GENERATION IN THE MIDDLE: SCREAMING FOR DADDY
Generally the generation gap grows even larger when an adolescent rebels in a more radical manner than merely choosing a disapproved lifestyle. Given the many rapid changes in American society, the issues that parents must confront are more complex today than ever before. And since there is no longer a consensus on values, nor any clear-cut guidelines on how to socialize a child toward adulthood, parents often feel inadequate and confused.
These feelings increase at mid-life, when a man discovers that it is far more traumatic to be the father of teen-agers than toddlers. Adolescents no longer rebel simply by drinking too much beer, flunking math, abusing curfews, or taking the family car for a joyride. They smoke and deal dope, get strung out on speed or heroin, shoplift and steal, or run away from home. Some disappear entirely, swallowed up by the underground drug culture or seduced by a religious cult like that of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
Steering a teen-ager through such treacherous waters is not easy, especially for this generation of success-oriented men who have often been too busy to pay much attention to their kids even during more placid periods. “These guys know a man doesn’t make the cover of Time magazine because he’s a good father,” said one management consultant bluntly. “They may give lip-service to the sanctity of their family, but the corporate man who is really concerned with his children’s development is rare indeed.” Sometimes men who have been so preoccupied with work that they have largely ignored their children are dynamited out of their indifference only when a tragedy occurs.
“This is a perfect example of a mid-life crisis,” said a New England psychiatrist, pointing to a telephone message marked “Urgent” from a man he described as a highly successful business executive. “My son was hurt in an accident and is dying now. Another child is very upset. Please advise,” the message read. “This kind of man buys advisers when he needs them,” commented the psychiatrist. “He had just recently woken up to the fact that he barely had any contact with his children. And now this.”
Such heart-shatterini? incidents are not Unique. “It’s only when there is a total breakdown in the child and it destroys the family that we do something,” declared entertainer Alan King not long ago, speaking from personal experience. “T saw it all . . . the glue-sniffing . . . the marijuana . . . and I excused it, any excuse,”" he said about his oldest son. Bob, who had gone from bcinc a school troublemaker to using alcohol, barbiturates, amphetamines, and then to becoming a heroin addict at seventeen.
“I’m more aware now,” claimed King at forty-four, acknowledging his failure as a father several years after his son had completed a rehabilitation program and gotten off drugs. “I thought because I was a success at any early age, I knew it all. I knew nothing.” An active philanthropist who had “played a million benefits” and spent many years on the road, he recalls not wanting to discipline his child after returning from his travels. “When I did things with him, it was token, there was no continuity,” he admits. “They are aware when you are playing at being a father. They can smell it. just as they can smell true affection, concern and parental guidance.”7
King discovered that more discipline, consistency, and demonstrative affection are needed at home. “Now everyone kisses,” he says. He also discovered that even though the demands of his career are atypical, many other men fail their children in a similar way:
The average father doesn’t lead my life, but it’s the same thing. He goes to work, comes home, says he doesn’t want to hear about the little problems because he’s had a tough day at the office, puts on the television and then goes to bed. He’s on the road, too!
I sec successful men running companies with hundreds of men; they know how to deal with every situation, how to discipline and reward in the business world. But the biggest business they arc running is their family and they fail at it. When you’ve been through this, you find out how many other parents arc going through it.
King remembers the futility of reminding his son that he had given him “everything,” including luxuries his own immigrant father could never afford. “What he wanted was not the material things but my affection and love,” he now says with painful candor. “What my kid was screaming for was Daddy.”
King heard the scream just in time. Two years later, when he realized that his younger son was heading in the same direction, smoking marijuana and sneaking out late at night, he had his son arrested for drug possession. “I had to stop him, and the only way—it was the last resort-—was to call the police,”" said King, a man who is just beginning to realize at mid-life how difficult it is to be a daddy. “The greatest danger,” he warns, “is that we see what is happening but we don’t want to see it, we don’t want to believe it.”
Alan King is right. Many men in their middle years refuse to see what is happening to their children, refuse to hear them even when they scream. When a youngster gets in serious trouble with himself or with the law, they react, instead, by becoming immovably irate. Rather then face reality or confront the fact that their child, their own flesh and blood, has given birth to an illegitimate baby, stolen a car, become a political activist, or been convicted on a narcotics rap, they often deny the whole event, deny any responsibility for their child’s behavior, by cutting of all communication.
Here is another instance where men of this generation reach an impasse because of impacted feelings. Not only are they inept at handling openly antagonistic confrontations with their own children, but also they frequently cannot accept the fact that their child has in some way failed, or that they themselves have failed as a father. Turning their back, they refuse to acknowledge that here is a situation they cannot solve, a person they cannot control.
“Such critical encounters with rebelling youngsters are enormously humbling experiences” for driving, ambitious men, says sociologist Norma Haan, who has interviewed many mid-life men participating in studies at the University of California’s Institute of Human Development at Berkeley. One man whose daughter had become involved with drugs confessed this was the only problem he had ever tackled that he couldn’t lick.
“He found out he couldn’t order her, he couldn’t bully her, he couldn’t persuade her,” says Haan. “And for the first time he felt really helpless about something that mattered terribly to him.” Frequently such fathers want to cut their children off, in contrast to mothers, who are much less inclined to break the tie, despite their anger. The man’s attitude is that he will refuse to support a child who is doing things he doesn’t approve of.
“Some of them absolutely reject the kid,” says Haan of the men in her study. “They don’t know where the kid is, and they don’t care to know.”
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