Mean Teens Don’T Know Any Better

We hear a lot of talk these days about our children’s self-esteem.

However, as the parent of teenagers, I want to discuss an even more serious problem:

What about the parents’ self-esteem?

I, along with parents of teenagers everywhere, am going through a particularly inept stage of life right now. I have suddenly become socially awkward, intellectually incompetent and dangerous when let out in public. My character is flawed, my musical tastes hackneyed, my lifestyle cliched, my hobbies suspect and my wardrobe is just plain — sad.

In other words, I have become the lamest person on the planet, which, let me tell you, is guaranteed to have a negative effect on the old self-image. Every day, I get up up and look at myself in the mirror and repeat Stuart Smalley’s daily affirmations - “I’m good enough, smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me” - but then I have to add that fourth one, “plus, I’m a total embarrassment to my loved ones,” and the entire effect is ruined.

Deep in my heart, I know that I am not, literally, the lamest person on the planet. There are millions of other parents of teenagers out there who, according to their children, are also the lamest people on the planet. According to the law of superlatives, only one of us can be the lamest, so I may be only second or third lamest. I find this immensely reassuring.

I don’t blame my children for any of this. All teens, as part of the adolescent breaking-away process, consider their parents to be walking, talking embarrassments, and my children are not even particularly obnoxious examples of the phenomenon.

In fact, at age 15 I was much more sarcastic and condescending to my parents, not to mention superior, self-righteous, argumentative, disdainful of their enthusiasms, and suspicious of their values, although I was occasionally affectionate and tolerant when I was in trouble or needed money or had come momentarily to my senses.

Yes, I understand the syndrome far too well. In fact, I would consider it far more bizarre if my teenagers actually thought I was the hippest and most fun guy they knew. If my teenagers ever said, “Hey, dad, I want to hang out with you and mom all the time, because you are so cool!,” I’d probably get them appointments with a therapist.

In some ways, our children’s disdain for us is good. About the time that we become parents of teenagers, we are in the most danger of becoming smug, self-satisfied middle-aged burghers. We think that because we have careers and Chris-Crafts and 401K’s and fat resumes and tastefully decorated homes and season tickets and young people to push around that we are somehow the kings and queens of the world. We think that we have Made It, that we have Proven Ourselves, that we have earned universal respect and a lifetime superiority complex.

And then we go home to our teenagers and discover that our sage advice is (1) unwelcome, (2) irrelevant, (3) ignored and (4) wrong anyway.

This is an excellent reality check and prevents the parents of teenagers from ever possessing the slightest amount of hubris.

Of course, that also means we lack the slightest amount of self-regard, which is where the problem arises. We find ourselves tacitly conceding the notion that we have become lamer as the years have progressed, which forces us to this unhappy conclusion: All of our accumulated experience and hard-won lessons have not made us wiser, but dumber.

Two solutions come to mind, and the first one requires the cooperation of you, the public. When you see the parent of a teenager, don’t do the natural thing and scurry across the street, avoiding eye contact. Walk right up, placing a hand supportively on the arm, and say, “I don’t think you’re all THAT embarrassing.”

The other solution requires no action whatsoever. It will simply happen, magically, over time. Our teenagers will grow up.

Mark Twain said it best: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

We’re due to get smarter any time now. As our teenagers are well aware, we can’t get any dumber.