Good Kids and Bad Influences
My elderly mother, as she reflects on her life (and mine), often asks me, “Why were you kids so bad?”
“You kids” refers to me and my brother. We are both in our later 40s. The badness she is referring to occurred in our adolescence.
Her repeated return to this question gets under my skin, as I am no longer 16, and I reject categorization of children into 2 groups, good and bad.
Most parents, I’d bet, even if their teenagers are doing super “bad” things would say, “He’s a good kid, but he’s just really struggling in school,” or “She’s a good kid; she just gets a lot of peer pressure from her friends.” In other words, even in the midst of kids’ badness, rare is the parent who would call a spade a spade. I’d bet my life that if you’d asked my mother when my brother and I were teens if we were bad kids, she would say absolutely not!
And I know exactly who she would blame for our badness: a friend of my brother’s, whose presence around the house coincided with the worst time in each of our lives, the ultimate Bad Influence, who drank heavily, did and dealt drugs, had frequent sex with any girl who pleased him (including me), skipped school, and generally did whatever the fuck he wanted.
GOOD KIDS, BAD KIDS: A FICTION
This little story sounds like I am actually giving evidence for the good kid/ bad kid categorization. I am not. Here’s the truth in my estimation. Like attracts like.
While it’s true that there are situations in adolescence where there is victim/victimizer and predator/prey, I wholeheartedly believe my brother and I attracted the rage, indifference, pain, and desire to burn it all down because we carried it in ourselves.
So what did that make us? Were we bad kids?
According to the universal parental definition, yes. Bad kids rebel. They drink, do drugs, have sex, skip or do poorly in school, and generally don’t give a fuck. Good kids don’t drink or do drugs, have sex when we think it’s appropriate, go to school, get good grades, and are generally following our rules. Right?
Parents, wake up. Many of the kids we’ve categorized as good or great are also good or great at hiding bad choices. And kids who follow rules and never cross the line are in grave danger of being taken advantage of or ostracized—or worse, being judgmental of choices they don’t make by kids to which they consider themselves superior.
So parents of bad kids think their kids are really good and make excuses for their badness, and parents of good kids are either blind to their kids’ badness or have made their kids so devoted to goodness that their kids are naive and judgmental.
It’s time to dispose of useless, binary categories and adopt new ways of thinking about bad influences.
PERSONAL INTEGRITY AND FORTITUDE: A SPECTRUM
I described fully my own parenting intentions in my parenting manifesto. My manifesto describes in detail why making a goal of helping your children on a path toward independence and self-realization is wiser that handing them a prewritten script (written, presumably, by parents and the dominant cultural values) for “success.”
The script asks kids to play the part of the shiny rule-follower, the “good kid.” The good kid should do good things and avoid bad things and bad people, and all will be well. I argue this narrative disables children. We ought to be aiming for actions that promote independent thought and action in our kids and encouraging experimentation by our kids.
This backdrop of clear intention eviscerates the notion of children as good or bad. As kids journey toward independence and self-realization, it becomes obvious that they are on a spectrum of personal integrity and fortitude. All kids have these qualities, in varying degrees, for varying reasons.
We would do well as parents to keep our focus on our own children and continually assess their current levels of integrity (moral principles) and fortitude (ability to bear pain or adversity with courage).
Too little integrity adds up to actions driven by selfishness, disrespect, meanspiritedness, law-breaking, and the like. Too little fortitude adds up to lack of daring, lack of courage, and cracking under the slightest pressure. A child with higher degrees of BOTH will navigate the external world well.
“BAD INFLUENCES:” WAYS TO GROW
It is essential to nurture integrity and fortitude from the get-go. It is a difficult situation indeed to assess your 15 year old and admit that she is repeatedly and unabashedly breaking the law, or he is unwilling to get uncomfortable and challenge himself.
Stop seeing your kid as bad or good. Instead, practice seeing clearly that kid’s level of integrity and fortitude. If you cannot be ruthlessly honest with yourself as parent, you cannot get meaningful traction, especially in your child’s adolescence.
If your child is average (not off the rails nor completely isolated) it’s high time to end the obsession with so-called bad influences. Here’s why.
You actually can’t keep the world away from your kid. They WILL be exposed to all the things you are afraid of if they are living an average (relatively healthy) existence. Unless you plan on being their chaperone though life, they will encounter alcohol, drugs, all manner of idiocy online, sex, law breakers, “inappropriate” lyrics, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, etc. It is really only a matter of time.
The world and its influences, be it other kids, adults, crap on the internet, substances, are your kids’ training ground. This stuff, this bad, bad, stuff? That’s HOW KIDS GROW. Without these “bad influences,” your child would be bored and boring, weak with no place to work out. If your kid has solid levels of integrity and fortitude, these encounters should not spike your anxiety or keep you up at night.
I know that I do not know all that my kids do. I don’t and have not ever checked their phones, tracked them, interrogated them, or punished them. My assessment is that all three of my kids have high enough levels of integrity and fortitude that I do not need to be concerned about what I don’t know. If you are concerned about what you don’t know, don’t spy. Talk to them.
I want to know my kids can wander and experiment and come back to center.
I want to know my kids can try things without being crushed.
I want to know my kids have competence in strange situations.
Do you?
The more you focus on the “bad” world, the “bad” kids, the more potentially alluring those things are. Instead, turn your focus to your own child. Demonstrate belief in the goodness of their essence instead of dictating the goodness of their behavior.
Just last week, my youngest daughter was invited to smoke weed. And, she admitted, not for the first time.
She told me about it, and I didn’t bat an eye. I don’t think weed is something to get wound up about. She looked at me and said, “It would be easier for me if you’d just tell me not to do it. That I’m not allowed.”
I refused.