Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (10 page)

A fifteen-minute train-ride away from Eastern city lies the formerly agricul- tural town turned bedroom community of Kers. In an upscale section of town, substantial stretches of green surround large, uniquely styled free- standing houses, including the home of Ria and Maarten van Kampen, and their children Fleur, sixteen, and Jasper, fourteen. Their occupations—he is a senior administrator and she works as a psychotherapist in private practice—put the van Kampens in the upper-income bracket of the middle class. In addition, Ria is one of the few Dutch mothers interviewed who works full-time in a professional capacity, leaving her more pressed for time than most and caught, more often than she would like, juggling con- tradictory demands.

When Fleur first started her courtship with Vincent, her mother was quite happy. Vincent is her first, at least the first she told her mother about: “I think there were other boyfriends before, but I don’t know that.” Yet, Ria is of two minds. “I like that boyfriends come into her life. I think that is a very healthy development. But I think it is too bad that it is taking such steady forms.” Having been together for a year and a half,

The courtship [between Fleur and her boyfriend] has grown into a full- fledged partner relationship. And I just think she is too young for that. I think, ‘Gee, why don’t you sniff around here, sniff around there.’ That sniff- ing around would not have been easy for me either. But I mean that is what I think you need when you are young and not . . . to have such a lengthy

relationship with the first person who comes along. But okay, that is not something [as a parent] you can control.

Ria had told Fleur before, “If you are ready, then you need to say it hon- estly and then you also need to take precautions.” When Fleur said she was
er aan toe
, Ria first hoped, “Who knows, maybe the relationship will be over in a month. But you know, gradually I thought to myself, ‘He’s a nice, very pleasant, friendly, and calm boy, so. . . .’ So that makes you say at a certain point, ‘Okay she is
er aan toe
and he is a nice boy so what can you do?’” Still, despite the fact that Fleur feels ready, has a steady boyfriend, and uses the pill and condoms, her parents do not let Vincent spend the night at home. They have told her: “We are not there yet.” Fleur does not accept their point of view: “Why not, I’d like it so much.” The boyfriend also objects: “What a ridiculous situation, how old-fashioned.” Fleur has asked: “Would you rather I had multiple, short-lived relation- ships?” Ria sees Fleur getting stuck in between her parents and Vincent, who is nineteen: “She understands us, but she would rather have had it differently.”

Ria admits that she is ambivalent. She has been influenced by her own upbringing, which was, in her own words, “very authoritarian.” Looking back, she says:

My opinion was not important. My parents decided a lot of things for me. The distance between [us] was also much greater. . . . I want to do things dif- ferently, but that does not always make it easier for me. . . . I think it is better for [Fleur]. At least I hope it is better for children today to learn to feel what they want and think.

But giving her daughter the space she did not have requires, Ria says, ad- justment. “When you look at the development around her boyfriend, then I think, in the end, you constantly have to yield. . . . As a parent, I feel that I have to keep adding water to the wine [compromising] because I think the relationship [with my daughter] is more important.” Ria and her hus- band have for instance let Fleur and her boyfriend go away for a weekend and camp together on a family vacation. But the sleepover is still a no-go: “I just don’t want to have such a little couple in my house. . . . I have the feeling that if we were to say yes to that, he would practically be living here. [It would be] coming a little too close, the sexuality, our feeling is that that just doesn’t feel right.”

These two final vignettes are instances of conflict. As such, they defy the dominant cultural categories of adolescent sexuality and bring into view a matter left almost entirely unspoken in the Dutch interviews: power. In relaying their own conversations about sex with their children or discuss- ing the relationships their children have with others, Dutch parents rarely talk about the inequalities, antagonisms, and power differences that those relationships may entail.
19
When confronted with what appears to be an instance of sexual violation, Marga Fenning struggles to find words and responses that make sense out of her son’s experience and behavior. Yet, Marga remains strikingly attached to the language and practices of nor- malization, prodding herself, despite shock and discomfort, to respond to Thomas’s experiences as were they
gewoon
.

Fleur van Kampen’s sexual development tests the limits of normaliza- tion in another way. Although confronted with a textbook case of “normal” adolescent sexual development, Ria van Kampen has nonetheless forbid- den her daughter’s boyfriend to spend the night. Her notable articulation of discomfort and exercise of parental power may well be an expression of two concerns that typically remain unarticulated in the Dutch interviews. Gender, conceptualized as an unequal or power-ridden relationship, is a rare theme in the Dutch interviews. If Dutch middle-class parents speak at all of the inequalities of gender and the disadvantages girls face, they do so in reference to other times or the other social classes. A few Dutch parents acknowledge being more worried about, or protective of, daugh- ters given their capacity for childbearing. But unlike their American coun- terparts, the Dutch parents do not tend to talk about adolescent sexual- ity and relationships as an arena in which girls are at a gender-specific disadvantage.

Concerns about gender and power may, however, be hidden in Ria’s re- fusal to permit the sleepover. Without explicitly addressing gender inequal- ity, like Ria, several other professionally employed mothers of daughters hint that in relationships that are prematurely stable, girls may have more to lose than their boyfriends—who are often a few years older. Anneke Schutte, for instance, is “fine with [my daughters’] having a boyfriend as long as he doesn’t last.” She is wary of the “really steady relationships,” ones that could entail losing contact with other friends. If Mariette is hon- est, she too would rather that her own daughter wait until later. “But that has nothing to do with sex,” Mariette explains. “It has to do with being free. You’re getting yourself into such a bind. . . . You limit yourself. If you

have a steady relationship, you need to start adapting. . . . [Sixteen] is a bit young to start adjusting yourself to another person.”

