Gerhard Richter’s painting Betty holds the eyes in a trance that grows stronger the longer you look at it. The first shock is that this 1988 work, on display at the Saint Louis Art Museum, is not the photograph it appears to be. Richter’s skill as an artist is so formidable that he can make this oil on canvas, about the size of a large briefcase turned on its side, look absolutely true to life. The second shock is that this image—Richter once called it a “non-portrait”—of his oldest teenage daughter asks us not to contemplate or admire what his child looks like, but what she is looking at or toward.
Other painters have depicted this sly trick before Richter, one of the most famous German artists to straddle the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. German artist Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818) did it most famously, becoming the iconic image of the Romantic movement in art and music. Friedrich painted a variation on the same theme again in 1822, with Frau am Fenster (Woman at the Window), using his wife Caroline as the subject, looking toward the Elbe river from Dresden. The theme of someone looking away got an American twist when, in 1948, Andrew Wyeth gave us Christina’s World.
Even before Friedrich, Wyeth, and Richter, Spanish painter Diego Velázquez went “meta,” as they say, pushing the viewer’s perspective inside the canvas, and also far beyond its frame, of his most famous work, Las Meninas (1656), which depicted multiple figures, plus a dog, onto one huge canvas. Art critics have outdone themselves in attempts to catch up with Velázquez ever since.
We see these images but also do not see them because they ask us to perceive without sight a world the subjects of these paintings see, a world that is beyond our ken but that maybe we, too, have at some time absorbed or taken in.
Betty, like the works of Friedrich and Wyeth, spares the exertion of multiple perspectives with its focus on one person. All these paintings restate perspective in a concentrated, radical way. They ask us to imagine the consciousness of their subjects without ever seeing their faces. A request to “see” is the request of every painting. More difficult is the request to imagine and empathize with the hopes and dreams of those we do not see face to face, to share in their consciousness apart from what their facial expression tells us, which so often deceives us anyway.
We see these images but also do not see them because they ask us to perceive without sight a world the subjects of these paintings see, a world that is beyond our ken but that maybe we, too, have at some time absorbed or taken in.
As such, Betty and its predecessors give parents an apt tool for understanding adolescence. Or should it be said, as much as a parent can understand adolescence. Richter knew exactly what he was talking about when he called his painting a “non-portrait.” There is no precise portrait of adolescence because so much of the teenager portrayed is in flux to begin with. The teenager is there for everyone to see, but the negative space that surrounds them is always shrinking (hopefully) as they grow, contracting in retreat from the world (heaven forfend), or both (what, exactly, is going on?).
• • •
“Can you somehow write your article without saying anything about me?”
These first words at the prospect of one of her parents writing “an essay about raising an adolescent” were no surprise. If fun, broadly speaking, is the chief concern of the child, privacy is the chief aim of the emerging adolescent. Or, perhaps it is better to say that fun within the context of an ever-broadening sense of privacy is the chief aim of the emerging adolescent.
The first lesson of a parent to an adolescent is that the parent’s role and responsibilities change almost as much as the child about to become an adolescent. Between your child’s toddlerhood and about the age of twelve or thirteen, you, the parent, are Prospero performing magic for Miranda. Apart from the occasional complaints of various Calibans—worried pre-school teachers or competitive parents on the kids’ athletic field—the world is an enchanted island. The crude plots of Pippy Longstocking are every bit as entertaining as the refined art of Studio Ghibli anime. Ice cream is magical because it is ice cream. Satisfying meals are no sweat, so long as they invariably include chicken nuggets.
Then waters darken beneath a roiling sky. Maturation’s big storm approaches, followed by other, bigger storms. Shame and embarrassment seep into the consciousness. Boys who would objectify your body and girls who would contrast it with their own in competition encroach on your self-esteem. The crushing realization that almost no one is absolutely “free” from economic forces and that the ruthless demands of the marketplace operate on, at best, a soft form of coercion, congeal into terror. The adolescent understands she must strategize to remain as free as possible while finding ways to sacrifice time and opportunity to society. This compromise is painful compared to the remembered innocence of childhood. Pain begets anger and frustration. If the parents are lucky, Miranda becomes Rosalind, the eloquent, witty romantic who loves her parents from a distance but would rather be among friends for romance and adventures in the forest of Arden. If the parents of a teenage daughter are unlucky, Miranda becomes Juliet; romantic certainly, but also doomed.
I know all this, and can write it down, thanks to the second lesson to all parents of an adolescent: while no two adolescent experiences are the same, most all share the same imprint. And so it is through this route that I can attempt to write an essay about “raising an adolescent,” hopefully without invading the sacred space of privacy that envelopes my daughter. If this essay strikes any chords at all, it is because to write about raising an adolescent is to write about raising most adolescents.
• • •
“The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint … As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.”
—Peter the Hermit, AD1274
Your adolescent child has grown tired and weary of what you have to say or suggest that she might do. You are rote. You are boring. The bedroom door that was once closed during cell phone conversations with friends is now closed whether or not she is talking with her friends at all. The bedroom door is the moat protecting her castle door, and the bridge is rarely lowered.
None of that is a news flash to parents raising an adolescent. But maybe this is: Stop to remember your own adolescence, and you soon realize that the adolescent child you now raise is rote. Your teenager is boring. The bedroom door that separates you from your teenager is the same Rubicon you dared your parents to cross when you refused to believe they had any wisdom to offer your soul in turmoil and struggle. Adolescence is unique among life phases because it is a time a person is least likely to believe they share experiences in common with others—unless perhaps those others are also adolescents.
