The Logical Song [ midi ] By Supertramp When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical. And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily, joyfully, playfully watching me. But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible, logical, responsible, practical. And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, clinical, intellectual, cynical. There are times when all the world's asleep, the questions run too deep for such a simple man. Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned I know it sounds absurd but please tell me who I am. Now watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical, liberal, fanatical, criminal. Won't you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable! At night, when all the world's asleep, the questions run so deep for such a simple man. Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned I know it sounds absurd but please tell me who I am.

There comes a time in a teenager's life when he has to face the fact that he doesn't have a clue who he is.

The famous Supertramp song says it better than most: please tell me who I am.

All my life I've been the child of my parents - but now, all of a sudden, I need to know who I am as an individual. I'm growing. I'm changing. I am no longer the child. But who the heck am I?

It is during this period when you're desperately trying to build an identity that any serious threat to your self-concept is viewed with extreme anger. No wonder teens blow up at their parents and teachers when they perceive these adults as acting to subvert their attempts to define themselves. No wonder teens are flagrant in their displays of difference from adults, even to the point of provocation and defiance. No wonder teens cling to those things that adults shun, and ridicule adults who want to embrace the things that define their generation. No wonder teens go to extraordinary lengths to prove that their parents' edicts don't really rule the way they think and choose and live. The rebellious teen is the kid trying desperately to define himself against the backdrop of what his parents want him to be.

Some parents will tolerate the clothes, the hair, the music, the lingo, the free-spiritedness and the mannerisms, as long as their children agree to "be nice". But when a teen feels this rule of niceness pressing down on him like a ton of hypocrisy, he may deliberately choose to be "not nice" because that's the one way left in which he can assert his defiant independence. He is embarrassed to bring his friends around his parents' niceness, and makes sure to let his peers see that he is the black sheep of the family, not at all in the mold of the old man and the old lady. Perhaps this is why the children of adults well-known to the peers of the child - especially teachers and ministers - go out of their way to be difficult.

The teen is creating an identity in a given context. A teen in a small family stranded on a desert island would certainly want to assert his independence, but he would not be as eager as teens in a larger society to assert his independence for the sake of onlooking peers. The need for independence is co-opted in communities by the need for peer acceptance. The teen is seeking to assert independence from parents in the context of other teens seeking to assert their independence from parents. The fact that children spend most of their quality time with their peers in school or in extracurricular activities only reinforces their need to fit in with their peers.

The parent who adamantly resists a child's drive for self-assertion and the peer-influence of the child's friends is actively engaged in a war that the parent, quite likely, will not win (unless at great cost to the child). Have you not seen parents mock their children, make fun of their friends, ridicule the child's apparent need for peer acceptance, and do everything possible to keep the child from finding easy acceptance in the peer group? Is not that parent a scourge against the child? Is it not likely that the parent's actions will cause the teen permanent damage?

Peer acceptance is not such a childish phenomenon. Parents often forget that they, too, need peer acceptance - even if that peer is a work associate or a spouse. Parents forget that they, too, sought peer acceptance in school. They forget the bitterness of rejection and loneliness, and fail to bring to mind the fact that most of life's truly enjoyable experiences are defined in the context of friends. At some level, perhaps, the parent wants to be that friend for the child - but it is wrong to thwart the child's efforts to choose his own friends from among his peers. And if the parent is himself or herself bitter from loneliness and is projecting his or her own bad experiences onto the child out of some deep-seated spite, then be warned that you are engaging in "child abuse".

Parents have to realize that depriving children of peer associations is deadly, and seriously limiting those experiences is dangerous. Building the family home far out of town where few friends have ready access may be painful for the child. Taking a child out of school for home schooling may deprive the child of peer contact. Grounding a child by forbidding him to have contact with his friends - in person or by phone - is a painful punishment, not unlike sentencing a child to solitary confinement, and can cause serious problems if done frequently or for extended periods.

