It is not just a clash of values or changing social mores that account for the difficulties which arise at this stage of life between fathers and their children, leading eventually to dramatic fights, a breakdown in communication, or even a complete rupture. Much of the antagonism is due to the fact that both the father and the adolescent are going through turbulent life crises simultaneously. Both are in transition, both are struggling to cope with mysterious changes and monumental new challenges.
In a study of the generation gap between high school students and their parents, Marjorie Fiske, director of the Human Development Program at the University of California in San Francisco, found that more men then women felt threatened by “youth’s deviation and challenge.” When questioned about their youngsters’ goals, these fathers often responded with defensive and highly emotional rationales for their own lives.
“Doesn’t he realize that he should be thinking about a house and all these other dull, routine, ordinary things?” said one father who, while fiercely denouncing his son’s aspirations, was really admitting how unfulfilled his own life had been.
The real problem was not related to opposing values, since the young held long-term goals similar to their parents’, but to the fact that those teen-agers were at the stage of struggling for self-identity, while their parents were at the stage of reviewing what they had achieved. This caused more conflict for the men than for the women, says Fiske, because although many men had been idealistic in their youth they were forced by the Depression to concentrate on survival and security, thereby compromising their own youthful goals. Thus they were often uneasy about their youngster’s vague work ambitions because they felt that the worth of their own life strivings was being undercut by their children’s rejection of practical concerns.
From this perspective we can see more clearly why the freedom of movement enjoyed by youngsters today so frequently stirs up resentment among men in their middle years. On one level a man may claim to be proud of his ability to give his child advantages he himself never had, but on a deeper level he often feels enraged that his children take for granted privileges that he had to earn by the sweat of his brow. To the older generation it is a deep affront that young people act as if they are entitled to pleasure as a human birthright, whereas they themselves were taught it was something you had to work for and deserve.
Moreover, it is not simply a matter of a man’s having been denied such tantalizing choices in his own youth. His rage may also stem from dissatisfaction with his present situation. If he feels impotent at work or in bed, or if he feels generally stuck and overburdened, deprived of meaningful options, the freedom and independence that his maturing children are enjoying will only accentuate his own sense of being imprisoned.
This conclusion comes from a five-year study of troubled adolescents, conducted by psychiatrist Helm Stierlin and his associates, which revealed that the fathers of teen-agers in serious trouble had all failed to resolve their own crisis, and that this failure was clearly related to the child’s difficulty.11 Disappointed in their own lives, these men cither neglected or brutalized their children to such an extent that a bitter breach often ensued, accompanied by disturbed behavior on the part of the adolescent.
Ordinarily, say these therapists, with the increasing awareness of declining physical and sexual powers, a man in his forties goes through a crisis where he doubts the value of his work efforts and his marriage. If the resolution of this crisis is to be successful, he must grieve long-time aspirations now out of reach and reassess the meaning of his achievements; or he must strike out on a new course in cither work or marriage.
In this study of troubled adolescents, however, the men were unable either to grieve successfully or to find a satisfactory new course of action. Instead, they suffered from depression, which showed up most clearly in a loss of energy and distorted relationships with their adolescent sons and daughters. (By and large these findings apply to fathers and sons, but the general theory also applies to daughters, say these researchers. With sons, a pattern of resignation and withdrawal was most common. With daughters, such fathers tended to seek self-confirmation by becoming intrusive and seductive.)
Most of these fathers were found to be frustrated, unhappy men who were either dealing with a substantial gap between their goals and the realities of their life, or else devaluing what success they had achieved. Seeing themselves as weak or impotent, they tended to be jealous of their son’s sexual vitality and freedom from tedious work. In turn, such envy produced two destructive patterns. Sometimes the father overidentified with his son, even admiring the youngster’s “potency” in defying authority, and tried to live out through him what he himself had missed. This usually led to a pattern of resignation, with almost complete abdication of the fathering role; or else to a kind of detached and hand-wringing and nagging, with no effective limit-setting.
The other alternative, even worse, was for a father to reject and devalue his son by being harshly punitive and by engaging in an “annihilating fight.” Instead of a conflict over content, how to live best, with implicit acknowledgment of the adolescent’s right to choose, this kind of fight is a personal assault. Rather than focusing on what the child does (smoke pot, for example), the father attacks who he is by defining him as an incorrigible criminal. The terms of this brutal attack are such that the son cannot survive with his self-respect intact unless he completely erases the image of his father as a worthwhile person, or breaks with him entirely, or both.
In this group of troubled adolescents what followed were abrupt and bitter separations, failures of differentiation between father and son, and long-standing alienation between them. At the root of these difficulties, say these researchers, was the fact that these men were unable to confront their sons openly because he men had failed to establish a strong sense of their own worth, failed to resolve their own “integrity” crisis. But, the researchers insist, this resolution is essential for the healthy development of both father and child.
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