My daughter, almost 13, recently told me she wanted to be a graffiti artist. And as someone who grew up watching both The Warriors and the title sequence to Welcome Back, Kotter countless times, I thought this was super cool. Then she confessed that she had snuck through a fence next to some railroad tracks with a friend, cans of Krylon in hand, to decorate some random concrete abutment.
She held her phone toward me with a transgressive grin, showing images of some innocuous spray-painted circles. No profane expression. Nothing evoking Basquiat. Just a series of black circular smears, each about the size of a large pizza.
I swiped through the pics, smiled and said, “Good stuff! You know, you have to be safe around railroad tracks and places like that.”
That was it. I never reprimanded her for trespassing or vandalism. If anything, I praised her.
Later, I started to be haunted by guilt. Am I a crappy parent? Is my negligence damning her to a future in juvie? Is juvie still a thing?
Fighting the urge to over-parent
The way I reacted to my daughter was, according to historian and demographer Neil Howe, “typical Gen X.”
Howe, who is sought after for his expertise in generational trends — the dude invented the term “millennial,” along with William Strauss — chuckled as I shared this story with him. “The idea that it’s illegal didn’t even occur to you,” he says.
In fact, I was quietly proud of her, recalling my own early teens — before driving, before girls — spent with friends squishing pennies on commuter train tracks and busting out porch lights with well-aimed landscaping stones.
“Gen X parents grew up with very little order,” Howe explains. “They were latchkey kids, the children of divorce.”
Realizing what we got away with, some Gen X parents have overcompensated, creating a hyper-parental police state where a kid’s every waking moment is scheduled and monitored. Many kids reach 15 or 16 without ever having been someplace where their parents couldn’t reach them in an instant. They carry communicator-tracking devices with them at all times. That’s light-years away from our childhoods, when a typical 16-year-old could hang out at the bowling alley all night, feeding quarters into the Asteroids arcade machine and trying to talk someone’s older brother into buying a six-pack.
And many of us don’t like what modern childhood looks like. We want kids to have as much freedom as we did … but not too much. Our brains flip-flop between “Stay safe” and “Stick it to The Man!”
Instead of punishment, perspective
So, what’s the middle ground? I want my daughter to have the freedom to make mistakes, but I also want to give her more parameters and guidance than I got.
“One of the things kids need their parents to do is explain principles behind things that are impersonal,” Howe notes.
In other words, instead of punishment, I should be talking to her about consequences other than her own. Like how shoplifting a pack of baseball cards hurts a store owner's livelihood. Or how vandalizing private property messes with someone's job or detracts from a public space. It puts her actions in perspective without limiting her freedoms.
But I’m also going to dilute it with a dose of Gen X tonic. Looking at those graffiti photos, I saw a kid being a kid, making questionable choices and coloring outside the lines. Who knows, she may even fall out of today’s soul-crushing lockstep and become a real human being — something I’d be happy to have on her permanent record.
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