So, what is a parent to do? The parent wants the child to study and do his best at school. The parent wants the child to pursue meaningful hobbies that develop character: sports, music, art, debating, and so forth. The parent wants to ensure the child does not get in with a bad bunch that is cursing and swearing, telling foul jokes, drinking, smoking, using drugs, sleeping around, risking sexually-transmitted diseases and pregnancy, engaging in vandalism and shoplifting, pursuing cult activities, getting tattoos and body piercings and scarring, and going to places where adults can take advantage of a child. The parent's fears are justified. Who wants a child's life turned upside-down by an unplanned pregnancy, a young offender conviction, or a drug dependency?

It is a reasonable fear that a child, wanting to fit in quite badly, might choose behaviors that could ruin his life. But the child's greatest fear, in response to the parents' fear, is that he will be pulled away from the friends he's chosen and seen by them to be an over-protected mommy's boy. Nothing is more humiliating for a child than to be exposed, before his peers, as not being independent of his parents.

But that does not mean the child wants the parent to disappear. Without a parent, there is no sounding-board against which the child can assert his independence. Children of absent or absolutely permissive parents will often have a hard time defining themselves at all. They will find themselves flailing. The child needs the parents' rules and leadership in the home. The parent must set standards and help the child to internalize those standards, seeing the rationality of those standards more and more as he grows old enough to rationalize decisions. The parent must start this early, and it should be thought of in positive terms - as guidance rather than discipline.

The parent has to give the child more and more space and freedom to make choices. The parent can't be dictating the child's behavior when the "child" is age 30 or 25 or 21 - but instead of trying to find the right cutoff between childhood and adulthood, the parent should be striving to gradually and appropriately "phase out" parental control. The parent should have been granting freedoms and encouraging independent decision-making early in life. The parent who does not trust the child ends up with a child who cannot trust himself. If the parent has done a sound job, the child will have an internal sense of whether or not a behavior or set of circumstances is best avoided. When children make mistakes, the parent's role is to help the child understand what went wrong and how to say No to inappropriate behaviors. No one is perfect - neither children nor adults - and children should not be held to a higher standard or have hanging over their heads the constant threat of loss of freedom. Freedom granted and removed at the parent's whim is no freedom at all.

Everyone makes mistakes - and sometimes it's not easy to tell if something is a mistake or not. Sometimes a fight is justifiable in a given set of circumstances. Sometimes an argument is justifiable. On the other hand, sometimes a piece of conversation is bitterly mean. Parents have more than a decade to show children how to behave in respect of other people. If children learn bad behaviors and attitudes from their parents throughout that period, what's the point of discipline at the bitter end of childhood? A child's capacity to make a good choice and to be a good person among his peers must be developed throughout his childhood. Parents who fail in this respect are more deserving of punishment than the children they seek to discipline.

This little essay is hardly the answer to all a parent's problems - and in fact, that's not its purpose at all. Parents know there are situations where they simply have to put their foot down. Parents with particularly unruly children often do not know what to do. Does the parent, after repeated failures, simply throw up his hands and decide to let the child grow up on his own? And what does it accomplish to suggest that maybe the parent failed in some way when the teenager was a child? What good does this judgmentalism do now? Is it enough to say that the child needs the opportunity to work out his own identity? How far can you let a child go in trying to define himself? What if he wants to define himself as a bully or a gangster or a hoodlum or a vagrant? Where and how do you draw the line then?

Surely the parent cannot wash his hands of a child for which he is legally and morally responsible?

The child wakes up one day and, because of the way he's defining himself in his own mind as a gun-toting tough guy, he purchases a stolen weapon - and then he smuggles a weapon into the school. Surely he is acting out his chosen identity. Surely he is not doing this because of some other need. Surely it is not done out of paranoid self-defence. He has chosen a persona, and everything he does fits in with this persona.

There are factors that make a persona attractive. How many kids, after visiting the circus, have wanted to run away from home to be circus hands? How many have watched movies and wanted to be stars; watched concerts and wanted to be performers; watched sporting events and wanted to be sports heroes; watched aerial acrobatics and wanted to be pilots; read spy thrillers and wanted to be secret agents? Choosing identities can be fun. It would have been a lot less fun if the kids had actually run away from home, or taken their secret-agent aspirations to the extreme of building bombs and carrying live ammunition.

