Setting Our Own Standard

My daughter was a little curt and snippy with me the other day, while we were out doing her bidding. Rather than being contrite or at least subdued when I called her on it, she was indignant. “You wouldn’t believe how other kids treat their parents!” she informed me with a whithering look that was calculated to put me in my place.

I stewed on that for a bit, resisting the urge to retort with the age old parental response, “I don’t care what everybody else is doing” because I wanted to give this one some thought. You see, my daughter is a great kid. She is honest, hard working, and responsible. Given what we could be dealing with at sixteen her father and I feel very lucky indeed. But in the end I realize that we are talking about separate issues. I don’t want to view her relative to others. The fact that so-and-so hurls profanities at her parents does not make it any more acceptable for my daughter to sulk through the mall without any acknowledgement of the time, energy, and resources being expended on her behalf.

The teen years seem to be ones characterized by rather unflattering self-absorption. My mother is happy to remind me of how, as a teen, I was at the center of my very own universe, caught up in the minutia of myself. It was the luxury I enjoyed as a child raised with enough love and abundance to be able to engage in some serious navel gazing. But what I did not enjoy was a lot of back-up to support this self-aggrandizement. There were behavioral expectations at school, at home, and in the community to live up to, or pay the price. Television seemed to echo these standards with programs like the Brady Bunch and The Cosby Show, where adults were portrayed as smart and credible, and courtesy and respect held sway. Now granted, I never met a family that actually resembled the Brady Bunch or the Huxtables, but still, I was getting the message about standards of behavior on a variety of fronts.

These days it seems as if television shows centered on teens are largely parent-free or use adults primarily for pratfalls or as punch lines. I remember a while back when my son said something uncharacteristically bratty to me and I realized that he was literally pirating lines from a Nickelodeon sit-com. This child seemed genuinely perplexed when I told him that such behavior was not going to fly. So, if we as parents are competing with the likes of Lindsey Lohan, Facebook, and Gossip Girls for airtime with our kids it is no wonder we may be experiencing a subtle descent into sarcasm and irreverence that often does not even register with them. I get the message being sent by my daughter: I don’t even know how lucky I have it.

But it doesn’t feel lucky to me if she simply exceeds the minimum standards of socially acceptable behavior. It doesn’t feel lucky if she is just not as rude as “everybody else”. I want her to operate from a foundation of values that reflect a sense of respect for herself and for others. I want her to become clear on who she is and what she believes in, and to use that as the measuring stick. In short, I want her to set the standard for her own life, not just pattern it after whatever is coming down the pike.

And so I continue to respond with the old adage, “I don’t care what everyone else is doing”. Then my husband and I give some thought to ways in which we can help her develop a sense of self not built on shifting sands. We share, and hopefully model, the values that we subscribe to. We tell our kids why they matter to us, and sometimes the hard earned lessons we learned that helped us to determine that. This does not seem to go very well when delivered in lecture form, but we seem to make some headway when it is brought up in the context of our everyday lives. We have shaken our heads at some ridiculous lapses in judgment we have seen with our kids, finding it hard to believe that certain things are not just plain common sense. We have gotten to the point, though, where we presume nothing. Values are caught and taught, but much is not necessarily intuitive.

Perhaps in the end, having our children observe the widely divergent ways in which people think it is okay to operate will prove to be a blessing. Far too many of us from the Brady Bunch era knew how we were expected to behave, while giving little thought to why we did so. Many of us didn’t own the values that we subscribed to, which made them shifting sands in and of themselves, a real danger in conformity.

So we challenge our children to think through the things that will define them, while continuing to set our expectations high. Our hope is that they will know that we believe they are capable of great things and grow to believe this themselves. We hope that they will know how we have come to define some of the attributes that we hold dear and will know, also, that we trust them to define for themselves the standards by which they will choose to live. Just as with telling the truth, knowing who you are really helps you keep your story straight.