•  Book Review: Teen Health Books

The Second Family: How Adolescent Power Is Challenging the American Family
By Ron Taffel, MD and Melinda Blau
St. Martin's Press
256 pp $23.95

For a glimpse of quiet desperation, go no farther than the parenting section of your local bookstore.

Troubled parents of troubled teens haunt the aisle at all hours. You see them anxiously browse a few paragraphs of some promising volume, then hear them sigh like busted radiators. Some take frantic notes -- yet another page of expert observations to be stuffed in a pocket and forgotten. These are not happy readers searching for surefire ways to liven up Muffy's birthday party.

Parenting has never been easy, but these days June and Ward Cleaver would require books by the pound -- not to mention counseling and anxiety medications -- just to cope with Wally, the Beav's decent-enough older brother. The prototypical wise parents of the Baby Boom's childhood years would find themselves popping Ativan in the parenting aisle when faced with kids like those vividly sketched in an intriguing new book called The Second Family. In it, child and family therapist Ron Taffel offers an array of disturbing vignettes that ring all too true.

Take Jessica, who at dinnertime repeatedly refuses to turn off the TV and set the table. When mom threatens to pull the plug on the TV for the evening, Jessica "looks her mother squarely in the face and says, 'F--- you, Mommy.'" "Jessica is 8-years-old," Taffel tells us. "And she is far from unique."

As the kids in Taffel's examples grow older, their anger deepens. Parents beyond number can nod ruefully when reading about Jared, a suburban eighth-grader on the brink of expulsion for smoking pot. "A skull and crossbones dangles from his left earlobe, a dagger penetrates his eyebrow, and an Egyptian ankh projects from his lower lip -- 'for good luck,' he explains. Everything that he does -- painting his room black, his low-rent look, the piercings -- seems to shout to his parents, 'Stay away! I'm not part of your world and I don't want you in mine." '

Then there's Margaret, a 14-year-old master of denial who was caught by her mother having sex in the bathtub with two boys simultaneously. "I wasn't doing anything," she insists to her distraught mom. "Besides, there were bubbles in the tub -- how could you know what was actually going on?"

These are not dangerous loners likely to gun down their classmates, Taffel reminds us. Sadly, their problems are far more pervasive.

The litany of causes is familiar: Parents working longer hours. Kids hooked from infancy on TV and chat rooms. A confusing slew of theories on raising children. The demise of family rituals like pancakes on Sunday mornings and dinner together every night. Now, says Taffel, teens find solace in a "second family" -- "a huge, supportive network of friends who think just like them, act like them, don't care about school, and view parents from the same distant perspective."

To be sure, teenagers have slammed doors and claimed to be misunderstood since the invention of puberty. Even so, Taffel offers valuable insights into the far different world inhabited by today's adolescents. He says, for example, that rage at Mom and Dad doesn't generally drive kids to the second family. Instead, teens crave what their parents aren't providing -- "a sense of comfort, belonging, rules, rituals, and honest feedback." "We're not arguing with our parents like you did," a 13-year-old told Taffel. "We're not even noticing them that much."

In addition, Taffel argues, "peer pressure" isn't as potent as it used to be. Imposing no expectations other than loyalty, the second family does not force teens to drink, use drugs, or have sex. "I don't have to do anything," one teen explained to Taffel. "I don't have to be good at anything."

Despite the raw image they convey, however, today's kids are "more honest, open, and willing to put their feelings on the line with their friends than adolescents once were," Taffel says. He uses his surprising frontline observations to craft advice some parents will find useful. Instead of shutting out your kids' repulsive music and grungy friends, grit your teeth and open up to them, Taffel advises. Yes, the lyrics will offend you. And the pals, pierced and pink-haired, might look like characters out of a Fellini film.

But Taffel cites case after case of parents who rapidly come to see the value in their kids' friends, and, as for the music -- well, they discover, at the least, provocative topics for discussion.

Taffel believes so strongly in reaching your kids through their pals that one of his chapters is entitled, "Why Don't You Invite Your Friends Over?" In it, he tells the story of the impossible-to-live-with junior high student Alicia and her mom Cay, whose home became a lot happier once Alicia's friends felt comfortable there. Hostilities between mother and daughter eased to the point where the two could have a serious and constructive talk about sex; later, Alicia even confided that an older cousin had once molested her.

Cay didn't try to be one of the kids, Taffel points out. She made sure that Alicia and her friends kept their behavior at her house within reasonable limits. But the bottom line is that her show of respect for Alicia's friends -- tough as it was at first -- paid off in a more respectful relationship all around.

At the same time, teenagers should be required to gain their parents' trust the old-fashioned way: by earning it. Taffel urges parents to mete out rewards and consequences liberally, no matter how lax they've been in the past. "Threatening to take away a favorite TV weekly program or denying access to e-mail gets their attention a lot faster than yelling the same old invectives," he writes.

That can be solid advice in families where kids still agree, however grudgingly, that their parents are in charge. In others, though, commonsense consequences will force kids even deeper into their dark bunkers. In households where communication channels have long since been vaporized, Mom's sudden interest in Ten Inch Nails will fall on deaf ears. And a threat to cut off e-mail if that mess in your room isn't cleaned up will yield only a cynical smirk -- and another candy wrapper tossed onto the mulch that once was a floor.

The best parts of The Second Family are descriptive. Taffel offers a compelling look at the way teens interact with one another, the ways their "second families" enrich them, and why their actual families have fallen down on the job. This kind of behind-the-front-lines intelligence is valuable for any parent attempting to understand an errant teen.

However, the book is weaker when it comes to the techniques parents might need to deal with kids who have shut down. There's no discussion, for instance, of the pros and cons of therapeutic schools and other end-of-the-rope alternatives that, at their best, have proven to be lifesavers for some families. And just what is the most effective response to that 8-year-old who cursed out her mother over restrictions on TV watching? Taffel doesn't say -- at least not directly.

Even so, The Second Family is intriguing for its depiction of a world adults seldom enter, and it can serve as a reminder to a legion of anguished parents that their kids might not be as beyond hope as they sometimes seem.

-- Steve Chawkins is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

First published December 12, 2001
Last updated June 18, 2007
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive

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