Relationship between Parents and Their Teenage Girls - Essay Example

?Kyra Adams Mr. Shea Honors World Literature April 2, Relationship between Parents and their Teenage Girls Parenting is not for everyone. This is a popular declaration that makes us thwart about the challenges of parenting. Parenting is the process during which parents support their children physically, emotionally, financially and socially, right from infancy to adulthood. It is one of the principal challenges, especially when parents make efforts to be the best parents intending to bring the best out of their children. Parents bring into play many approaches while parenting. Some make the children intrepid and positive; while, some tend to make their personalities weaker. When it comes to teenagers, and especially teenage girls, parenting becomes all the more daunting. Teenage girls, if handled correctly, grow up into conscientious women who can look after their families responsibly. On the other hand, if they are mishandled, they can create deteriorating circumstances for themselves and for the whole family. Teenage pregnancies and teenage suicides are becoming some of the leading social problems of our societies. Such tribulations arise due to flawed relationships that exist between the parents and their teenage daughters. Some parents attempt to make their daughters blissful by putting off stricter boundaries from them, and encouraging them or not getting bothered when they interact with the opposite sex. This gives girls a hidden support from their parents, and they get indulged in teenage sexual relationships, which have disastrous consequences later on. Parents disregard the fact that, perhaps, their daughters need love and affection from their side instead of sheer leniency. There is a difference between parents’ perception of their daughters’ emotional demands and teenage girls’ expectations from their parents, as seen in the novel The Virgin Su, is a novel that shows how a group of teenage sleuths assemble together the pieces of the story of a family tragedy, which begun twenty years ago by the youngest daughter’s stunning death brought about by self-defenestration. The suicides attempted by five teenage girls bring the catastrophic ending to the family. The novel shows how parents try to please their girls by allowing them to interact with the opposite sex without any restriction, and how this leniency brings disaster to the whole family. The parents in the novel, like most of the parents of our society, ignored the fact that their teenage daughters wanted their love and warmth of affection. They needed care from their parents instead of care from an outsider. The parent-adolescent relationship gets a twist in this aspect. Smetana et al. (201) concluded from their research that, “Greater trust, perceived obligations to disclose, and, for personal issues, more parental acceptance and psychological control predicted more disclosure and less secrecy.”1 This makes one believe that when parents show trust in their adolescents’ issues, the latter feel more obligated to disclose their feelings to their parents. However, parents need to understand in what direction their trust and psychological control go. Overestimation of teenage girls’ disclosure of issues can inspire mothers to let go of their control, thus making them more lenient toward their daughters. This leniency, at times, proves to be catastrophic, like when mothers feel no botheration in letting their teenage daughters keep relations with boys, as shown in The Virgin Suicides. The reaction from the parents’ side can have many facets. How they cope with their teenage girls’ disclosure depends upon the parents’ intellect and experience. If they understand that their daughters might need that love and protection that their age demands, they succeed in developing healthy relationships with them. On the other hand, if they fail to recognize their daughters’ expectation of love and care, and perceive that their leniency in all respects is what is required to keep the girls happy, they actually push them towards disastrous end, like the suicides of five teenage girls in The Virgin Suicides. Eugenides mentions, in his novel, the boys saying that, We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them (p.43). 2 These lines make our minds wander toward an entirely different aspect of teenage girls’ perception of the world, and how this perception relates to their expectations that they have from their parents. Girls perceive the world and its inhabitants in a different way than boys do. They tend to be more possessive and caring in nature. They see vivid colors around them when they are in their teenage years. They feel the ecstasy that pulls them toward the path of deterioration. To suppress this ecstatic desire, and to make them see the right colors in the rainbows that surround them, their parents need to build such a relationship with them through which they can provide their daughters with extreme love, patience, and care. Teenage girls may start searching for this love in their surroundings if they do not get it from their parents. The distinctive modernist mythical impulse of terminating life originates when girls do not find protection from either side: neither from their parents nor from outside. They may consider this leniency from parents as a lack of protection, and this hinders with their normal mental development. Steinberg asserts that “psychological perspectives on family relationships at adolescence emphasized the need for children to separate themselves from parents, and suggested that parent-child conflicts grew out of adolescent need to detach emotionally from parents or parental figures.”3 This is no different from the five teenage girls who were suppressed by their strict mother. As a means of emotionally detaching themselves from their parents-they girls finally resorted to suicide. Next, parents should expect oppositionalism and defiance from their teenage girls as they try to forge an identity of their own. Jeffrey Eugenides discourses desertion in the context of the “Virgin Suicides.” The discussion focuses around the Lisbon house and towards the last remaining months when the Lisbon girls ceased to be surviving. Imagination then turns into speculation that this enforced isolation was the amounting to suicides. Nevertheless, much more intricate forms of desertion are prevalent with the text which appears to have encouraged even more intricate effects on the characters. In essence, the desertion of both the Lisbon girls, and the group of boys obsessed with them, although displayed by different ways, appears to have fostered a kind of ego-centrism within each group. The magnitude of passivity of this egocentrism seems to be interrelated to the overtness of the desertion experienced by every group. Whilst the boys display a passive level of egocentrism in the manner they imagine simply of how mingling with Lisbon girls would somehow make their own lives a lot more interesting-the forced desertion of Lisbon girls by their mothers only just increased the active nature of their egocentrism. In “Virgin Suicides”, the girls’ mother, for instance, Mrs. Lisbon, plainly punished the girls for a life time after the second youngest daughter, Lux, arrived