Crazy-Stressed: Saving Today’s
Overwhelmed Teens with Love, Laughter, and the Science of Resilience. By
Michael J. Bradley, Ed.D. AMACOM. $17.95.
The well has pretty much run
dry for books telling Baby Boomers all the things they are doing wrong in
raising children and all the things they should do instead – most Boomers are
now past childbearing years and becoming grandparents. This opens up a whole
new opportunity, however: books telling members of Generation X all the things they are doing wrong in raising children
and all the things they should do
instead. The few Boomers still (or again) involved in child-rearing can come
along for the ride. And so we have books such as Crazy-Stressed, in which family counselor and frequent media pundit
Michael J. Bradley explores methods for GenX parents to use to talk to their
teenagers in ways that will help them teach their teens the resilience they
will need to cope with the inevitable setbacks in their lives. One wonders
whether Bradley himself is as eminently reasonable with his two teenage
children as he tells parents they need to be. If so, he may be a candidate for
sainthood, or the parental equivalent – although, to be fair, Bradley is a
psychologist who specializes in issues involving teenagers and their parents,
so his behavior at home is presumably a continuation of his daily work rather
than a completely different and differently stressful part of his life, as it
inevitably will be for virtually all his readers.
Crazy-Stressed starts from the premise
that today’s world is uniquely pressure-inducing for teenagers, with 24/7
connectivity requiring teens to be “on” and involved with others at all times –
and with pop culture that glorifies vapid celebrities, violence and sex, plus
peer pressure whose behavioral elements involve sex and drugs and those
ever-present social media. In truth, except for the technological elements,
there is little that is different for teens today from the stressors faced by
teens in the past; and even today’s technology is a substitute for other forms
of onetime peer connectivity rather than something altogether new.
Nevertheless, in the grand tradition of “this time it’s different,” Bradley
suggests that the world of today’s teens requires their parents to do and not
do a variety of specific things in order to pave the way for teenagers to grow
into responsible, self-managing adults. Carefully arranged and nurtured
parenting, for which parents presumably have nearly infinite time, is what is
called for. What is surprising (or not) is that Bradley’s recommendations to
parents are no different from those made to Baby Boomers and, no doubt in
different ways, to earlier generations that did not have the dubious benefit of
widely promoted self-help books. To name a few: parents need to pick the right
time to communicate with teens, avoid telling them too much or speaking to them
too loudly or emphatically, ask questions instead of lecturing and giving
parental answers, take their cues from teens’ love of short messaging to keep
interactions minimal but very frequent, and walk away if attempted
communication provokes anger instead of aiding understanding. There is nothing
new here whatsoever, except that Bradley dresses up the advice neatly in the
latest scientific research on teenage brain development, comprehension and
sleep deprivation. Unfortunately, he does not tell parents how to find the time
in their lives for, say, a dozen
short face-to-face interactions that would collectively take the place of a
single longer one.
But putting all that aside,
what Bradley advocates here is helping teenagers develop personality traits
that are identical to those advocated, in not-very-different language, for the teens
of Baby Boomers. The longstanding notion of creating acronyms or using a series
of identical letters to describe desirable characteristics stays true to form
in Crazy-Stressed, with all seven
crucial traits beginning with the letter C. The C sequence is the heart of
Bradley’s book. Competence, he
argues, requires parents to encourage unstructured activities – not sports, for
example, but rock bands, through which teens can learn compromise, planning and
management of frustration (actually, sports would seem to teach the same
things, but Bradley says no). Confidence
is built by having parents react positively to teens’ positive qualities, such
as integrity and compassion – although Bradley has little to say about how
parents should handle creating confidence-building qualities in teens who do
not have them, that being different from encouraging qualities that are present
already. Connection requires parents
to make the family home an unfailing source of safety and security – an
excellent idea whose implementation is far tougher than Bradley indicates. Character means what it always has:
possessing a firm sense of right and wrong, which Bradley assumes parents can
help teens develop through talks about values – an optimistic idea that some
families will likely find impossible. Control
has to do with feeling in charge of one’s life, a particularly tough challenge
for teens, who are constantly subjected to pressure from adults and peer groups
– the idea that parents can nurture this feeling by repeatedly calling
attention to teens’ successes and good works is one genuinely useful element of
Bradley’s book, although this is scarcely an original notion. Coping means being able to handle life’s
inevitable setbacks, and this means parents must allow those setbacks to occur
instead of running interference – a rather unexceptionable bit of thinking,
since there is no possible way that parents will ever be able to shield teens
from “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (that, by the way, is from Hamlet, a play whose wisdom appears
nowhere in this book). The seventh C-word here is Contribution, which Bradley takes to mean helping teens learn to
improve the world without expecting anything in return – a very, very tall
order indeed for a great many teens and, for that matter, a great many parents.
The subtitle of Bradley’s
book contains the word “laughter,” but there is precious little of it in the
book itself, and that is a shame. One thing Bradley misses is the importance of
parents finding ways to teach teens not to take everything with an infinity of
intensity. “Don’t take life so serious, son – it ain’t nohow permanent,” was a
wonderful bit of philosophy from the comic strip Pogo, which neither today’s teens nor their parents likely know,
but from which all of them could benefit. Indeed, the leavening effect of supportive
humor – not the sarcasm of Dilbert or
the darkness of Pearls Before Swine –
can go a long way toward making the inevitable problems and troubles of the
teenage years more bearable. But GenX parents will find mostly sober,
well-considered advice here, with little in the way of “lighten up” thinking.
Unfortunately, the result is that living with teenagers (the extent to which
parents “raise” teens is itself debatable) seems even more difficult,
time-consuming and complex at the end of Crazy-Stressed
than at the beginning. The book is likely to make time-pressed, financially
stressed, perpetually exhausted parents (of any generation) feel they are just
not measuring up to Bradley’s high standards. And that is too bad, because
perfectionism in dealing with teenagers is, in reality, no more possible to
attain than perfectionism in most human endeavors. By providing step-by-step
prescriptions that many parents will not have the time, energy or emotional
wherewithal to accept and implement, Bradley sets parents up for failure in a way that is bound to boost their stress levels and carry through to
become yet another of the many stressors affecting, and afflicting, the
teenagers of today – as they have affected and afflicted teens since time
immemorial.
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