Frank Farrelly, I know you’re a therapist, we all know that.  What are your credentials to tell us about teenagers?

I was a teenager – that’s number one.  Number two, I didn’t just read about teenagers, I’ve done a lot of work with them over the years, and have a minor reputation of working with them.  June and I, my wife and I, are just easing out of having raised four teenagers and I’ve read some of the research and stuff about them too.  I have both engaged this subject at the experiential level from both ends, both as a teenager and as a parent and have done a lot of work with them over the years.  I dunno, kids and cats and puppy dogs gravitate towards me – I’ve never known why but I guess that might be another qualification too.

Are you sure it’s just kids?

Well, there are other people that gravitate towards me too, 82 year olds too.

There are a lot of therapists who practise in the area of working with children, working with teenagers, who are 30 years old.  30 too is old not of course yet a teenager Are they qualified?  

Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, if not, then every therapist would have had to have every single life experience before they could help, guide, counsel, therapise somebody about and that’s not necessarily true, but I think that, I would say this that the more different avenues, the more levels, the more aspects that are given subject, life stage, life problems, that you’ve engaged on and gone through it yourself, you’ve really struggled, so that it becomes not just merely cognitive, speculative, data left brain type of knowledge, but alpha experiential practical.  Dealing with the dimensions of the problem, it’s tough dealing with teenagers, its tough being a teenager, I mean when I was 16 for about a five month period every adult seemed to be yelling at me saying why didn’t you think.  Well I supposed to use foresight but I didn’t know that it would turn out wrong.  How can I think if I don’t know how to think?  I’ve never had to experience that before.  And they said ‘you should have thought’ and I just felt that   whatever…It’s difficult on the other side too. 

Your youngest child is now how old?

19. 

So you’re through it?

Well…yes  but there are occasional reversions .

I would like to say this is one of the things that when I was having breakfast, I said well what do you think I should talk about in terms of teenagers this morning and June and I really kinda struggled through with this.  She said the main thing is don’t give up and survive.  Our kids aren’t just our offspring, aren’t just teenagers to us. Kathleen, Bridgit, Timmy and Alice, they’re some of the most important people on the planet to us. So everything that I say this morning is him talk about teenagers is within that framework-but they’re tough to deal with.

I have a hard time liking teenage boys.  I’ve never had a teenage boy, but um

They’re poison…  Somebody once suggested that all teenagers ought to be shipped off to some island where they would just learn to do it with themselves and then afterwards when they get out of their teens then they’re allowed back on to the mainland.

Teenage girls are as difficult eh?

My experience in both therapy and as a parent and an observer of human beings and listening.  I always listen to people.  Not just in therapy but I’ve always been curious just about how people deal with and solve problems and just watch them.

Some parents seem to be really good with itsby bitsy teeny weeny babies.  Others like more the latency period when they’re kinda 8 – 12 , the Tom Sawyer types and stuff, and then some of them really like teenagers.  I know a lot of group homes for example counsellors and directors round town that have done a lot of work with their organisations over the last number of years, they to like teenagers.  I tell them that doesn’t mean they’re bad people it’s just a lot of people would question their judgement .  Some people really like them.  I think we have a right as parents, adults, teachers, therapists, whatever, to say ‘I like this age, I like these types.’  Teenage girls are OK but teenage boys are ..you know. whatever, or vice versa. 

How about your experience as a parent?

It shifts…I’ve asked myself that.. well now that on a given day it’s much more fluid .  On a given day I came home one night when June was  (before she started working outside the home again)  I said ‘how did it go?’ and she said ‘for 2 bits I’d sell ‘em to the lowest bidder.’ I burst out laughing because. So on a given day it’s .. the girls or my son were the most difficult to deal with.

If you look at those periods from birth to 5, then from 5 - 10 then 10 – 13 then teenage years, which do you enjoy most as a parent?