Status anxiety may be another reason Ria and her husband do not want to grant their daughter’s relationship full recognition. Although there are subtle hints that the social class of their children’s boyfriends and girl- friends matters—and is a basis for deciding whether the partner in question is a suitable candidate for the sleepover—Dutch parents never say that “a good way of relating” requires the right class. Many do not need to. Dutch secondary schools are tracked by academic level, which largely matches a student’s social class.
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Children from middle- and upper-middle class families often attend the upper-level tracks, resulting in relatively homog- enous school-based peer groups. Schools are, however, only one place to meet boyfriends. That at nineteen, Vincent lives in a town, rather than hav- ing moved to a city, as university students often do, suggests that his class trajectory may not make him a suitable sleepover partner.

But if concerns about gender and class drive Ria’s resistance to the sleep- over, they will not, she says, outweigh her desire to eventually move be- yond a state of conflict:

It is also our life’s process, and every time we too shift a little. . . . At a certain point you can no longer hold it back. We feel we have been able to prolong [our resistance] a bit, [thinking] it could be that the relationship breaks up. . . . But okay, if the [courtship] stays strong, then [as a parent] you also get more accustomed to the boy, become more familiar with him. . . . I won’t say, [the conflict over the sleepover] is going to stay like this. I hope not. No [having this conflict stay] wouldn’t be good. . . . You know, you need to move with your time.

Accepting the sleepover is, for Dutch parents, a sign that one has moved with the times: with the historical time—since the prevailing norms re- garding adolescent sexuality have changed dramatically in the course of a generation—and with personal time—since a child that was once little is now on the way to becoming an adult. To navigate these changes, and the tensions they produce, Dutch parents draw on distinct cultural tools— cultural frames, forms of reasoning, and everyday practices that help them to smooth out most of the wrinkles of discomfort and disarray. The cultural frames, as we have seen, are
normal
and
nonsecretive
sexuality,
relationship- based
sexuality, and
self-regulated
sexuality. Together, these cultural frames

create an understanding of adolescence and of parenting in which permit- ting the sleepover, under the right conditions, makes cognitive, emotional, and moral sense to the Dutch parents.

As a cultural process, normalization contains a cultural logic: its con- ceptual components reinforce one another to make the sleepover seem reasonable and right. However, this does not mean that parents do not struggle—with one another, with their children, and with themselves: Jo- lien Boskamp exhorted her husband Mark not to make their daughter “do penance” for the limitations imposed on them when they were young. Natalie Boskamp and Fleur van Kampen use the frame of normal sexuality to turn the tables and win over reluctant fathers and mothers by arguing that their sexuality should not provoke such an “overblown” emotional response. Finally, confronted with potentially uncomfortable elements of children’s sexuality—whether in providing run-of-the-mill sex education or in responding to sexual violation—Ada Kaptein and Marga Fenning both had to struggle to make their actions and reactions match the mandates of normalization.

Indeed, the controlling and constituting components of normalization apply as much to adults as they do to youth themselves.
21
Permitting the sleepover under the right conditions is part of a strategy for exercising con- trol through connection: with teenage sexuality open to discussion, parents can maintain oversight and are thus able to encourage youth to engage in “good ways of relating” and to “know their responsibilities.”
22
By allowing sleepovers at home, the Dutch parents provide young people both the op- portunity and the incentive to experience sexuality as part of life that can be discussed, rationally planned, and experienced in harmony with, rather than in opposition to, the social fabric of the household. But providing such opportunities requires substantial emotional work on the part of par- ents. Indeed the sleepover exacts from parents the same qualities they hope to induce in their children—self-restraint, interpersonal attunement, and the capacity to keep reservations and embarrassment from creating alien- ation in the family.

Notably, this process of normalization differs significantly from patterns observed by American sexuality and gender scholars. Unlike their Ameri- can peers, Dutch parents do not describe girls and boys as engaged in “an- tagonistic gender strategies.” Insisting that girls listen to and act on their sense of readiness, several Dutch parents clearly recognize their daughters’ capacity for sexual subjectivity and agency. And with regard to the sleep- over, many Dutch parents hold their sons to the same standards of self- regulated and relationship-based sexuality as they do their daughters. But

when parents run up against sexual behavior that is not self-determined or embedded in egalitarian relationships, they can be at a loss for words. In- deed, for all the desire to have sex not be a source of words left unspoken, normalization entails notable silences about the internal conflicts, conflicts of interest, and conflicts over power that can shape sexuality.

Both the premises and the silences embedded in normalization are products of a distinct experience of the transition from the pre-1960s to the post-1960s social order. As we will see in chapter 4, the Dutch par- ents interviewed for this book are part of a generation—born roughly be- tween 1945 and 1955 and adolescents during the 1960s and 70s—who have drawn on a particular model of individualism in raising their own children. One reason that this generation of parents was able to embrace the falling away of old taboos is because they had at their disposal cultural templates for understanding and instilling self-restraint and social cohesion within the family and within society at large. Striking is the faith that un- derlies not just normalization but this model of individualism: faith in the self-regulatory capacities of teenagers, faith in teenagers’ aptitude to form healthy relationships, and faith in parents’ own ability to overcome shame and embarrassment—and control their own emotional impulses—so they can accept change.

A more tangible disposition than faith underlies this normalization: trust.
23
Parents convey that they trust their children—and their children’s judgment about when they are ready and about whom to (learn to) love. They also express trust in the relationships they have with their children and an expectation that the relationship will continue despite the shocks and shifts wrought by the inevitable changes of maturation. Trust extends beyond the intimate sphere to institutions outside the family. Unlike their American peers, the Dutch parents do not describe themselves as under as- sault by a commercial media culture that overstimulates their children and takes away their control as parents.
24
And concerns about sexuality becom- ing
too
normal notwithstanding, they take for granted that professionals in health care and education will assist them when necessary in making adolescent sexuality the normal experience that they want it to be.