I was midway into my first cup of coffee one long-ago morning when my 16-year-old daughter plopped her one-gloved self (it was the height of Michael Jackson mania) down at the kitchen table and informed me that she was getting a tattoo. I put my cup down and looked at her full-on to make sure she was paying attention before saying something along the lines of “Over my dead body you will.”
Oh, the angst, the tears, the hysteria as she raged that she wanted a tattoo and was going to get one. It was her body and she could do with it whatever she wanted.
“Wrong,” I said. “You are a minor.” I further explained that if she unwisely got a tattoo I would hunt down the ink parlor and not rest until it was shut down for illegally tattooing a minor. The possibility of such a scandal involving her parent (the horror!) quieted her right down. She did finally get her tattoo on her 18th birthday and then spent thousands of dollars to have it removed a few years later when she started teaching.
I enjoyed my kids’ teenaged years; sharing their world views and passionate ideals was exciting stuff. It’s what young people have always done, what they are meant to do; they’re exploring their expanding worlds and testing their own often confusing places within it. Parents do themselves and their kids a disservice when they discount their opinions and evolving beliefs; it’s a natural part of growing up.
But that exploration, however hotly expressed, doesn’t mean that they’re legally adults. The law recognizes, as does anyone who has raised a teenager, that kids don’t always make the best decisions during their tumultuous young-adult years, and that parents can and should override them (like getting those pesky tattoos). Navigating these uncharted waters is tricky, and changes over generations. An inter-galactic visiting alien, if one ever landed here, would no doubt be befuddled by the actual practice of this philosophy. On the one hand if you’re not old enough to vote, or to buy booze, tobacco, or a firearm, how can you on the other hand be tried as an adult in a court of law or sent out, M-16 in hand, to kill a bunch of people you’ve never seen on the other side of the world? This is the philosophical conundrum, the murky transitional time between childhood and adulthood.
California’s new law prohibiting teachers from informing parents if their students show signs of switching their genders was only necessary because some conservative, MAGA-inclined parents have succeeded elsewhere in doing the exact opposite: legally requiring teachers to inform parents if their students change, for example, their personal pronouns or exhibit other signs of gender change.
Such expressions of underage gender identity change kick über-conservative parents squarely in the gut of their sex-obsessed worst fears: that “permissive” school policies somehow have the power to change their kids in unwanted (in this case sexual) ways, even down to changing their genders. This fear, like many if not most fears, is both highly emotional and wholly unsupported by the facts, despite Elon Musk’s very public charge that he’s moving part of his company to Texas because California schools turned one of his kids transgender. For a mega-ego like Musk it must have been inconceivable that he could not dictate his child’s sexuality, however impossible the task.
The new parental notification ban should never have risen to the level of state law; it only did so because California, like every other state, ultimately genuflects to business rather than to kids’ mental health, allowing Big Tech to roll along in its unfettered, unregulated, multi-billion-dollar way despite increasing evidence that non-stop screen time, offering up the unedited world 24/7 for all to see, largely contributes to teen depression, violence, and other psychic ills. So parents, most both working full time to provide food and a roof over their families’ heads, turn to what they think they may be able to actually influence – like public school policy. Many look out at the wasteland of our crumbling communities and failing education system and fear what kind of future awaits their kids. What parent wouldn’t?
In a rational world, during parent-teacher conferences teachers and parents should be able to rely upon their collective common sense and shared concerns to openly share their observations of their students or kids with compassion and thoughtfulness and without a political playbook, whatever one’s beliefs. My old friend Kitty, a retired high school teacher in rural Connecticut, summed this up nicely during a recent conversation. She explained that, as a high school teacher, she did not take up secondary roles. What she meant by that was that she was not a psychologist who counseled her students or a cop who toted a gun in her classroom. “I was a high school teacher,” she said simply.
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