Well,  that’s an excellent question and I don’t mean to dodge it but I think that what I’ve finally kinda wrestled with that one myself, is this the most difficult, is this the most enjoyable age, people sometimes say, enjoy your kids while you have them because you won’t have them  I said ‘when does that happen?’  And then other times I’ve had some of the most deeply moving experiences of my entire life being a father, a cool parent with the kids, our kids and others.  I think that at each age is beautiful and deeply moving, desirable, loveable, and each ages has its huh huh non-desirable, un-lovely aspects. 

I would suspect most parents would report the teens are the toughest time to be a parent. 

Yes, for a variety of reasons. 

What?

Well, it’s storm and stress not only for the teenagers, but also for the parents, teachers this whole dependency / independency conflict thing just gets stretched out from 13 – 19+ in this culture.  There’s no culture that stretches out childhood and young adulthood like the USA and Western Europe too but we have a very protracted childhood and Margaret and me and other anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists have noted this.  It’s difficult because it’s like at times you’ve got 4 other adults around, (well, we did) and then literally in mid sentence they would revert to 8 year olds or something like that.  It’s sort of like , you kinda go through a time warp or twilight zone , well are you this or are you that?, well, it turns out they’re both. 

A grown up or a kid?

That’s right.  Adolescence is becoming an adult but then again around a given issue not just on a given day around a given issue in mid paragraph it can switch from… but it is a growth kind of thing and all change is difficult.  Change is difficult on parents.

What is so tough about that Frank, if, let’s say we’re talking about a 15 year old girl who at one moment seems quite adult and then the next moment quite dependent.  What does that do to the parent?

For example, this morning June said I remember the time when one of our daughters was supposed to go to a party.  It began at 10pm and there were no parents around and we said absolutely not.  While you’re old fashioned, fine put me anti-diluvium before the deluge, everybody else is going…well, tough… worst enemy deviation times 9, you don’t let me do anything ever, this over generalisation stuff it’s not just the Pentagon and the Kremlin that do over generalisation, it’s teenagers that are the past masters.  I don’t know where they pick this stuff but guilt inductions, hypnotic guilt inductions on parents, it’s not like this, tears, sobs, call your social worker, the child welfare if you feel you’re being terribly oppressed.  So we kept our foot down and we said no.  The next day she said mum and dad, thanks a lot for not letting me go to that party, I didn’t want to go anyway.  If labour organisers had to deal with these kind of fluid communication, hidden agendas and I didn’t mean that as a conspiratorial kind of thing, she didn’t realise until afterwards that she didn’t want to go. 

She wanted you to put the limit on her?

Yeah.  And it’s not just teenagers who do that.  A lot of people do that, we all do it.  A lot of times we’ll just keep …it’s like we don’t know .  I had a patient once who ..I don’t know what I’m going to say, what I think can feel until I say it out loud to you and watch your reaction.  While some people would say that’s very adolescent.  He was 33,  some people feel dependent.  It means that you don’t quite know what the stormy process is and you have to kinda bounce it off other people and a lot of us process information  and learn about ourselves that way.  Kids need structure, but so do we, so do 82 year olds.  The thing is they’re kids and they have all the adult issues.  I remember as a teenager people would say, ‘boy enjoy this, this is the most wonderful time of your life,’ and I thought yeah? You got a thimble full of potential capacity to deal with adult problems that all the adults are dealing with, sex, money, identity, job, school, making it, developing friends etc etc.  It’s tough. 

Do you then, act to the teenager as primarily a parent figure, a friend, a counsellor?

Well, I very much, for example in family therapy, I put the parents right smack back in the driver’s seat.  There really is a Chinese proverb that says that the child is in charge of its parents has fools as parents.  And I think that part of that is that, it’s not just that father knows best or mother knows best, or they’re the seat of all wisdom, it’s just that in the state of Wisconsin we don’t give 9 year olds car keys. It’s because they simply don’t…. I was talking to a 14 year old in therapy the other day…Why not?  Because they couldn’t handle it.  I said what do you mean? They’re not mature enough, I said what does that mean ?  They don’t have the judgement.  She said they’re not big enough, I said no, 9 year olds are large enough, they’re tall enough to drive a car.

