It’s preposterous to think that the world has changed so much but our kids have stayed the same,” says Ron Taffel, a noted psychologist and family therapist who New Woman magazine has called “a Spock for our time.” “Many people are locked into the notion that somehow kids are still kids the way we remember kids to be. But kids today live with the kinds of pressures and expectations that simply did not exist 20 years ago. And it’s in every area — TV, technology, the way we live. The rest of life has changed profoundly and so has the nature of childhood.”
Taffel writes a monthly column called “Family Life” for Parents Magazine and is the author of several books including the highly acclaimed “The Second Family: Dealing with Peer Power, Pop Culture, the Wall of Silence — and Other Challenges of Raising Today’s Teens.” He speaks on Tuesday, November 16, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hun School on Edgarstoune Road in Princeton. In a lecture titled “The Tyranny of Cool: What Every 21st Century Parent Needs to Know about Listening, Limiting, and Maybe Saving Your Teen’s Life,” he will give practical advice on dealing with complicated teen issues including tips on lessening endless negotiating, reducing daily stress, and handling the new realities about teen sex and drinking. Topics include safe privileges versus dangerous freedoms, unacceptable back-talk, and healthy self-expression.
The lecture is sponsored by CommonGround, a group of the parent associations from 12 Princeton area independent schools that hosts a lecture series open to the public, addressing contemporary educational and parenting issues.
Taffel defines the tyranny of cool as the pressure to fit in, to be part of the group. That pressure has always existed to some degree, he says, but there has been a tremendous change over the last two decades. Twenty years ago Dr. Taffel says his clients were primarily high school students and their parents. Gradually, he observed a slow drift in his client mix to include middle schoolers — and today, that drift encompasses the early elementary level. He sees kindergartners, even nursery school children, feeling an enormous pressure to fit in. He says parents are also feeling the pressure to help their kids fit in and feel popular.
Taffel, who has appeared on the Today Show, 20/20, and Larry King Live, says: “We have a lot of myths about the tyranny of cool. It does not reach a fever pitch in high school the way it used to or the way we still think, but rather the tyranny of cool starts early and becomes the most intense in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, the middle school years when kids are already vulnerable to the pressures of adolescence and puberty.”
Looking at teens, Taffel says that high school kids today feel that they have an entitlement to do what they want, to hang out with the people they choose, to experiment with sex, drugs, alcohol, and music, and to push the boundaries of privilege. “It has changed with these things once being acts of rebellion and defining oneself as bad. Now these teenagers feel that it is just simply a normal part of adolescence. If they want to stay out later or drink they don’t feel they are doing it to rebel against authority or the establishment. They feel it’s all part of being normal.”
While we may ask ourselves if this behavior is the result of bad parenting, the media, movies, or music, Taffel says it is not just one thing, it’s everything, our entire culture. According to Taffel, even parents feel they must compete with peers and pop culture when it comes to influencing their children. “There’s not a kid in a dark corner forcing your kids to smoke weed,” says Taffel. “Kids make these decisions on their own to get closer to each other. Their friends become their second family, just as or even more powerful than the first family at home. It’s not peer pressure. I call it peer bonding. It’s the power of the second family.”
Taffel says the second family offers rituals — only those rituals differ from those in the first family. “You hang out at a certain place at a certain time. Kids love and need rituals.” The second family also offers rules. “Kids have complicated sets of moralities and behaviors with each other. They offer understanding and empathy. They offer balance. The only way that we as parents can continue to have relationships with our kids is to not give up and learn how to [parent] within their world of rituals and rules.”
What helps, notes Taffel, is to maintain the kind of family rituals that will keep kids close and in which they want to participate. For example many parents give up on going to church or to synagogue because their children are in sports and weekends are filled with games. They give up nightly dinners together because their kids are watching TV or doing homework. The more we give up on these kinds of simple rituals, he says, the more kids will drift out to the second family to have the rituals that they desperately need because the world is so chaotic.
As the father of two teenagers, Taffel says he has learned not to underestimate the sophistication of kids in the way they really think about their friendships and how complicated and important they can be. “I have been stunned at how much kids are aware of at an earlier age. I have been equally stunned by how much they need guidance. They may say they don’t need it but the reality is that they want and even crave it. I have also been shocked at what bad listeners parents can be. Over and over I hear kids tell me we need to listen better. If we don’t listen, they will go to their second family to be heard.”
He tells the story of a high school student who went to her guidance counselor because she was uncomfortable about going to an upcoming party. “And the counselor said well, what do you think you should do. This girl asked me what’s the matter with you adults? Even if we put up a fuss and pretend we don’t care we want to know what you have to say. I asked my counselor the question because I really wanted to hear his answer, and all he did was throw it back to me.”
