Salon.com Life | The whatever culture

Salon.com Life | The whatever culture: "You write that while our society assumes that teens with alcohol or drug problems must come from a lenient, overly indulgent family, the truth is the exact opposite.
There may be kids who decide to drink themselves into oblivion because people are too nice to them, but I haven't met them. I've talked to plenty of kids who get to that place in their life because people treat them badly.
It is not just the parental pressures to do well. It's growing up in a family where if you don't do well, you get thrown out of the house. And if you don't do better than everyone else in school, your parents tell you that you are a piece of crap. This combination of harshness and responsibility from adults has increased. The specific abnegation of responsibility for the child on the part of parents, schools, helping agencies -- that was a constant theme. I would argue that is new. On the level we experience it now, it's qualitatively worse than it used to be. "

....You come down very hard on parents, treatment centers, mental health professionals -- pretty much everyone in the adolescents' lives except the adolescents themselves.

I wound up being harder on parents and school personnel than I expected. That's partly because when I talked to some of them, I was appalled at the way they perceived parenting. We have to realize that there are a lot of parents out there who don't want to do the job of parenting. It's hard. It involves sacrificing your own pleasures, taking on a very responsible role, which is beyond the capacity of a lot of American parents.

Why do you think contemporary parents have such a difficult time parenting?

In the book I provide two answers: One, it's a problem of resources. Parents are pressed for time and money. In addition, there are very few sources of social support for parents. We're continually taking away money for childcare, school counselors, things that could help parents do a better job of parenting. We don't provide resources the same way many other countries do: universal childcare benefits, vacation time, family allowances.

One of the reasons these problems are getting worse is the hardening of the culture that lies behind this. Careless individualism has become our modus operandi. This behavior has roots in our individualist heritage, but it is sharpening in the 20th and 21st century. People are unwilling to take responsibility, unwilling to think about the consequences of their actions, whether it be barreling down the freeway in a Hummer and not caring about other drivers, other people, or the environment -- it's the same mentality.