What about 15 year olds, 16 year olds?

You see, that’s when it gets difficult, 

You’d still be clearly the parent when they’re 16, do they still need the structure?  Should you be a friend, a peer or a parent?

Whenever I hear about being a friend and stuff like that …my father who was and Irish patriarch, never was a friend of ours, of his 12 children, I was number 9, but he was very definitely a father.  And he could be very nurturing in many many ways.  But we never forgot who he was.  When I was 6, he wasn’t mad but he said ‘look, I’m the father and you’re the son’.  I said ‘right I got that.  Dad don’t go too fast’.  And then he said, ‘when you get old..’ and I said ‘ why can’t I do this kind of stuff in my house?’ and he’d say ‘no, this is my house.  When you get old and grow up then you’re going to have your house, and when you have your children then you make the rules’.  He said it very kindly and stuff but it’s like he was setting my mental compass  straight.  It’s like, this is north, and that’s south and if you’ve go those confused kid, you’re confused.  One thing June said this morning about in terms of structure and when do you give the kids their dependency, you give the kids some rope and when do you pull it,  it’s very difficult and it’s sort of  ad hoc.  Everyday has an ad hoc committee between parents and kids but they do need structure and limitations.  

What’s the consequence?  If you don’t give structure to that teenager and feel like saying, well, you do what you feel, what’s the consequence of that?

Well, that depends.  On some issues you do what you feel and stuff like that help the person process through it.  And incidentally, contrary to popular mythology teenagers do go to parents .  When the chips are down and everything else, THEY COME BACK TO PARENTS. And it isn’t just for the hand out, but it’s also for counsel and advice and stuff like that, because parents, they have stuck with the kid for umpteen years and the kids know this. 

For those parents who were products of the sixties and have teenagers now and who feel like, you do your thing, I’m not going to tell you how to live your life, you’ve got to find that for yourself, and they come and say, well should I stay out until three in the morning on a date or should I do my homework or whatever, they say, well, you’ve got to do what feels right to you.  We’re here for you if you need to talk.  What’s the consequences of that?

I think that is setting up an expectational set in that kid’s mind which is going to be highly disconfirmed. Not just out in the jungle but out in the working day world, in the college world.

Wait a minute, but why?  He has to struggle for himself and has to have the consequences of his own decisions. So in a way doesn’t that teach them?

That’s right, and you can tell kids to go and touch the hot stove but not everything is in that type of thing…

Yes, but my gut sense is to agree with what I think you’re saying, that is the kid will not do as well in the adult world if you don’t give him structure as a teenager.  But why?

Because other people don’t have to… they’re not going to go along with this,  No 1.  No2, they’re not going to say how do you feel about it?  We need the ribbons in the ribbon department out there and I don’t want to sit here and debate about it …this isn’t your home and you’re not 16 you’re 22 and …you’re a ribbon clerk and that’s your role and function is to get the work out.  We’re not running a growth centre …OK?

One of my secretary’s once said, she was a wise woman, and I used to consult with the girl, and she’d consult with me, we’d both talk to each other… and I was talking about these idiotic expectations that had inadvertently frequently been set up in kids’ minds this way, by precisely this type of thing on virtually everything.  You decide everything, and she said, it’s not going to be like that when the kids, the young adults now have, when they are parents.  You don’t think so Mary?  Why not?  She said are you kidding, they’re used to their parents teaching them that kind of thing and they got all the goodies of that and trampled on their parents but they also go the negative aspects out, no limits, it can cause a lot of confusion, well, how far is far, when do I stop, how late is late.  Sometimes even as adults we want sometime.. I went to the head of Social Service and I told her I wanted her to make a decision for me.  She burst out laughing.   She said, ‘Frank, I can’t do that’ Listen I don’t want you to client centre me,  I don’t want you to help me process it, I don’t want you to affirm my work and self dignity, I want you to decide because I’m on  50:50 on this thing and I can’t.  Just chose and I’ll do that, OK?  I’m just stuck in mid sentence, So it’s not just teenagers, it’s all of us….  we’re dealing with a lot of structures that have many different unsolved data… and nobody can predict that was the infallibility and how it’s going to turn out. Sometimes it’s very relieving to just have somebody set a structure, friends do this for us all the time. 

