Sixteen is a tough age for kids and their parents. It's good that you understand the value of communication, but unfortunately you can't achieve it. There's an old saying that the older you get, the smarter your parents become. I hope this is so in your case. In the meantime, to calm things down, you might try to lose a little weight, clean up your room and bring that D up to a C. As for retreating to your room for hours, granted, that is not screaming, but it is passive aggressive. I am guessing if you make an effort your parents will seem much more reasonable to you.
1. While losing weight is generally a good thing for most people, it is completely inappropriate to advise someone to change their body to smooth over interpersonal relationships with someone else. Do you really want to be setting that precedent and normalizing that concept with a 16 year old girl?
2. Retreating to one's room isn't passive agressive, because passive aggressive implies she's doing it to evoke a certain response from her parents. She isn't. She's doing it for her own benefit, so she doesn't have to deal with them. Think about when you seek privacy in your own life. You aren't seeking privacy as a dis to the other people. You aren't going "I'll show them, I'll deprive them of my company!" It's for your own purposes, because you personally need to either be alone, or be away from certain people, or be alone with a certain someone.
10 comments:
You're right. She's wrong.
It saddens me to see people encourage teenage girls to lose weight.
Especially for someone else!
If it were a boyfriend who thought she should lose weight the advice would be to DTMFA, whether she actually needs to lose weight or not. No good comes of encouraging people to take shit from their parents that you wouldn't want them taking from their partner.
passive aggressive implies she's doing it to evoke a certain response from her parents
You don't think she's trying to evoke a certain response from her parents?
She wants their attention, but can't seem to do anything that will illicit a positive form of attention. Instead, she neglects her room and her appearance, lets her math grade slip, looks at stuff on the computer she admits she shouldn't have been looking at and hides out in her room.
I bet her mom is at her wit's end.
But the question isn't from the mom. It's from the girl.
I know. I meant that the mom is likely more frustrated with the girl than the girl is with the mom.
The girl wants privacy in about the same way Britney Spears wants privacy. She wants the opposite of privacy, but when she gets the attention she craves, she doesn't like that, either.
I think Margo (whom I have never read before is correct): Sixteen is a tough age for kids and their parents. And I think her advice is pretty good too. Maybe if the girl actually makes an effort to do something positive things, as Margo suggests (you might try to lose a little weight, clean up your room and bring that D up to a C.), she'll get the desired feedback from her mom.
Fran, when you were a kid were the state of your room, your appearance, your grades, and the amount of time you spent in your room all based on getting a reaction from your parents?
Because personally the state of my room was what I wanted it to look like tempered by how much time I thought was worth spending on it, my appearance was what I wanted to look like tempered by available genetics and resources and what I thought was a reasonable amount of effort to put in (although I can see room for her not working on her weight as an assertion of sovereingty), my grades were a function of my skills and the teacher's skills and the difficulty of the material, and the time spent in my room was based on my desire for privacy.
My parents had nothing to do with it, I was just trying to live my life. Was it different for you?
No, my experience was generally similar to yours.
I guess I was lucky in that I didn't have to act up very much in order to get attention from my parents. Our communication level was just about what I wanted.
We only know this girl from her letter, so maybe I am misjudging her (although going public to the point of writing to an advice columnist invites judgment and misjudgment, but I don't get the impression this girl is as fortunate as kids whose parents are more attentive.
I still think Margo's advice is pretty good, though. Either do what her parents suggest or just be 16 and wait for her parents to 'become smarter.'
At what age do your parents become smarter?
This was a reference to the "old saying" cited by Margo.
The implication seems not so much that the parents become smarter, but that the offspring mature and realize the parents were pretty smart all along.
And when does this happen? The only changes in my perception of my parents that I've experienced so far have been in the direction of them having feet of clay. They aren't stupid by any means, but I've yet to see them get smarter.
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