The working-class and middle-class parents do not speak with a common voice about their own adolescent experiences. And they do not all have the same perceptions of how engaged and aware their own parents were. This is a varied group of adults; the experiences that they bring to bear on perceptions of appropriate relations between parents and children are also diverse. However, variation gives way to more uniformity as they discuss the issue of how important it is in a child’s adolescence that parents be especially alert to possible dangers and especially vigilant about watching over their children.
Some working-class and middle-class parents express appreciation for the efforts of their parents to rear their children in a religious faith, with good morals, and with personal ambition. In retrospect, they appreciate the limits their parents set. Those who recall that they actively tested those limits often admire their parents for the efforts they made to raise them in spite of that testing. One working-class, Hispanic mother of three children was explicit on this point: “I was a difficult kid. . . . [My mother] would agree definitely that her satisfying moments are seeing me turn out the way I am now. . . . She taught me how to mother even though I didn’t allow her to mother. She taught me how to be a good mom.” She is thus satisfied that she can rely on the model her mother put forth even if, in her youth, she thought it was too strict and too constraining.
Other working-class and middle-class adults believe their parents were insufficiently attentive to the behavior of their teenage children. A white, middle-class woman regrets the mistakes she now believes her parents’ lack of attention allowed her to make: “My parents left us to our own devices much more than I am [leaving my child to her own devices] probably. And I made some really stupid mistakes because of it. I did some really stupid stuff.”
Still others noted that their parents were not only inattentive but that they severely underestimated the trouble that children could get into as teens. Lisa Tbomas, a white, middle-class mother of two teenage children, recalled that although her parents were concerned about their children’s activities, they were not sufficiently aware of what they were actually doing:
We grew up in the city, and there were a lot of dangers in the city. And I think they worried about being in the city. . . . We were always up to no good all the time. We were doing all kinds of stuff as teenagers. When I think about it, it’s really quite wild. And I think whatever they worried about, we were doing way worse stuff.
Another white, middle-class mother of two thinks that because her parents were “naive,” she “saw a lot and did a lot and got away with things that [her own] kids [don’t] get away with.” And yet another white, middle-class mother of two teenagers also used the word “naive” to describe her parents, and she suggested that this naivete might have been deliberate:
Our parents were naive in terms of what was out there. . . . My parents were brought up in the fifties and forties, and they didn’t know what was out there in my high school days. So in some ways that was probably better. My mom always says, ”If you stick your head in the sand for four years and then pull it out, they will be fine.” That’s what her attitude was.
Some of these adults now live with the consequences of youthful indiscretions: a few of the interviewed women dropped out of school before receiving a high school diploma, and a few of them had children when they were very young.22 When they talked about the concerns their parents had about their not finishing their education or their getting pregnant, they were talking about concerns to which they often believe, in retrospect, both they and their parents should have been even more attentive. For example, consider Amy Price, a white, working-class mother of three who is now separated from the father of her children. Although Amy does not say that she regrets having children at a relatively young age (her daughter was born when she had just turned twenty), she acknowledges that she does not want the same thing for her own daughter: “I got married at nineteen; my sister got married at eighteen. That was just how it was back then. Everybody we knew back then got married as teenagers. I hope [my daughter] will wait.”
Whether they felt the consequences of youthful indiscretions or got off scot free, the acute awareness of how much they concealed from their parents— or, even more often, how little their parents knew or even wanted to know about what they were doing—serves as a lesson for the present. Working-class and middle-class parents draw from their own memories of having been young once too to conclude that they should be attentive and firm, diligent and authoritative. These perceptions are conjoined with other beliefs about the significance of setting limits for their children: they know that the world outside is dangerous and that they can no longer rely on others in their communities to keep an eye or ear out for their adolescent children; those who are employed outside the home know that the hours after school can become an occasion for all sorts of unwelcome behavior. They want to know what their children are doing at all times, they want to keep them safe, and they want to protect them from making mistakes that will have significant consequences down the road.