That’s the tones of Frank Farrelly, Provocative Therapist.  I’m Dick Goldberg and we’re talking about raising teenagers.  So far Frank, I’m getting this sense of, you can’t be just a buddy to your teenager, you must set structure, but that it’s very confusing because the teenager’s going back and forth into an adult, wanting to be independent, wanting to be dependent., that it’s not necessarily a harder or easier time than raising children than any other period, depending on the adult.  What about this issue of setting rules, setting limits?  Is it any different for the teenage boy and the teenage girl?

We do treat boys differently.  We’re more protective of girls in terms of curfew for example, just take that kind of thing.  We think that boys can handle themselves more,  in terms of them not getting hurt but statistics  someways in terms of drinking, driving, and a bunch of other kind of stuff, boys tend to get into trouble.  I was talking to a therapist yesterday from Perth, Australia, who came to study with me, the reason that young men tend to get in prison and in jails more and more is because, girls in order to be good girls have got to be good, boys in order to be good have got to be a little bad.   They’ve got to go out there and , it’s called ’exploratory behaviour’ by psychologists.  Researches sitting far from the maddening cry by parents it’s just tear your hair out time by.  Boys have always tended to get into trouble because they have a very narrow viewpoint.  June says kids have got a very narrow viewpoint, and they do.  An so they’re going out and trying stuff for the first time.  It’s not just that ……

What do you mean by a narrow viewpoint?

They don’t have life experiences, A lot of life experience that deal with these new issues, like sex, money, late night drinking, driving, stuff like that, driving a 1 or 2 ton machine – they’ve got life and death in their hands literally.  This type of thing…. talk to the traffic police or the state patrol, they’ve got some stories of very graphic illustrations about this.  So here they are, they’re thrust with a lot of major decisions without the breadth of experience to deal with these things.  Number 2, they’re in a bind kinda thing ‘do you own thing’. Well, everybody does not do their own thing. And one of the quickest ways of learning is imitation, so they all seem to imitate each other.  There are ways of learning and most teenagers do make it and they do grow up into useful citizens and contributing to the community but it’s tough going through it. 

I also read along that line paragraph in the book about teenage boys are encouraged to individuate, that they are nobody unless they’re someone separate from mum, from everybody.  That teenage girls are given the opposite cue, to bond, to be connected with.  Any response to that?

Yes.  In some ways teenage girls are given permission to bond kind of thing and teenage boys individuate, but in other ways through sports, through clubs,.  Lionel Tiger wrote a book on Men in Groups which a lot of people pan and things like that,  but the fact is that the guy is smart and is a very accurate observer in a lot of ways of human behaviour.  He found men group.  They group, they start as boys, and then group, and they start doing this especially long before teenagers.

Girls don’t group?

Well, girls group around certain kinds of issues and boys around other kinds of issues.  Girls tend to individuate remarkably on certain types of things…one thing I heard very recently and very loudly, and I had to talk for and hour and a half on this, was one of my daughters is out….. there’s no loyalty among women when it comes to boyfriends.  This sister is powerful, when there are two of them want the same guy.  They’re going to be real bosom buddies but, …so there are codes,

If two boyfriends fall for the same girl they are less likely to compete for this girl?

