TV Reflects Parent-Teen Relationships
May 1st, 2010 by Sue Blaney
Here’s an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal about how changes in parent-teen relationships are showing up in television. Quoting research that says “75% of teenagers get along with their parents,” television shows are changing the way they depict the parent-teen relationship.
For a fun walk down memory lane, click on the WSJ’s interactive time line that shows various television shows since the 1950s and how they reflected the times. Remember the Fonz? I had forgotten about Michael J Fox’s character Alex Keaton in Family Ties… how different that character is from those we might see on television today!
Experts encourage parents to use television shows as jumping-off points for discussions of all kinds. Whether or not you like some of today’s shows, this is what your kids are consuming and the relationship models they see. Join them on the couch…It’s a good way to spend some time together!
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May 3rd, 2010 at 8:47 pm
The recent WSJ article , “How Parents Became Cool: TV Finds Teens Like Their Moms and Attempts to Flatter Both,” (April 29, 2010) relates a shift in television programming and viewing to what the authors consider a major change in relationships between parents and their adolescent children. Rather than parental control on one side of the generational divide, and teenage rebellion on the other, the authors contend, we now have intimacy, permission, praise, and sharing. Parents and children stay connected through technology and bond by wearing the same J. Crew styles, placing the same orders at Starbucks, and enjoying together the delights of yoga or a sushi bar.
These high-end recreations are dead giveaways as to just which parents are being described. To be sure, elite parents do watch television with their children, stay in touch by texting, reward their children’s every effort and involve themselves in the minutiae of their children’s lives. And, to be sure, these links remain firm even when their children leave the nest for college. The privileged students at Middlebury College communicate with their parents more than ten times per week, mutually desired contacts which are initiated relatively equally by the students and their parents. But my study of a broader socio-economic range of parents revealed vivid class differences in parenting styles. If the elite can be described as “helicopter parents,” those with fewer resources follow a very different parenting style. The don’t say yes all the time; they use technologies of connection to make sure their children are where they are supposed to be rather than to share the latest intimacy; they block television programs they find offensive; and they place filters on computers to control access to the internet. In short, they place clear limits on their children’s activities. In a context of limited resources of time and money, anxieties about just what to order at Starbucks and how to feel okay about a loss at soccer give way to worries about how to keep children safe and how to make ends meet.
If the article gets it right with respect to some aspects of an upper middle-class style of “helicopter parenting,” it also utterly misleads. Intimacy, permission, praise and sharing do not mean that these elite parents “tend to avoid exerting parental control.” To the contrary: these are new, and intense, mechanisms of management and manipulation. Take all this watching television together — the centerpiece of the article. One upper middle class mother I interviewed was explicit about why she engaged in this practice: by watching with her children, she said, she could “project [her] values on them” and explain and interpret the characters’ words and behavior. Shared television viewing becomes a way to gain access to what it is that children think and feel, enabling ongoing, personalized control. Parents who are grooming their children to gain admission to selective colleges and to be winners in the race to the top feel a need for this sort of intimate control. Small wonder that these same children, subsequently, phone home to get parental approval for course selection in college, send assignments home to be edited by their fathers, and share the details of their latest romance with their mothers.
All parents want what’s best for their children, and all parents want to mold their children. Under the guise of sharing and intimacy, the intensive parenting strategy of the elite offers special opportunities to monitor, intervene in, and promote children’s progress. Elite parents have not relinquished the parental role, however much they act like their children’s buddies. They are buddies with agendas. And characterizing all parents as if they follow the practices of the elite ignores the very real and very different struggles of those more numerous but less visible parents a step or two down the socio-economic ladder.
Margaret K. Nelson
Middlebury, VT 05753
Margaret Nelson teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. She is the author of Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times (NYU Press, 2010).