Picking parental battles wisely

MAXINE COHEN

I met a friend for lunch at Rothschild’s recently. I’ve been going

there for more than 20 years, well before I lived here full-time. I

forget between times how charming the ambience is and how truly good

the food is, the Caesar salad with shrimp in particular.

We were seated in the alcove in the front, by the window that

looks out on the courtyard, a little out of the way of the other

diners. Great, I thought, nice, private and quiet.

Ah, but not so fast.

At the next table, two women were deep in animated conversation.

It was hard not to hear.

It seems one of the women was upset about her oldest child, a

daughter in eighth grade. The girl’s bedroom is a disaster, clothes

and books and papers and just stuff, lots of it, strewn everywhere.

“It’s driving me crazy. I can’t stand going to the kids’ wing of

the house because I can’t keep from looking in her room, and then I

just want to kill her. She doesn’t see the rest of us living like

slobs. I don’t know where she gets it from.”

“Sounds frustrating,” her friend said.

“It is, beyond frustrating,” the other mother said. “We go round

and round. I tell her to clean it up, and she yells at me that it’s

her room and she’s entitled to have it any way she likes. I’m at my

wit’s end. One of these days, when she’s at school, I’m going to

march right in there and throw it all out, just like I’ve been

threatening to.”

And Mom went on.

“You haven’t seen her lately. She wears those low-rise jeans and

skimpy tops that leave a big chunk of her middle exposed. I think she

looks cheap and ridiculous, teetering around half-naked on platform

shoes and I don’t want to waste my good money buying such junk.”

“I guess you fight a lot, huh,” commented her friend. “Must be

hard.”

Witness adolescence in all its glory. This mom is blessed with a

healthy girl who wants to dress in style, fit in with her peers and

live in disarray.

As the mother of three now-grown daughters, I can certainly

empathize.

It’s hard for parents to accept the aberrant behaviors that go

hand in hand with the healthy expression of adolescence. They don’t

look like the incubation period of orderliness, responsibility and

achievement. Not that that is the only healthy outcome, but it is

what our society prescribes and what most parents subscribe to.

Children are not extensions of their parents. They are separate

people in their own right. And it is during the adolescent years that

they begin to experiment and discover for themselves who they are and

how they want to live their lives. And the ways in which they do this

that don’t reflect our values, as they struggle to find their own,

should not diminish their parents’ self-worth or make them feel like

they have failed.

The desire to mold our children is healthy and reflects the desire

to give. The compulsion to mold reflects the desire to get and is in

the service of our own needs. The reward of good parenting is to have

established an accepting and loving relationship with your child, not

to have produced a little clone.

I shudder when I think about the parenting I perpetrated on my

first-born. If I could do it over again, I would have broadened my

parameters of what was acceptable. I would have looked with softer

eyes, lowered my standards and left more unspoken if not unseen. I

would have had more faith in her. Lots more.

My oldest daughter made it out of adolescence alive, as did I. So

with all humility, may I suggest: Do not go to war over messy rooms

or trendy clothes. Such things are not worth damaging the

relationship over. Be careful which battles you choose to fight. You

don’t want to lose the war.

* MAXINE COHEN is a Corona del Mar resident and marriage and

family therapist practicing in Newport Beach.