I just got back from the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Adolescence in Philadelphia. Like most meetings of researchers, this gathering was much like an ant nest. People who hadn’t seen each other would come together in little groups, touch antenna to see where and how the others had been, and move along, sharing their news. It all seemed random and scattered. But, like an ant nest, the researchers were building something much larger than any one individual could see: a scientific understanding of adolescence. I’ve been attending these meetings since the first gathering 27 years ago in Montreal, where just a few of us met in a hotel room and thought maybe there were enough folks studying adolescents to have our own organization, separate from the larger Society for Research in Child Development. We’ve grown. Our current meeting was thousands strong.
Professional scientific meetings are like a science fair writ large. Virtually every person attending has a poster or a talk to present, showing the questions they’ve been addressing for the past few years. One of the reasons I love to bring students to these meetings is that it shows them the huge amount of work involved in creating the scientific knowledge they take so blithely for granted in their textbooks. Our group presented work representing 10-20 hours a weeks’ work for me and 8 or 9 students over a three year period. And we’re just one of 4 papers in a short session, and there are hundreds and hundreds of sessions. Hundreds of thousands of manhours, all dedicated to building knowledge.
That’s how science works. If it were easy, everyone would do it.
Privacy v. Secrecy
As a parenting researcher, there was a lot of new material, much of it focusing on the fine distinction between adolescent privacy and adolescent secrecy. Much of this research grows out of research on monitoring. In general, monitoring by parents is thought to facilitate effective parenting. Parents can’t respond appropriately – either by becoming more trusting and giving kids more freedom or by intervening when things aren’t going well - if they don’t know what’s going on in their kids’ lives.
But monitoring can definitely turn into snooping. And snooping is bad. Anything that undermines trust is corrosive to the parent-child relationship, especially when that distrust isn’t deserved. Understanding the difference between healthy privacy and the kind of secrecy or manipulative use of information that may be hiding a serious problem is an issue at the cutting edge of our understanding of parenting adolescents.
Adolescents are sensitive to their privacy - no surprise - and that’s healthy. It’s not just that kids don’t want you to walk in on them in the shower. Little kids don’t mind their parents going through their backpacks and checking for moldy sandwiches and math test grades. Adolescents do. Kids don’t usually mind if you hang out while they’re playing video games. That’s not a given when they’re 16.
Several papers looked at the question: when are parental rules and questioning okay and when aren’t they? Answer: it's more okay when the issues in question have to do with the parents primary roles: protecting kids and fostering positive development. It’s more okay to set rules and ask about safety issues, like drinking or smoking (or friends drinking or smoking), about homework, and about driving. It’s not okay to set rules about who friends are or other issues that are primarily private and only affect the teens.
One of the main things that really struck me across these many sets of results was that if parents’ actions stem from their roles, the kids don’t usually feel they’re intrusive. They might not always like it, but they understand it – especially, ironically enough – as they get older. Eighteen year olds tend to be less touchy about these issues that 14 year olds.
The problem always arises when kids and parents disagree about what’s personal and what’s a safety issue. Is dressing provocatively and safety/conventional issue or a matter of personal expression? Kids and parents disagree. One of the things I found most challenging in terms of where I’d like to see my own research going was on how to judge where that point is. My current thought: if the kid isn’t doing anything wrong and isn’t in danger – leave them alone. Yes, I always knew that as a parent. That’s what the research says now too. How to capture that delicate balance will be a challenge for future researchers and statisticians.
In general, the lighter the touch – and the more parents evoke pragmatic concerts instead of moral ones – the more kids will tend to buy into it.
Parenting as Propoganda
And buying into it is key. The major shift in research on parenting in the last decade is our understanding that kids are active participants in their own development. Think about it. Is your child going to be making decisions about having sex or drinking or even studying with you sitting over their shoulder? No. They need to make decisions on their own, because they understand their parents’ reasoning and they’ve come to agree with it. They do what THEY believe in. That’s what socialization is. You act as you’re expected to because you believe in the system. Most people don't obey laws because they're worried about getting caught. They are lawabiding because they believe in the social contract that created those laws.
Our research says that kids whose parents are warm and fairly strict when they enter adolescence agree with their parents more, obey them more, and are more open to their influence. They’ve internalized the values their parents have tried to teach them. They care what their parents think. And they have friends who more or less agree with them. Parents and friends usually are working towards the same ends. The idea that peers are a negative influence is mostly a myth.
That was one of the main things I got from this year’s meeting: effective parenting is a lot like propaganda.
When does propaganda work best?
- When you’re not really aware of it, so your defenses aren’t up. Parents casually chat about their own day, so kids chat about theirs.
- When you like the person who’s delivering the message. It’s not a surprise that parents who kids describe as warm and supportive are more likely to be agreed with and – when the child doesn’t agree - obeyed.
- When things are explained in a matter of fact kind of way. The child asks if they can have something that the parent thinks is too expensive or too commercial or inappropriate. The parent just says ‘no’, and tells them why. Explaining gives the kid something to think about. And, over time, they may come to think it makes sense.
- When it happens in small doses over a long, long, long period of time. Remember how long it took us to believe in wearing seatbelts or to realize that it’s not okay to smoke at our desks?
Our most important task as parents is letting our kids go, and be, and find out who they are and what they love to do. Our other – harder – task is to help keep them safe while they do that.
The best way for that to happen is to help them protect themselves. And to do that, we can’t start when they’re teens. We need to start when they’re still babes in arms and keep it going. Then, when they’re teenagers, they may still listen to us.
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To see what a scientific paper presented in poster form at a conference looks like, right click on the image below and select 'view image'. That will allow you to see and read the full poster.
