They play with their PSP in bed until midday, they swear more fluently than a fishmonger, they hide pizza boxes behind the washing basket instead of throwing them away… Who are we talking about? The “adolescents” , a new word describing these adults with adolescent behaviors. Funny, cool and funky as long as they stay single …but the situation turns more complicated once they become parents.
Is that my child?
The birth of a child is usually a way to dive head first into adulthood. It implies of course new responsibilities but allows you as well to focus your attention on someone else and to stop thinking only about yourself. It basically helps you to grow up. Except that some people just don’t and keep behaving like they used to, as if the child inside refuses to turn off leading to situations such as: buying a high-calories breakfast (Danish roll & can of coke) on the way to school because the fridge was once again empty, leaving dirty clothes and empty packs of crisps (last night dinner) all over the floor, forgetting on the coffee table the last people magazine special edition about fake boobs…
Just be cool.
Why do these parents find it so hard to play the part of reasonable and responsible adults? Once again most of the problem could be down to the stressful society we are living in where people constantly have to remodel and reformat themselves to adapt better to their environment. Consequently the childhood values have become a sanctuary, a new guide to survival responding to this fear of changing and growing up (and later growing old) which is called by psychoanalysts “Peter Pan Syndrome”. According to them the reasons of this phenomenon are sociological: the “adolescence” is linked to the lengthening of our life. Everything is postponed: becoming old, our death, and so in all logic the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood. In the dynamic of the end of the 60s revolution this generation of thirty-something adults asserts a will of freedom, an appetite for fun that shouldn’t be disturbed by the cries of a baby or the requests of a demanding teenager. One of the typical defects of these “adolescent parents” is the lack of respect for the child’s rhythm of life. They don’t want to make compromise so they shift the bath, the meals, the homework’s… if they don’t end up forgetting about them. After a long day at work they feel more like enjoying time for themselves rather than coming back home to more responsibilities.
Irritating authority
Behind all this there is as well the refusal of showing authority. They prefer to play with the Lego collection or sing along to Sponge Bob rather than force the kids to clean up their mess. To hold the authority means assuming the place of someone detaining a knowledge (the good and the bad, the fair and the unfair) and who will make others behave according to this knowledge. The one in charge is permanently confronted to his/her own responsibility and a deep feeling of loneliness (standing alone against the others). This turns out to be even more difficult when children are involved as the authority has to deal with the emotional side of it. For what result? Either letting things go in a bet that education will come to the child as hair grows on his head, or negotiating which is the equivalence of denying the difference of status between adults and children. But children need these reference marks and limits to grow up and this could lead to a deep feeling of affective insecurity. If a parent is immature to the point of lacking authority, he/she will force the child to become overly autonomous at an early age. Without any model the child will become the parent and end up behaving like a mini-tyrannical dictator living above the law.
But don’t think about calling Super Nanny just yet. “Adulescence” rarely goes that far and usually translates in childish indulgences with no real consequences (binging on pizza once a week, spitting on pigeons or regarding Will Ferrell as the best actor in the world). And on the positive side it seems that kids just love having “young” parents still able to wear slim jeans, to assume an “out of bed” hairdo, to tell bad jokes and laugh their head off in front of Shrek. Proof that being an adult can still sometimes be synonymous of cool.
