WHY PARENTS JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND
I recently got around to watching the Sopranos. It didn’t make my Top 10, but it certainly had its moments. I thought that the Soprano children’s character arcs, as well as their relationships with their parents, were some of the most engaging parts of the show. The writers showed a remarkably firm hand in developing these characters and their relationships across 6 seasons, without ever falling into common TV cliche traps. You really have to respect the writer who feels pressure from the producers, the audience, and even themselves to give these characters the kind of feel good plot lines that are the standard of TV storytelling -- and still says “Fuck It, that’s just not how things are in the real world.”
The Soprano nuclear family dynamic is just so very real that it makes for an excellent model of both parenting and childhood in today’s world. Ironically, the “family business” of crime had relatively little bearing on these children and their relationships. The child and parental behaviors I saw on screen in countless episodes mirrored the behaviors I have seen in countless living rooms.
First Impressions
The Soprano kids are shitty kids. The Soprano parents are shitty parents.
It’s hard not to be shocked at the level of selfishness and self-centeredness that’s constantly exhibited by the Soprano kids. What’s even more shocking is that it never wears off. I spent 6 seasons waiting for the happy ending where they “grow out of it”. It never happens. There are 6 seasons of extreme selfishness and self-centeredness from both the “successful” daughter and the “struggling” son. Kudos again to the writers for keeping these characters so very real and not succumbing to the pressure of making these kids more likable.
The parents suck too, but it’s harder to point your finger as to why exactly. They love their kids, provide for them, and protect them. They are generally available and ready to help. So it’s easy to take the parents as victims and the kids as the real bad guys.
The awfulness of these kids is just infinitely frustrating. Why are they so damn selfish and self-centered? (I have to be careful between using selfish and self-centered. They are two different traits and manifest themselves in different ways. Fortunately, the Soprano children are both. So going forward, I will use the unifying term “self-obsessed” to describe them.)
Intrafamilial Cultural Gap
It’s easy for us to just say, “The kid-parent relationship in the Sopranos is awful because the parents spoiled their kids and now the kids are spoiled. End of story.” I’d guess that’s the conclusion that 95% of viewers end up on. But it’s (mostly) wrong. I think there are better, more disturbing, and more pressing insights to be found in the everyman Soprano family.
Selfish children are not uncommon and, even if you don’t subscribe to some of the above assumptions, they are to be expected. I would go as far as to say that they are natural. There was another phenomenon in the Sopranos clan that I would say is also not uncommon in American family rooms - but this phenomenon I find to be grossly unnatural. I call it the cultural gap between parents and children.
The cultural gap is complicated and it's easier to define it by its symptoms. The biggest, strongest, loudest symptom of an intrafamilial culture gap is a wholesale inability of parents and kids to communicate.
We’ve come to accept that “my kids speak a different language”. We’ve stopped including kids in “our adult lives” by letting “kids be kids”. We often treat kids like a special - mentally challenged - class. “No, don’t get a job. School is your job.” “Money?! Children shouldn’t have to worry about such things.”
We have come to accept and expect that kids and parents will be unable and unwilling to effectively communicate. We’ve become so desensitized to poor intrafamilial communication that we don’t find it to be so insanely weird. Well, it is. It is so insanely weird.
Meanwhile, the kids reciprocate this estrangement, which is nicely summed up as “Parents just don’t understand.” But, “parents just don’t understand” is just the tip of the iceberg. Behind this cliche hides a vicious reality that an average American adult is more culturally compatible with an average North Korean adult, than with the average American child. We talk about the increase in polarity in the political realm, while ignoring the complete polarization within the home.
The American nuclear family has been culturally bifurcated along the lines of meaning, morals, interests, activities, habits, responsibilities, and the list goes on. It is nothing short of painful to watch the Soprano parents and kids fail at communication each and every time they try. Across the span of six seasons of quasi-normal family life, they never even come close to succeeding. These people, who live together and love each other, are also completely unable to relate to each other.
And worst of all, IT LOOKS NORMAL.
Peter Pan
Maybe we can just blame the parents for this cultural gap. Something happened when they grew up. Their imagination dissipated. They got caught up in the rat race. They forgot what it was like to be a kid. It’s an old story.
And there is some truth to this story. Kids are indeed different from adults. They do have more robust imaginations. They don’t share the same history of experience. They have not shared the same responsibilities. So why should we even expect for them to speak the same language as their parents?
I think it’s important to draw a distinction here between cultural differences and a cultural gap. There is no shortage of differences between individuals of all ages. For example, in my group of high school buddies (my crew), the personalities couldn’t have been any more different. There were a couple of alphas who always competed. There was a vain narcissist. There was a responsible but risk-averse engineer. There was a habitual liar with a quick wit. There was an aloof quasi-intellectual romantic. On top of that, we were all selfish kids. And yet -- we could still communicate. We could still relate to each other. We could, and to a point still do, understand each other.
