Another day, another grim modern portmanteau word to describe another grim modern phenomenon. We’ve had affluenza (anxiety brought about by having…too much stuff and too great an ability to buy more. Give me strength). We’ve got celebutantes (the famous for being famous). Edutainment, McMansions, frankenfoods and the sporks to eat them with while we chillax and labradoodles snuffle round for scraps. Now “teen-ternity leave” opens its arms and rushes to greet us. This refers to the growing trend for parents to take time off when their children reach teenhood to usher them and the family safely through this turbulent time.
Superficially, of course, this looks like a good thing. Caring parents! Cherished children! Adult guidance! Seamless transition to maturity! Except, on closer examination, it’s very little of any of that.
What does it mean to take time off to help your children through their teenage years? Well, first of all, it means you are probably in a nice, flexible job that will allow such a thing without your boss looking at you like you’ve just dropped a steaming turd on his desk and destroyed a career you’ve worked for years to build. You’re probably quite affluent (sorry if the buying stuff is causing you any anxiety though) and privileged (or as it used to be called, less tooth-grindingly, lucky) and rare.
Taking time off by choice is not an option available to many. So teen-ternity leave is already weighted against the majority (and, more broadly, it is worth noting that at all levels of employment and encouraged by successive governments of all stripes the needs of the employer are held to come before those of the family, a reprioritisation that has arrived by stealth and so has not yet been challenged as the damaging imposition it is).
Who is taking the time off? At the moment it seems that it is almost entirely mothers. I am going to go out on a limb – attached to a robust trunk of a good 20 years’ experience of watching friends rear offspring and 12 years’ more direct experience of my own – and say that it will largely continue in this manner as the practice grows. Fathers will go on as insulated from the crap bits of parenting, the sacrifices frequently needed, the emotional vexations as they ever were.
Why is it needed? Two main possibilities present themselves, neither of them good for people as individuals or as a society. The first is that modern children are monsters, the product of what I still think of as the fashion – despite it having gone on for long enough now to constitute a wholesale and enduring shift in practice – for parents being somewhere between best friends with and therapists for their crotchfruit instead of their benign overlords.
It has resulted in overindulged horrors whose every emotion is to be given its fullest expression and never tempered lest it cause them irreparable psychological harm and turn them into serial killers. Or something. Their parents never seem to realise that it would be much nicer to have a strictly brought up, well-behaved teen who doesn’t destroy family life and make everyone – including him or herself – miserable and then maaaaybe goes on to murder (quietly, and usually well away from the house) a few strangers much later on.
It’s possible my view is skewed here by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to have an adolescence. My mother ran a tight ship and she had enough friends her own age. We weren’t allowed moods, hormonal or otherwise. We weren’t allowed rebellion. We weren’t allowed our own sartorial or musical expression. That wasn’t what life was about and if we didn’t like it (or her), well, that was our problem and nobody else’s. It was oddly soothing. I am doing my best to replicate it with my own son, but I fear I lack the requisite amount of iron in the maternal soul. We’ll see.
The second possibility is more terrifying – which is that the world now is genuinely too broken – too awful, too complicated, too fraught with real difficulty and danger – for children to be able to negotiate it alone and be expected to make it safely to adulthood. I have already had more conversations – just casually, over homework or tea as things come up on the news, or in the social studies curriculum, or (increasingly) via WhatsApp, Tiktok or some other part of the greatest unregulated experiment ever conducted on humanity, which we know as the internet – about child neglect and abuse, esoteric sexual practices and perversions, the unspeakable things people will do to each other in the name of religion, the terrible treatment of women and an uncountable number of other things my parents never had to contemplate as part of my preparation for life.
So, no, teens cannot be left to work it all out alone, any more than they could be left to change their own nappies or puree their own carrots back in the day. If I had a proper job (instead of typing at the kitchen table at all hours in stained joggers and T-shirt), I would already be testing the waters with my employer in fearful preparation. Even if they have become – even if we have made them – monsters in the intervening years, to close our eyes to their reality would be as much a dereliction of duty now as it would have been to walk away from a dirty nappy or push a raw steak at a yelling newborn and telling him to get on with it. I suspect that “teen-ternity leave” is an idea whose time, in the absence of massive political, economic, sociosexual and technological reform, has sadly come. But we have got, got, GOT to find a better name.