back home from a dance having evidently had sex with her date. Nevertheless, long before Lux’s incident at the dance- the only one the girls had ever been permitted to attend-her mother had been deserting her and her sisters from the world as much as she probably could. Even when going to church Mrs. Lisbon wielded her control over the girls. The narrator of the book quips “Clutching her good purse, she checked each daughter for signs of make-up before allowing her to get in the car and it was unusual for her to send Lux back inside to put on a less revealing top” (Eugenides 30) Just after Cecilia, the youngest daughter’s suicide attempt was the psychologist and Mr. Lisbon able to persuade Mrs. Lisbon that it would be best for the best for the girls if she gave them more freedom. Meanwhile, the moment it was established that Lux had had sex after the dance; the girls’ desertion became even more severe than most people can think. Mrs. Lisbon removed the girls from school and confined them to the house. Although contrasted to the situations under which the Lisbon girls suffered, the desertion experienced by the boys in their neighborhood was hardly manifesting, it still deserves examination if only for appraisal purposes. As opposed to being imposed to outside forces, the desertion was felt by these boys was more of practice of habit. Current research has found that the significance of children’s revelation as a genesis of parental knowledge about children’s activities. Though a great deal of research establishes that parental checking becomes increasingly significant in adolescence, as many adolescents spend less time with parents and a lot more time with peers, it has been found out that most of the investigation has examined parental monitoring in terms of parents knowledge of children’s activities and that parental knowledge can be acquired in numerous ways, including parental solicitation of information, and parental behavioral control. The investigation found that controlling for trust in the parent-child relationship, only adolescent revelation was linked to lower intensities of juvenile felony and adolescent behavioral problems. In Virgin Suicides parental checking on the teenage girls was almost nonexistent. Ideally, if the girls’ mother had somehow developed a close relationship with them, the girls then could have revealed to her some of the things they feel that they mother to know. “Boys were found reporting equal disclosure to mothers and fathers about relationships, sexual attitudes and information, and plans.”4 Though these studies are clearly instructive, they lack a theoretical framework and a more methodical approach for comprehending. In most cases, parental concerns are established as not having any impact for others and are thus seen as beyond the boundaries of appropriate moral and conservative issues. Adolescents’ dismissal of authentic parental ability and their assertions to jurisdiction over individual authority recommend that adolescents claim that “arena of privacy over these issues and they may believe that they are not obligated to reveal personal issues to parents.” In 2006, 1771 children and adolescents aged between 10 to 19 years committed suicide in the United States. This made it the third leading cause of death in this age group. Suffocation at 44.9 percent and firearms at 43.1 percent were the main means for suicides. Though the frequency of teen suicide was highest amid Native American adolescents, standing at 15.4 incidents per 100, 000, Hispanic, white, and black adolescents had important rates of 3.0, 4.7 and 2.7 incidents per 100, 000, correspondingly. Further, accomplished suicides mirror a measly segment of the problem. Swartz et al conclude that “According to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey-14.5 percent of all US adolescents in ninth to 12th grade seriously considered suicide and 11.33 of all youth surveyed had made a plan during that year, which is similar to rates in Illinois and Kansas.”5 Adolescents regularly are the first to be aware of peer’s suicidal imagination however are uncertain what to do with information. Adolescents’ feedbacks to peer revelations vary and are interconnected to their gender, personal account ideation and knowledge about suicide and perceptions of mental illness. Though adults contemplate it important that adolescents report at-risk peers to adults, this is something that really never quite happed to the five adolescent teenagers in “Virgin Suicides.” The confinement of the five sisters to the house denied them important occasions in their teenage lives. As soon as we realize it, the boys spent their time obsessing over them, and they could not really understand. Without doubt, these five sisters could have made the boys’ lives more enjoyable and interesting if only they were allowed the opportunity to interact with them. Not until adolescence that the mother-daughter relationship is one of overall warmth and closeness. At this point in life that the teenage daughter is faced with the undertaking of differentiating herself-no doubt the mother-daughter relationship becomes one of the sporadic understanding and hate, both heralded with intensity that only teenage daughters can bring to a relationship. But the five sisters were denied this opportunity by their overprotective mother, Mrs. Lisbon. Teenage girls want both their freedom from their connection to their moms; the five sisters desperately needed to exercise their autonomy, but their wished sadly never bore any fruits. In “Virgin Suicide” Mrs. Lisbon was not really there for the teenage girls when they needed connection. Ideally, when the mother is available, these are the most cherished times between mothers and daughters. However, after months of detention, rather than becoming reflexive, the Lisbon sisters did relatively the opposite. They suddenly became rather active. Over a span of weeks-they sent out notes and even participated in an ostentatious phone call with the boys that lasted for over one hour. At this point, it is evident that the girls were also interested in them, too. But had the girls asked the boys to save them, to take at a far-flung city away from their now abusive parents-then all the mechanization could be considered a rudimentary cry for help. Overall, parents must learn to stay close while also giving their teenage daughters space in which they claim individuality. Had this been the case for the five sisters, then their deaths could have been averted. Works Cited Collado, Rodriguez. F. “Back to Myth and Ethical Compromise: Garcia Marquez’s Traces on Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides.” Atlantis 27.2(2005): 27–40. Print. Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides. USA: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002. Print. Schwartz, Karen Sheehan, et al. “Attitudes of Adolescents and Parents Regarding Adolescent Suicide.” Pediatrics 10.1(2010): 2008-2248. Print. Smetana, Aaron Metzger, et al. “Disclosure and Secrecy in Adolescent–Parent Relationships.” Child Development 77.1(2006): 201-217. Print. Steinberg, Laurence. “We Know Some Things: Parent-Adolescent Relationships in Retrospect and Prospect.” Journal of Research on Adolescence 11(2001): 1-19. Print. Read More