Now hard fast statistical research on this kind of thing… the eternal triangle, I haven’t seen any.  I think it’d be a fast …I’d say there is more of a tendency that boys will tend to do that less during the teenage years.  It’s more like a code of honour, you don’t muck over your buddies in that kind of way because you can really get hurt.

If, I don’t know if you’ll  agree with this but,  it seems to me that those teenage years are powerful in terms of their formative affect on your adult life.  And that the cues boys get to what makes them worthwhile are so different from the  cues teenage girls get as to what makes them worthwhile.  That that lays the seeds of difficult adult relationships between men and women later. i.e. that the boys get their cues that being tough and being separate and not being dependent is what is important, and the girls get the cues that how you relate and your relationships and your friendships and being close to people is important , and that’s how you get your strokes.  That 15 years later in marriage or whatever, the man’s still trying to individuate and be separate while the women is still trying to bond and be together. 

Yes, there are different social role allocations in any culture and the thing that boys are told to be strong, don’t cry, don’t show weakness, because that is highly ..  don’t show weakness or fear… the worst thing you can be called is a coward .

What I’m wondering is should you, as a parent, attempt to break that kind of  socialisation or should you not go against it because you’re going to other harms by teaching a kid to be different from other kids’ socialisations.

Nobody can be everything.  And I don’t agree with Freud that anatomy is destiny, but it certainly does shape.  We don’t just have persons, we have male persons and female persons and our maleness and femaleness are every different cell in your body is different from your sisters or your female relatives or friends and female colleagues.  And their different base and metabolism rates.  Corrine Hutt, researcher in England wrote a brilliant book on this, Male and Female and she’s a neurophysiologist.  And she studied this in depth.  It isn’t just culture.  Now there are cultural role allocations and the reason there are, is because there are different tasks to run.  Now in a technological culture some people say women, when they in the army and stuff, that less and less of them are muscle and stuff like that.  Men are stronger physically than women but with machines and stuff like this and air condition and these big construction machines and servo mechanisms and power cranes and stuff you don’t need a lot of muscle.  Some people are arguing that the old cultural role adaptations and stuff like inducements and inductions, really aren’t that operative to the age we’re coming into.  You don’t…….

Yet the messages are still there in high schools.  We’ve done programmes with 13 year olds, 16 year olds and the messages aren’t very different than 30 years ago.  They are very much role differentiated which later does produce a lot of difficulty in marriages . 

But see, where did those things come from?  Has it just been handed down by a bunch of benighted adults and the poor helpless victims of the . …..no,  I think one of the most startling examples of this is that females and males choose different things.  In the Israeli Kibbutzim the women will go out and do the tractors in the fields one day and the men will stay home and then the next day they’ll switch it around and everybody ‘s going to be equal.  No more of this, phoney social roles culturally assigned.  And that went on for four or five years.  Guess who finally changed it? 

The women.

That’s right.  They said, we don’t like tractors, we want our babies.  You like tractors, fine.  You go and do tractors and machines.

Couldn’t that have been because of their socialisations when they were teenagers?

Yes. 

If they had and equal socialisation, then that wouldn’t have been the case.

I think there’s one difference and I’ve talked to a lot of mamas and one of the reasons maybe the psychologists, physicians…I don’t think understand that well, well I know they don’t, and they admit they don’t,   but there is a kind of imprinting type of behaviour.  If men carried life within in them for nine months…it’s not the only thing you can do, but it’s one of the most important tasks on the planet, I mean, who else, there’s no body else can do it, see nobody else can do it.  So you’re going to have a lot of things about your identity, you’re going to start thinking and then feeling and stuff like that and it isn’t just ‘I feel logie today’ ‘I feel like a stranded whale or something,’ there’s a whole bunch of feelings reactions and identity kind of stuff you’re going to have so, women, for whatever the reason, tend, in every single culture, women take care of the children, in the nurturing roles and males are the instrumental out there role.

We’ll be back to continue our discussion with Frank Farrelly right after this.