So, I refuse to accept as a universal truth that the cultural gap between parents and children is unbridgeable because they are too different. No! It is unnatural and weird. And I think that it is very much a modern crisis specific to the 20th and 21st centuries.
Anthropological Interlude
Now, let’s go back a few millennia, and consider the family dynamic back then. I know it’s not that simple. Are we talking about hunters/gatherers? Are we talking about post agricultural evolution? You’re right, of course, the families of farmers and hunters/gatherers were very different. But for our comparison with the Sopranos, it doesn’t really matter. What was consistent for 99.9%+ of human history was that the family unit(however it was defined at the time) lived and worked together - every day. There was no school. Lives were intertwined by the daily schedule of activity. Lives were shared across age groups. There was a single culture within a family.
As such, I do not think there were any issues in communication among these family members. The level of understanding was high because everyone was on the same page. I’m sure there were still a variety of personality types and not all relationships were good and positive. Assholes still existed. They had other problems. But an intrafamiliar culture gap was not one of them.
This began to change with the mainstreaming of school. As school became introduced into the mainstream, gradually, over the last 150 years, children were increasingly untwined from their familial lives - for a few years at first, then for a decade, and today, for the first two decades --- the most formative ones --- of their lives. Today, kids spend the great majority of their waking time in institutions, surrounded by peers and away from their parents.
As for the helicopter parents, or the “we do everything together” parents, do they really stand a chance? The time economics for most kids work out so that even the most engaged parents only spend 1-2 hours per weekday engaged with their kids. And with the proliferation of screens, the kids are more likely than ever to be elsewhere, even while physically at the dinner table or on the family room couch.
School Island
Let’s stick with the concept of parents forgetting what it was like to be a kid for a bit longer. In honour of Peter Pan, we call it the Darling Syndrome.
Parents with the Darling Syndrome believe that when their kids go off to school they go off to study and learn. These parents are suspending disbelief in how much of the school experience concerns learning and studying. In reality, their kids are going off to a place much more complex and ontologically much further away from their family home -- a place also known as School Island (read Skull Island). On School Island, the most significant part of their kid’s day is likely governed by SPF – Sex, Play, Friends.
School Island operates by its own rules of decorum, values, economics, traditions, and power hierarchy. On School Island, each child must navigate through this complex social structure, intensely immersed in the drama, action, and comedy of SPF. SPF are the building blocks of the life of a kid and School Island is a petri dish – or better yet, an incubator – for SPF.
While the administration and teachers on School Island do provide some structure and some responsibilities to students – a kid’s experience on School Island is governed most of all by their peers. The Hollywood version of school life is much closer to the truth than the parental version.
On School Island, education is more a frustrating distraction to SPF than the other way around.
The island metaphor for school is apt because disengagement with the “real world” is part of the design and mission of today’s educational institutions — regardless of the lip service they may pay to experiential education, real world skills and employability. If a child follows the recommended track - 12 years of school and 4 years of college - they end up in institutions that, by design, separate students from the real world and put them into the SPF incubator. This real world that they disengage from, happens to be the world their parents inhabit during most of their day.
So maybe the Darling Synrome is not the culprit after all, and it’s not the parents’ fault that communication channels break down. By removing kids from the home for 6-12 hours per day for as many as 20 years, it is the kids who diverge from the family’s culture. By relocating them to School Island, kids are kept from growing up for a decade or longer than what would be natural.
So something as banal as kids going to school and parents going to work has the fateful result of kids and parents inhabiting (for most of the day) two completely separate, and mostly incompatible, cultures.
Why kids are so F’ed
Congrats! You’ve made it all the way here without getting too angry in disagreement (or agreement) with my thinking. And perhaps you see it my way - that kids have been so untwined from their family life that they have become foreigners in their own homes. It’s not so crazy after all for the child and parent cultures to be so incompatible, since they spend so much of their life on school island and work island, respectively. And perhaps now you’re ready for some good news, or at least for some semblance to a solution.
Ok. Maybe we’ll get to a solution in the pages below. But first, things are about to get much, much worse.
As I was working my way through this culture gap, I figured that it might be hard to code switch between two cultures and find ways to bridge them --- but it’s not impossible. I’m an immigrant, and while I found it a challenge to relate to the local kids for several years, I did manage at the end to integrate. And I began the process as a 100% foreigner, while families start the process as 100% families -- a much easier starting point.
Is it really as simple as school being the culprit for the breakdown of family culture? Does my bifurcated world view explain why kids are struggling so much to figure out what life’s all about? Does it explain the frightening statistics of depression, anxiety and other mental health issues?
