find yourself overwhelmed with life tasks, not the least of which is raising children, plus managing a career, doing housework, scheduling carpooling, and taking care of financial responsibilities. It isn’t news to you that you’re in need of help, but you are looking in the wrong place if you think your teenager will step forward. Nonetheless, when something’s got to give, many parents enlist their children to assist in household duties, including the rearing of their younger siblings. If you are looking for conflict, you can find it right here.
No Exploitation
Your teenagers want nothing to do with your responsibilities, nor should they. Their job is to attend school, get good grades, socialize, and eventually learn enough to matriculate into society. This is not to say they shouldn’t have chores, but by “chores” we mean light housework, such as cleaning their bedrooms, and responsibilities which may include mowing the lawn or taking out the garbage. A chore is of the nature of lending a hand, with some degree of accountability, some degree of prioritizing, and some degree of accomplishment upon completion. In our opinion, unless you and your teens have worked out some type of work arrangement where you are paying them a salary to do a job for which they have interviewed, you are exploiting them.
We are adamant about our position on exploitation. Your son or daughter needs to have time for those things that are important in defining their adolescence; housework is not one of those things. If you need a little help with sweeping the floor, they should be asked to pitch in, but to assign them your jobs, just because you can, is both unfair and an abuse of power. Your teenagers have their own set of responsibilities. They must attend school, study for exams, write research papers, be prepared for pop quizzes, make friends, find a date, socialize, join organizations, excel in sports, have a talent, play the piano or the tuba, come home, do homework, make a snack and sometimes dinner, organize their clothing, worry about being included in parties, outings, movies, and overnights, make money, lose privileges, gain them back…and see to a multitude of other developmental “tasks.”
Angry John
John was one of the more angry teenagers we have seen in our practice, and for good reason. His father, a single parent raising his son, didn’t believe he should have to go to work and then come home to keep the house. He put responsibility for most of the housework and almost all of the cooking on John’s shoulders. Admittedly, Mr. R. wasn’t the neatest man in the world, so even if the housework was done in a slipshod manner it didn’t come under white-glove scrutiny. Nonetheless, it was up to John to make sure the garbage went to the street on pickup days, the grocery shopping was done, something was made for dinner, and there was enough soda and beer in the refrigerator.
John’s mother died when he was still in grade school, and he tried to help his father out as best he could because he didn’t want his father to be sad. John felt extremely sad at the loss of his mother, but he could tell that the overall atmosphere of the house was “nicer” when he did his part to pick up his clothing or walk the dog.
Over the years, as John got bigger so did the list of chores; in fact, little by little, his father gave him more and more responsibility for home maintenance, both inside and outside, until John was handling the majority of the tasks. That left little time for studies, and almost no time for socialization. John was isolated from his peers because of his “job” and felt like an outsider in his classes. By the time he was a junior in high school, he had had enough, and he snapped. He began lashing out, starting fights among his classmates, and ending up in the principal’s office at least once a week. Then John beat up a boy one year his junior and put him in the hospital. The boy’s parents pressed assault charges, and John was ordered by the court to therapy for anger management.
After several sessions, it became clear that John’s anger was displaced from his father onto his peers. It also became clear that John had become a “parentified” child after his mother died, meaning that he took it upon himself to parent his remaining parent, rather than his remaining parent parenting him. Because he was not given grief counseling, nor any opportunity to talk about his mother and resolve his feelings about her death, John’s feelings of loss, coupled with his anger toward his father for his father’s lack of understanding and exploitation, brought the situation to a very serious head.
John’s father agreed to hear what we had to say but de-fended his right to “make” his teenager “help out” around the house. To date, John continues to express his sadness and his anger in a more constructive manner by verbalizing it, but, unfortunately, his father has not given John the emotional support he craves.
Socialization—Their Vital Work
If you were going to measure the worth of your offspring by how little they did around the house, you would be sadly disappointed. Teenagers are busy with their own lives, and although superficially that life may seem nothing more than hanging out with friends, every social interaction is a building block toward the understanding of human relationships. Socialization is as vital to relationships as academics is to learning, because one without the other makes a very one-dimensional young adult. Through interaction with peers, teenagers sharpen their powers of observation, test the limits of their grandiose behavior, find the courage to speak in a group, look for someone with whom to share confidences and trust, and, eventually, seek a partner with whom they can share the rest of their life.
While socialization comes easily for some young people, it is difficult and emotionally painful for others. If your child is shy or introverted, if their self-esteem and self-confidence is less than adequate, you may observe them watching from the sidelines, as if they are disinterested in making friends or participating in school functions. Trust us; they are interested. They just don’t have the necessary coping skills to take risks, or the emotional confidence to bounce back if they are rejected. Your son or daughter very much wants to be sought out by their peers, picked to be on the team, romantically involved with someone who bolsters their confidence level. They just don’t always know how to get there.
Times Have Changed
Life is so much more complicated than it was at an earlier time when there were few expectations beyond helping with the family chores and contributing to the family workload. In years gone by, the primary emphasis was not on socializing or dating, schoolwork or recreation, but on survival: bringing in the crops before the first winter freeze, tending the cattle, milking the cows, hoping the chickens would lay eggs. If these tasks were not handled, there would be no food, and families would starve. Success was measured not in material possessions, of which there were very few, but in the unity of family: sharing experiences of birth and death, working side by side with a sense of pride and loyalty as an integral member of a tight-knit unit.
In this twenty-first century, materialism has all but snuffed out intangible successes, which have been overshadowed by the “me” society of insatiable appetites fueled by greed and jealousy. Rather than working side by side, people are pitted against each other in fierce competition, vying for jobs and lying for money, which has become the barometer by which our young people have learned to measure success and is the underpinning of anger and depression.
The love of money has become the driving force behind the seventy-hour work week, robbing our children of precious time. Employers foster the notion that everyone is expendable, and in such a competitive world anyone who is unwilling to play by the company rules is simply replaced by someone who will.
For