Today, add the Internet as a prime source of stimulation for the imagination, since it feeds fantasies with information that may well be directly from the horse's mouth.

As teens grow older, the need to fix an identity becomes greater - and those identities often reflect, not the media, but peer expectations. In a context of toughness, a kid will feel the need to be tough. In a context of promiscuity, a kid will feel the need to be sexually active. In a context of athletic prowess, a kid will feel the need to be athletically skilful. In a context of weapon fixation, a kid will feel the need to have and display a weapon. In a context of wealth, a kid will feel the need to be wealthy. If you could know and choose your child's peers, you would choose peers whose interests and actions were ones you'd wish your child to emulate.

Might a boy feel peer pressure to overcompensate because of his lack of exposure to, and experience with, guns? Take a gun-friendly, hunter-friendly community and a boy from a gun-naive home. Perhaps the boy is embarrassed about his innocence, and perhaps he is even ridiculed for his naivete about guns. When a kid overcompensates with extreme weapons, he is clearly doing so for some reason. The kid who is ridiculed about his virginity may overcompensate by trying to have sex with a dozen girls or by obtaining proof of sexual conquest for his friends to see. Similarly, a kid ridiculed about his lack of gun experience may feel he has to go overboard in developing a knowledge of weaponry. And he will also have to prove it - perhaps by lecturing about bombs or by bringing the proof to school and storing it in his locker. Kids will go to great lengths to overcome perceived deficiencies when they want to be accepted as one of the boys.

Some teens, of course, are leaders and trend-setters. A strong athlete can foster a context of athleticism. Other teens don't seem to mind standing out from the main crowd in small cliques. But some teens end up sidelined and ostracized, undoubtably against their will. It may be because of the fear of blacklisting that some teens try so hard to be accepted. They try to measure up to the identity that's been contextualized in their school or class or ideal peer group. The bitter reality is that some teens face exclusion because of idiosyncrasies and unique qualities - such as hair color, size, race, accent, twitches, et cetera. Some teens get accepted into the group on the basis of nicknames and exaggerated characterizations: the kid who'll do anything on a dare, for example; and the poor kid feels he has to live up to his image to maintain his place in the group. School being the way it is, the child does not have the luxury of choosing which peers will form his community of associates. Sometimes it is impossible to escape the bad influences, or the in-your-face peer groups, or the pressures that may be unique to a given community. The kid who would be a leader in one context or who would find easy acceptance in one setting may be an outsider in another school - and this can turn his life upside-down in ways that have earth-shattering repercussions.

All too often, there is no easy solution. Often, because of practical considerations, you have to take what you get. And meanwhile, countless kids - even if they do seem to fit in - may be wallowing in the depths of depression because they don't know who they are. The pressures to conform are so great that they don't know if they're liked for who they are or if they're accepted only because their deception has worked. The shallowness of it all is not lost on the kids themselves. Nirvana would never have achieved a widespread following among teens unless kids identified with the angst they were singing about.

All of these pressures and counterpressures, drives to be unique and drives to fit in, veiled threats and cruelties and hypocrisies, come crushing down on teenagers today in profound ways - and sometimes, parents make the problems worse. The answers are not easy ones, and sometimes all we can do is cross our fingers that the whole pressure cooker won't explode. Sometimes the pressure cooker does explode, at least for individual teenagers. Teen suicides - which have always left me heart-sunk and empty - continue to steal away lives. Drop-outs and runaways often become roadkill on the highway through teenagehood. And occasionally, teens kill.

Killing yourself, running away, prostituting yourself, dropping out and shooting up your school are all choices that many children are making. What factors lead a child to make such a choice? How must a child see himself before being capable of embracing such a choice as the one for him? Why would the child be incapable of seeing himself as something else - as someone with a wider range of options from which he can make a more positive choice? And what is a parent or teacher or caregiver to do to open up that range of choices and to point the way to the more progressive ones? All questions without easy answers. But surely, for the sake of the young people who fall by the wayside, we have the responsibility to be more aggressive in seeking answers that work.