Competing Narratives
Back in our prehistoric family, there was one narrative. It was so easy. By an early age, a kid knew everything there was to know. And if she didn’t know, she could ask the village elder, and then she would know everything. Analogously, in my parents vs. children model, one might assume two dominant narratives. Oh, if only things were as simple as TWO.
Today, trying to find the meaning in life, a kid needs to navigate between not two narratives, but dozens of them. There are multiple “at-home” narratives that are confusing enough. “Do as I say!” and “Do as I do!” are often at odds because many parents themselves have not found meaning in their lives. The parents are overwhelmed -- doing what they have to do to provide for the family, while doing what the neighbors are doing to keep up with the Joneses, while telling their kids absurd things like “it’s your job to go to school.” These at-home narratives are often complicated and contradictory. The parents may have picked some narratives up from their parents, others from an episode of Oprah, or perhaps from a book, or god forbid an Instagram Influencer. And if the parents don’t understand them all too well, it will certainly be hard for the kids to do so.
Next come the School Island narratives: the institutional ones of the “top 10%” and of the “smart or not”; the countless SPF narratives lurk around every corner: “nerd or jock,” “just say no, or yes,” “who is the cutest, the richest, the funnies, the smartest, the strongest, etc.,” “which gender are you?”, “what makes you special?”, “why can’t you just be like everybody else?”, “Jimmy’s parents bought him a car. And so did Jenny’s parents, and Jacob’s and Jill’s”.
Let’s not forget the religious narratives. “If you do this, you’re living in sin.” And to that, let’s add the corporate narratives. “You’re not cool unless you wear a Jansport. Anybody with an Eastpack is a total dweeb.” “Kardashians, Kanye. Kanye, Kardashians.”
Who can help kids navigate through these narratives? Nobody. The parents are hard to trust because the “at-home” narratives are such a mess. Beyond that, they are literally out of touch with School Island, so “how can they possibly know anything about anything?!?!?” They can’t.
Meanwhile, the friends have their own narratives to navigate. Some friends are better at it than others. Maybe a piece of good advice or moral support at the right time will help with 10% or 20% of the navigation. But mostly, your kid is on her own.
The Dunbar Number on Narratives
A few minutes ago, I was complaining about two incompatible narratives and now we’re in the dozens. Drum roll…. Tada!!! We now introduce the SCREEN and SOCIAL NETWORKS!!! Guess what?!?!??! More narratives everybody.
Now our kids can get narratives courtesy of Russia and China and ISIS and QAnon. Narratives that are generated by narrative-generated algorithms that were generated by... yes, more narratives (or just something the phone overheard you say). And of course, narratives created by movie celebrities, and TV celebrities, and social media celebrities, and influencers, and...
What to think? What to believe? What to do? Well, there is always somebody telling you; hundreds of narratives shouting at you, with absolutely no guarantee of coherence, continuity, or care. OH!!! MY!!!! GOD!!!!
How don’t our kids have mental health issues from such strain? How much can our kids handle? Alone, but hearing voices everywhere. Perhaps we are creating a new generation of default schizophrenics.
Suddenly, I see a slightly different version of the self-obsessed Soprano kid. I’m starting to think that perhaps he wasn’t self-obsessed enough. Perhaps to be self-obsessed, to look only within, is the best defense against the onslaught of the narratives.
Earlier in this essay, I presented three theories of self-obsession. I think that a fourth theory is in order: Self-obsession as a defense mechanism against an unnavigably high number of competing narratives.
The Soprano Son
Towards the end of the 6th season, the Soprano parents finally put their son A.J. into therapy and he gets medicated with Lexapro. And for a while it works. A.J. becomes less self-obsessed.
But there’s a strange side-effect. Having broken out of his self-shell, he is hit by a whole bunch of narratives at once. He wakes up to the fact that it’s not just him who’s fucked up, but the whole world. And he gets depressed again, because if everything’s so fucked, then “what’s the point?!?”
His father is annoyed that his kid is having issues again, and complains: “You care too damn much!!!” And A.J.’s response couldn’t be more on point: “All that time you told me I didn’t care enough. And now you’re telling me I care too much?!?!”
I thought this was a great drop-the-mic moment. This is the choice that millions of teens are facing.
Through most of the six seasons I couldn’t help but blame the parent Sopranos for being shitty parents and the kid Sopranos for being shitty children. If only they could all be better. Now, I guess I absolve them of all of their sins. They never stood a chance. These days, if an American family can keep it together enough for civil dialogue over a meal once in a while, they might deserve a standing ovation. Because nobody is equipped to deal with this shit. IT’S SIMPLY UNNATURAL.
Solution
Ok. I sort of promised you a solution. I have one. It’s really simple. First, discard all screens in your house. Next, take your kids out of school. And finally, spend 6-12 hours per day, every day, working and playing side-by-side with them.
Easy. 100% good intra-family communication guaranteed.