Generating the future, accompanying the living, staying as close as possible to what wants to happen, traveling towards the authentic, learning who we really are, picking up the bits of ourselves that we had escaped, suffering, speaking, healing, growing up, this, for me, is a part of the lexical field that should be the one we hear about parenting teenagers. Yes, these sweet words, but sometimes also crude, are the ones that always end up being said after we have dusted them off from the sediment words that covered them.
The words that fly into the public space in the usual discourse on adolescents do not seem to come from the same element, belonging rather to this vast race for the “best way to do things right” which covers everything about modern parenting, about adult pregnancy. According to this speech, we should “face the challenges, supervise, manage, develop their full potential, avoid slip-ups, develop the right tools, give the resources” to our teenager, whether they like it or not, whether he needs it or not.
And perhaps this is where the line is drawn between the two worlds of language. In the first, it is indeed the relational adventure which is at the center, impossible to standardize, full of unknowns, surprises, revelations. In the second, while we claim to “work for the teenager”, we are indeed “performing” our role, hoping for a good grade on the parental report card, trying to calm our own narcissistic anxieties ( and other anxieties, certainly legitimate, but belonging to us, not to the teenager).
Parenthood, I often talk to you about it, has in fact become one of the fertile grounds for this whole performance industry, which thrives on control, with its absolutely neoliberal language from one end of the spectrum to the other (managing, equipping, plan, solve, etc.). As if the intimate relationship with our children could be conceived as a small business, we, parents, would have to become good managers of human resources, who would ensure that everything runs smoothly.
For each problem, there would be a solution, quick, simple, effective, and a qualified professional at the end of the line if necessary. In a few hashtags — “sports, healthy eating, emotion management, screen management, academic supervision, substance management, healthy communication” — it is now possible to come across a host of tips and advice and more “all-inclusive” kits for parenting approved by experts.
Now, although I in no way want to deny the mental health problems that we have listed and which are very real, although I also do not want to minimize what the lack of resources implies for a crowd of extremely suffering, I also want to bring a small stone into the dome of hope and talk with you about an adolescence that is certainly suffering, but also full of resources.
This is what the series Being a teenager seems to succeed in sowing seeds in us, from its first episode, which I watched with great interest last Thursday on Télé-Québec. The project, absolutely ambitious and delightful in its originality, was already an adventure: filming ten young people over five years; from the first year of secondary school to the fifth year. We can already imagine all the pitfalls that the team had to face, over time, in the support of young people, who, we know, do only one thing during these five years of their lives: change. Add to that a pandemic that has kept everyone at home for almost two years, and we have the ingredients that restore television to its quality as a mirror of our society, offering us a real foray into what this generation will have experienced in this period that we have only just gone through.
What is highly moving in this docu-reality is the look it takes, without filter, on human beings learning about themselves, discovering themselves at the same time as they discover the world, their interiority, their intimacy. , who reveal themselves to them without their having any control, tossed as they are by the tumultuous journey specific to their age. It is to this essential that the images bring us back, from the first episode: adolescence is a profoundly human adventure, of an intensity which will mark the rest of life.
And, as with all the great moments of existence (birth, death, all moments of life’s crises), there is always, around adolescence, a bit of this tendency to minimize things, to talk about it in a way that reduces everything, that allows those who talk about it to keep this distance, this objectification of the experience of the other.
The discourse on adolescent mental health is, in my opinion, tinged with this strong tendency to pathologize everything that exceeds a fleeting, changing, but always coveted norm. Is this normal, Madam Psychologist? I am often asked. I rarely know what to answer, honestly, having always found that the norm was little involved in becoming oneself.
If suffering is today quickly classified under generic categories, it is good to see it emerging before our eyes, without the worried filter of adults and experts concerned with “doing things right”. We only see close-up faces of children becoming adults, carrying all their legitimate concerns. Because yes, adolescence is painful. It is full of self-shame, fear of heights, feeling of betrayal, groping, loss of bearings, intensity of affects. It is also full of moments of raw truth that our world absolutely needs, despite all the pretenses it compulsively puts on.
I, who prescribe almost nothing, want to do differently this time and recommend to all parents the viewing, with their teenager, of this series, to escape the usual pitfalls of the newspeak of psychopathology, as the said the philosopher and psychoanalyst Roland Gori.
Pierre Falardeau said “filming living human beings is revolutionary and it means resistance”. I believe and hope that this is what this series will do for us: an act of resistance to the constant flattening of human experiences under the steamroller of the standardization of the intimate.