Seventies Parents raising Millennium Kids

By Paulette Tobin (3/14/00)

This weekend was a historic one in our home. It was the first time Emily, who is just weeks shy of 16, was allowed to go to a concert in Fargo with four of her friends and no adult supervision. This happened because she asked her father first, and he said yes. I would have said no.

Emily at first had asked if she could drive our car the 90 miles to Fargo and take some of her friends along. I said, sure, as long as I was in the passenger seat. She said none of her friends wanted to ride with her if she was bringing her mother.

I realize this could change at any moment, but so far raising a teen-ager has been a lot of fun. Through my job at the Herald and my church work I spend a lot of time with high school-aged kids, and for the most part I find them smart and very, very funny, sometimes when they don't mean to be funny, but that's another story.

It can be tough to be a '70s-era parent of a teen-ager. I remember some of the stuff I was doing when I was 16, don't you? There's part of me that hopes my daughter has as much fun in high school as I did - and then there's part of me that hopes that she doesn't.

Not that I was robbing banks or anything, but there was a great deal of underage beer consumption, often in moving vehicles, when I was in high school. I started smoking Marlboros when I was about 16 (I quit for the second and last time in the mid-1980s). Although I was a good girl in many ways, there were some ways in which I was not exactly a model citizen.

Of course these are not exactly the things one wants to admit to their teen-aged daughter. I struggled over the right thing to say when she asked, "Did you ever smoke pot, Mom?" For many of raised in the '60s and '70s, there are several ways you could respond to this. You could lie and be a hypocrite, or, like President Clinton, claim you never inhaled. Or you could tell the truth. In the end I opted for the truth.

Most of us have in our pasts what the politicians call "youthful indiscretions." It has always been thus. Even the apostle Paul had to admit: "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child..." Of course the apostle Paul never had any children to ask him, "So, Dad, what's this I hear about your youthful phase of persecuting Christians?"

To be honest I have mixed feelings about my younger days. On one hand, my life has been so respectable and boring for so long that I'm glad to have a misspent youth to look back upon. On the other hand, I don't want to be flippant, because I am well aware of how many bad things can happen to teen-agers when they make bad decisions. And I know too many people whose youthful indiscretions evolved into lifetime problems.

Now that I'm middle-aged, I wonder why we ever thought we needed any intoxicating substances to have fun when we were kids. Wasn't the fact that we were so young and healthy and full of teen-aged hormones enough? In one of my favorite movies, the 1940s-era James Stewart classic "It's a Wonderful Life," there's a scene in which two teen-aged boys are leaving for a high school graduation dance. Their father is admonishing them: "No gin tonight, boys, not a drop," whereupon the family maid shakes her head and says: "Boys and girls and music and dancing. Why would they ever need gin?"

I consider myself a cool mom, but sometimes I hear my mother's words coming out of my mouth or I find myself giving Emily the third degree, like the other night when she came home a half-hour late. When I asked her why she'd been late, she rolled her eyes (I get a lot of that) and said: "Only you could be worried when I'm late getting home from church group."

Hey, I remember what went on after those Luther League meetings.

(Paulette Haupt Tobin grew up 12 miles north of Eureka and graduated from EHS in 1973 and from SDSU in 1977. Today she lives in Grand Forks, N.D. You can email her at [email protected])