Taffel had a decidedly different teen experience growing up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York during the baby boom after World War Two. At that time the neighborhood was a diverse multi-ethnic community of Irish, Hispanic, Armenian immigrant families as well as families that had already been there, all contained within a 20-block radius where everyone knew each other as if it were a small town.
“The families were so intertwined and all the kids were the sons and daughters of my parents’ best friends,” says Taffel. “The kids who I grew up with, the ones I went to grammar school, middle school, and high school with, to this day are still my core group of best friends.
“I think there was a tremendous degree of power in the neighborhood. Despite the differences in our backgrounds there was an emphasis on common values, especially on the value of education and the ideas of trying to be true to your word, living modestly, and being modest.
One of the elements missing from 21st century family life. says Taffel, is that sense of community. “When I was growing up in that neighborhood, if I crossed against the light my mother would already know about it before I got home. There was a real adult and intergenerational presence that was extremely supportive and comforting. The shopkeepers all knew the kids. Of course not everything about that way of growing up was good but I’ve tried to take everything that was good and important and mattered and to use it when I’m talking about family life today.”
Taffel’s parents married in Europe just before World War II broke, then escaped to New York just before the borders closed. His mother and father, both Jewish, lost many of their family members during the Holocaust. Taffel’s father owned a small shoe store in Union, New Jersey, before the mega-malls took over. Taffel says that he learned many of the values he talks about now in the high-tech world of modern kids by watching his father sell shoes. “People would try on shoes and say they loved them. He would tell them I know you may love them but they don’t fit quite right and you’re going to get down the block and they’re going to hurt your feet. He would literally refuse to sell them those shoes and he would help them find another pair that fit better.”
He says parenting is all about finding the right fit for our children, the custom fit that is the antithesis of the mass-produced, off-the-rack parenting that is happening today. “Part of what I try to teach parents is to figure out what fits best with their children, to figure out who their child really is. Our kids are different. What they need is different. Parents understand that formulaic, wholesale parenting just doesn’t work.”
Taffel graduated from City College in New York then earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at New York University. He studied family issues at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, part of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, then worked in Brooklyn as director of treatment in child and adolescent psychology at Downstate-Kings County Hospital. In 1982 he started a family division at a non-profit needs based clinic and teaching agency, then later became chair of the Institute of Contemporary Psychology, one of New York’s largest independent psychotherapy institutes.
It was while he was there that one of his friends got sick and asked him to give a workshop in his place. From that one workshop 50 more sprang up that year. His reputation spread by word-of-mouth, and since then he has given 1500 more workshops around the country that became the basis for his first book. Taffel’s wife, Stacey Merel, is a clinical social worker who practices in New York.
Taffel says one of his goals is to try to get people to look at early adolescence in a different way. “There is a lot of information out there, a glut that changes from week to week. It can be very confusing. But after years of working with kids, interviewing kids, and going over research, there is rock solid stuff we know that works with kids and practical, concrete tools.
Taffel offers several strategies for parents of teenagers:
The kiss of death for any parent to say to a teenager is “I know exactly how you feel.” This approach forces your kids to say no, you really don’t know how I feel. Kids feel like you are taking away their ability to express themselves.
A good way to communicate with your child is to help him or her tell a story. Ask questions like, What happened next? They said this and you said that? Taffel encourages parents to help their kids develop emotional literacy and react to it. You can say something like I can’t believe what you’re telling me. Did she really say that? When kids start to feel that we really want to know what happened next in the story they want to tell the story because they are interested in your reaction to it. Ask them who else was there. Get them to describe the details. Get kids to feel like there is a real live person listening because it helps them to tell the story. Kids in the 21st century want advice. They want to know what to do. They want to hear some opinion.
Help children make informed decisions by setting the right limits. Taffel says the reality is that while most kids do not want limits, they need limits — but compassionate limits. “Kids are not worse today than they used to be. In fact, in many ways they are better, smarter, and more sophisticated. Rules and limits, yes. But countered by good listening and empathy. It’s all about balance, walking that tightrope.”
At the November 16 workshop he hopes to give parents a look at what really matters, a Consumer Reports-type digest of the best information and the best practices that work with kids this age.
“It’s very bad when kids feel more confident than the parent, when they feel more connected to each other in what they want,” says Taffel. “I want parents to leave with a greater understanding and compassion for their kids and to give them new tools to deal with their kids more effectively. It’s all about having a better relationship and guiding them through a very difficult time not only in their lives, but in this country and what’s around them.”
—Euna Kwon Brossman
“The Tyranny of Cool, What Every 21st Century Parent Needs to Know about Listening, Limiting and Maybe Saving Your Teen’s Life,” Dr. Ron Taffel, Tuesday, November 16, 7:30 to 9 p.m., the Hun School, Edgerstoune Road, Princeton. Free. 609-921-7600.
