The Problem With Teenagers

The problem with teenagers is that you cannot bribe them into mental health.

For most teenagers, sexual desire, longing and confusion comes raging to the fore. The youngster looks at the prospect of the grown-up prohibitions ahead and the reality that adulthood means the brunt of responsibility for his life passing to his own shoulders.

Should we really be surprised if the teenager is in the doldrums or protests against the dying of childhood?

The adult-figure most likely shape whether the teenager boy has any appetite for adulthood is his father. The son will ask himself, on some level, is it appealing to become like dad?

A lonely teenager, by the name of Finn, captured my attention in Sebastian Faulks’s novel, A Week In December. He spends all his time in his bedroom at the top of the family house in an affluent part of London. Knowing the boy is probably at home, upstairs, is the extent to which the parents give him much thought. He is in fact using drugs (synthetic skunk) and living on junk food in the hazy fantasy world of his bedroom. Each day, he gazes at a Big Brother sort of reality TV show, where all the participants are psychiatric inmates, with bipolar disorder, schizophrenic or acute depression.

This is how the young Finn spends his life – obliterating any connection with it whatsoever.

Severely neglected children like Finn, often develop neurological problems in the brain, as well as real challenges with functioning in life. We simply need others in our lives in order to grow into healthy adults. We need to be around other brains in order to develop adequate functioning. The adolescent brain is also going through the second radical change after babyhood. Without the good enough experience of others, the Finn’s of this world are likely to develop the sort of mental health problems of those inmates he is watching on the television.

Finn’s father, John Veals, is a multi-millionaire hedge-fund manager, consumed by self-interest, in his private study on the ground floor of the house. (Needless to say, the figure of the workaholic is hardly appealing to a teenager.) He prepares trades that will allegedly destroy the global financial system. Mrs hedge fund meanwhile, Finn’s mother, is comatose on white wine, after a busy days buying handbags. Invariably she is found stretched out with her perfectly coiffured hair on the sofa downstairs. Finn peers at her around the door when he goes to collect the pizza delivery. Occasionally, father and son meet on the stairs, with little more than mute recognition. Meanwhile, Finn’s younger sister Bella - another tragedy in the making - has been on a ‘sleep-over’ at a friend’s house for longer than any of the family care to remember.

The tragic dimensions of this money-rich and emotionally impoverished family are revealed when Finn finally descends into a raging full-blown psychotic episode. He is admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where they have to wait and see whether the psychosis is a sign that he has developed schizophrenia. Finn’s father, receives a call from his wife at the hospital, cuts her off mid-sentence, saying he has an important business call coming through. The father’s flat stubby sentences reveal he has no time whatsoever for his deeply distressed son. 

It is a moment of chilling tyranny.

Whilst I find the financial misdemeanours of John Veals and his hedge fund not entirely convincing, the neglected child Finn, is painfully similar to those I meet in the course of my work.  I probably write this (hoping to appeal to at least one or two readers) because the Finn’s of this world deserve so much more. I wanted Finn’s father John Veals to be just a ludicrous parody of excessive masculinity – which of course he is – however one is left knowing that it is Finn who pays the price and that the daughter Bella may well be next.

This troubled boy is to a large degree, a symptom of the family’s dysfunction, doing the madness on everyone’s behalf. But perhaps one of the many great achievements of the novel is the way Sebastian Faulks seems to me to force the reader to ask the question:

Who is the real psychotic? The son or the father, closed off in his self-absorbed world of business and money?

On the occasions I talk with men in the finance industry about how they see their role as a father, what they feel they should contribute to their growing children’s wellbeing, few can articulate an interesting response. It seems rarely to occur to them to think about it. Commonly, I will hear little more than ‘financial provider’.  (The exceptional fathers of course stand out.) The troubled adolescents I talk to, simply translate endless paternal absence, alongside the obvious excessive material provision, as dad just selfishly following his own dreams. Several of the teenagers say, in a perplexed way, that they rarely see dad laugh or smile. “So what’s the point?” they ask me.  Let’s face it: it isn’t as though dad is absent in order to put bread on the table. Something else is going on in the excessive pursuit of money, the filthy lucre asked to quell some deeper more complex issues to do with self-esteem.

Sometimes I will hear some quasi-Darwinist explanation, survival of the richest as a defensive response, as though you just mindlessly create children and let them get on with growing up (Darwin, incidentally, never suggested anything like this). Yet Charles Darwin, who loved Jane Austen novels and the poetry of Milton, was himself an exceptionally loving, caring father and known by many to be so. In this regard, perhaps his life as well as his work is just as extraordinary and worthy of study.  His daughter for instance, said of him:

            "To all of us he was the most delightful play-fellow, and the most perfect

             sympathizer. Indeed, it is impossible adequately to describe how delightful a

            relation his was to his family, whether as children or in their later life."

The performance of excessive masculinity, cut-off from feelings, an efficient extension of the corporate machine, is painful and difficult for many men (and women) in the business world. 

In order to maintain some sense of mental health, the work identity needs to be worn lightly, like a cloak one can remove, rather than life-long armour. It is neither adequate, nor a sufficiently flexible way of being when it comes to fathering.  Our teenagers desperately need both our presence in the lives and our forbearance that some rage against growing up is natural. We should never be sentimental with them, blindly attempting to understand their troubles – they don’t want that – instead, we need to hold firm boundaries, tolerate what we believe is right and stand up against the behaviour we think is wrong. Of course this requires patience and the emotional endurance to cope with our own sense of frustration.

Perhaps the rewards of some studious consideration about how to better love our teenagers, are more enormous than we can ever imagine. 

Our children are after all our true legacy, not our deals, houses, boats or anything else.