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Research at the University of Southern California has found that
many parents are more willing to intrude on their children’s privacy
than were their own parents.
Researcher Elaine Bell Kaplan, who apparently never met my
mother, was surprised at the findings. “I had assumed that parents
who grew up in the liberal 1960s – with its emphasis on civil rights
– would be sympathetic to their children’s privacy rights,” she
noted. Instead, the prevalence of drugs, gangs, AIDS, school
violence, Internet pornography, and an increasingly coarse youth
culture has led many to keep a closer watch. Parents admitted to
searching bedrooms, testing their kids for drugs, electronic
monitoring of Internet activity, and plain old snooping.
It’s
about darn time. The study did not attempt a representative sample,
focusing on parents who are college educated, with annual family
incomes of $65,000 to $150,000. However this is just the group
that takes the most heat for excessive permissiveness.
Dr. Kaplan’s casual acceptance of children’s “privacy rights”
illustrates the problem. While the law makes significant
exceptions, children have few such rights. I’ll take it a step
further: If a law interferes with a parent’s higher responsibility,
there is a moral obligation to break it. I’ll take my chances
explaining that to the Good Lord rather than why I let my kids run
amuck. Even so, most problems come not from children exercising
their rights but parents failing theirs.
Short of welding
the rascals in their rooms (which would be wrong, I keep telling
myself) there is no way to prevent the occasional bonehead stunt.
If there were, it wouldn’t be wise. It has been said, and I
believe, that good judgment comes from experience – and that
experience comes from bad judgment.
So I’m all for
giving kids rope, just not enough to hang themselves. Adolescence
is a time for testing limits, boundaries imposed by the loving hands
of parents. Unfortunately, children can’t learn from testing limits
if they have none. Ignoring this is no kindness; the heavy fist of
the judicial system awaits those who don’t figure out that the real
world has rules.
Not everyone likes
the idea of parental prying, and not just kids. For complete utter
nonsense,
try this from Dr. James Weiss, staff psychologist at Seton Hall
University: “Students finding out their own parents did the very
acts they are now prevented from doing compromises parental
effectiveness in the long run … The other problem is that these
parents are operating without a model or a map. They are sort of
shooting from the hip, not basing their ideas on any effective
models.”
Weiss’ first assertion presumes there is something suspect about
having learned from one’s experiences. I know parents
reluctant to discipline for misbehavior they indulged in as kids,
but if they had ignored their parents’ advice to look before
crossing the street then got hit, few would allow their children to
learn the same way. Granted, there is little peer pressure to
get creamed by a truck, but there are social forces that are just as
dangerous.
The
notion that there is no effective model for parental attentiveness
is exactly backwards. Until fairly recently in human history,
families lived and worked together until at least adulthood. There
was no time for mischief and little respite from prying eyes. Heck,
ask anyone over 60 whether he or she even had his or her own
bedroom. What I’ve seen no successful model for is raising children
by leaving them to their own devices.
It is not possible to go back to living like “The Waltons” and I
wouldn't if I could.
Still, if John-Boy
didn’t hooch up on moonshine and chill with the local
ne’er-do-wells, I suspect it was because Ma and Pa were always
nearby. |
