I wonder if in all cultures this stereotypical 'teenage' behaviour even exists.
I think the behaviors that occur in this culture do not occur in all but an adolescent phase of maturation specific to that culture, does exist.
I need to hate you right now and I need you to survive it....I need to fight you on it and I need you to fight me back.
This is a psychoanalytic perspective on adolescence. I know this because this is the exact thing that the psychiatrist who treated my son and I for many years, told me as recently as a couple of months ago, and many times before.
...while I find the handholds and footholds in this new world I feel like I am in. I used to know who I was, who you were, who we were. But right now I don’t....
This is the fight that will teach me that my shadow is not bigger than my light. This is the fight that will teach me that bad feelings don’t mean the end of a relationship. This is the fight that will teach me how to listen to myself, even when it might disappoint others.
If you think about it in traditional society there are rituals that explain and help the child define him or herself as changed and enter adult society. In this society, what is there? Drugs, sex, gangs, defiance towards parents and society? In other societies, there is work, an apprenticeship system, an extended family. There are religious rituals. People may marry early and take on actual responsibilities whereby they see objectively their own changing. While I am favor of the so-called welfare state, there is no government subsidy or help from parents to live and to pay ones way without work.
So these societies by definition are detachment oriented.
In more traditionally oriented modern countries, Greece, Spain and Argentina come to mind, that did not have problems during the teen phase as countries, when work disappears and economic crisis arrives...problems associated with growing up come to approach more our own. At least I think this is so.
In our country adolescence and therefore dependency is prolonged extraordinarily. This is what causes the problems. The parents hold on. And so do the kids. ...All of this takes puts a lot of heat on the nuclear family. And the kids.
Now the expectation of parents is that "to do good" the kids go to college and gradate school. The emotional investment of parents is extra-loaded. The guilt is enormous.
I am relying entirely on your ability to stay in this fight. No matter how much I argue.
This is very, very strange to me.
I am looking at M's family. Weirdness has gone on and still does. There is the expectation by all that the family stays united. When unity is threatened seriously, it causes enormous pain. There is huge pressure on the errant sibling to right himself and to make it right.
I agree with NIJ. What seems to be absent in our children is
their expectation of themselves to take responsibility for anything.
My son sometimes appears to take responsibility a bit. But it is always, when I look back at it, when he wants something. It is outer-directed, it seems, not a sense of obligation on his part.
Perhaps that will come later. I hope so.
Thank you Cedar. I will come back and respond again. This thread is very interesting.
Have a good day tomorrow, everybody.
COPA