I’m Dave Goldberg and we’re here with Frank Farrelly, Provocative therapist and a man that’s been with us many times, and we’re talking about dealing with teenagers, a little about being a teenager, Frank knows he once was.  Coming up at 11 after this programme, Jim Packard and his guest, the subject is The Consumer Movement Burnt Out.  Burned Out – burnt is not a word – and after that at noon with Larry Mealer, an update on the fast fade issues related to laundry detergents.  If you would like to join our discussion this morning and have any questions or comments on raising teenagers, dealing with teenagers, the number to call is 263 6582, that’s 263 6582.  If you could stand in a teenager’s shoes, you’re a 15 year old boy, what’s the toughest thing facing a 15 year old boy?

15 year old girls.  Do you remember when you were 15? I do.  One of the things I’m very proud about in my clinical life, is that I’ve never had any teenager that I’ve seen  in therapy, ever say to me , ‘you never were my age’ because one of the first things they do is when I work with teenagers is talk about the trouble I got in, and I found that out.  Anyway, I used to tell my kids this and they’d say ‘Dad, tell us again about how you actually…’ ‘you’ve heard that….I’ve told that story about 27 times already.’  Well, it’s just that.   Me and my western swing band …I was a singer and guitar player…

When you were 15?

Yeah, the Missouri Railriders, 16 or 17, we got jailed for hopping freight.  We hopped freight trains and stuff like that down in Missouri and we got jailed and we knew we were going to get it when we came back.  My father, he just nailed our foot to the floor and had us walking in tight circles for a month and then one other time, I shouldn’t say this really on air but… it’s clean but it just shows you the kind of stuff teenagers get into.  There wasn’t anything to do and it was a rainy wet March day so we went out and stole a human arm.

What?

Yeah.  I know.  See…

What? A human arm?  You want to explain where you got it?

It was from a medical college.

You stole an arm.  And they caught you?

No.  We wrapped it up in newspaper and put it on a street corner and put the name and address of the guy we hated most in our class on it.

Oh God…

I know. But see….people say ‘my gosh what a ghoul’ and I just felt horrible.  I never forgot that thing!  But this is the kind of thing that teenagers get it really.  And I hear some listener out there say ‘I never stole a human arm when that age’.  I went and took my son Timothy to a barber’s shop, and this was way back when he was five years old and all the men, there were only men there, were sitting there lamenting the general low level of teenagers these days.  And there was a pause in the conversation.  I sat there and listened to this for about 15 minutes and there was this pause, a break in the conversation, and I said  ’yeah, we were never like that when we were their age’ and they all looked at me and burst out laughing and then they started talking about the stuff they did.  And I mean to tell you, it raised my hopes for the coming generation because all these solid citizens – fathers and taxpayers and church going types – law abiding and community organisers and good community fathers – they were just terrors when they were kids.

Why is it that teenage boys are terrors?

Because a lot of fathers and mothers remember the way they were and they know – it’s like with …

What makes those boys that way?

Well part of it…. I just say my research shows all boys are evil ... once you accept that basic assumption, then it explains a lot of stuff that’s been puzzled about and debated and researched in an entire clinical field and psychiatry and psychology. 

In addition to the basic evilness, is it perhaps got to do with boys are trying to be men?

Trying to be men and they don’t quite have it on right yet.  With a narrow perspective they’re aping others, imitating others, and no3 they have a narrow perspective of… it’s a very tough being a woman in today’s society.  I’m telling you, it’s tough growing up to be a man too.  There are so many contradictory expectational sets.  Be tender….now be tough…..be stay at home….. now go out there and earn a living, not just for yourself, and even the feminists say this, women have a choice of whether they stay at home or go out.   A lot of them do.  I understand 50% of them work outside the home, but men don’t have a choice, not really.  If there’s a house husband, he makes the international news and it’s all around the planet in 24 hours by your colleagues.  There are a lot of very tough tasks for young men and boys to learn.