Adolescence has always been a pain to get through. Adolescents have always been a pain to those who must put up with them. As the quote from Peter the Hermit above demonstrates, panic and anxiety over the next generation to inherit the Earth is—even in AD 1274!—as old as time. Like most people who judge others, Peter the Hermit was largely full of crap, and hardly a hermit at all. He led one of the first militant pilgrimages to Jerusalem under Pope Urban II’s Crusades, but not before murdering thousands of Jews in the Rhineland on the way. And, as his quote reveals, he was more than a little sexist. Still, his words ring true because they transcend time, place, or era. Excavating corpses from the muddy bogs of northern Europe, archaeologists were surprised to find that ancient tribal leaders hurled a surprising number of teenagers, bound but alive, into these ancient pits in rituals meant to appease their Gods. A hardened cynic would have a field day explaining why teenagers were prime candidates for these sacrifices. The prefrontal cortex of the adolescent mind is a place of turbulent goings-on when risk-taking is at its ripest, and bound to confound or even enrage adults who want peace at the end of the day.
Adolescence is unique among life phases because it is a time a person is least likely to believe they share experiences in common with others—unless perhaps those others are also adolescents.
Anxiety and pain about today’s adolescents revolve around the universe of social media and the cell phones that deliver said media whenever teenagers feel the slightest bit bored. (Fentanyl has an orbit in there somewhere, but let us remember that in AD 1274 the average life expectancy was 33 years, and making it past 50 was winning the lottery. The quantity and quality of our lives are relative to our time in history, but let us not pretend we do not have it better than people who lived during the Middle Ages.) As someone who grew up a latchkey kid to a single parent with little else but Gilligan’s Island and I Dream of Jeannie re-runs for company after school, let me say that the fear of abandoning young adults to life online is overblown.
Technological advances are premised on the belief that the human attention span goes to the highest, most impressive bidder. Yes, it is distressing to watch as your child capitulates to endless hours in front of a phone screen. We have every right to ask how they might learn ethics and morals when the consequence of so much wasted time may not be evident for years to come. All I can offer is a reminder that the human species has survived far worse over centuries and seems remarkably equipped to survive into the future. All we can do is hope that our children tire of digital life and one day rediscover the peace of silence and the solitude of thoughts withdrawn from the chaos and din of the digital world. The majority of teenagers no longer play with dolls and toy soldiers. Surely, they will outgrow, if even only incrementally, life in front of the phone screen. Of course, Gilligan’s Island is not as inventive as our endless array of digital media creations, but too much of anything for a lifetime is bound to exhaust most people.
Adolescence is a burning cauterization fusing childhood to adulthood, not a soothing balm connecting the two. It was always thus, and will always be thus. Every astute parent, single or married, knows this. Memories of our own awkward adolescence may be too painful to dredge up, but if we are going to raise teenagers with any sense of compassion we would do well to remember them.
Weeks after my fourteenth birthday, and speaking to me from a slight distance (as if I were a bomb that might detonate without warning), my mother one evening left me alone at the kitchen table with a tape recorder. The “lessons” from that player were spoken by Dr. James Dobson, still today one of the leaders of right-wing Christian fundamentalism. Titled “Preparing for Adolescence,” each cassette side dealt with a separate encomium regarding drugs, alcohol, dating do’s and don’ts and, the biggest, most awkward bombshell of all, masturbation.
To sit in that family kitchen, listening to the droll, weary recorded voice of a professional evangelist recite when and how young adults could touch themselves, taught me not just the limits of awkward conversation—there is no conversation between a teenager and a tape recorder—but the also painful terrain of talking about adolescence at all. A small part of me was touched that my mother cared enough about my maturity to have me listen to these cassette tapes. The larger part of me understood that adolescence was something I was destined to struggle with, and suffer through, by myself. It brought to mind the times my friends and I clutched our knees in pain during middle school gym class. Every time we felt our bones stretching forth to grow, we would clench our teeth in agony. We would gripe. Sitting on the bench to wait our turn on the basketball court, we listened to one another for a sense of mutual suffering, sometimes in rounds, as we gasped in pain of our growing bones. Still, this suffering was ours to endure, each one of us, alone and by ourselves.
Coming home from work at night, sometimes hours after my daughter has already been home from school, I listen for sounds of her growth but hear nothing. Nothing, except a sound so distant, puzzling, and unfamiliar I do not know how to measure it. At least, I think I cannot. That silent distance in which everything happens to a seventeen-year-old, but the parent discerns nothing, is the mysterious rite of her adolescence.
We all know, as parents, the ritual of advice we want to offer in order to soften the blows of what our children experience as they become adults. My own favorite adage is by Desiderius Erasmus: “The chief element of happiness is this: to want to be what you are.” There are various glosses attempting to wrap as much advice as possible into the fewest words, e.g., “The trick to life is learning what you can control if you work hard and learning what you cannot control no matter how hard you work. Somewhere between those two places, freedom resides.” Then there is the advice disguised as gentle cynicism: “Work hard, but also do your best not to be a prisoner of your expectations.”
Given enough space and nurtured ease, the silence between parents and teenagers can become a sort of meditation. Answers to a parent’s “stupid” questions can assume the riddled tone of a Zen koan. What the hell is she thinking? What vexes her mind, body, or spirit? Is she all right? With the rhythm of childhood gone, the parent searches for hints of tempo.
None of that is bound to do a teenager much good. Early in her teens, when my daughter asked for advice, I could feel my recommendations land in her heart and soul with both feet on the ground. As the years passed, a paradox emerged: the louder and longer I spoke, the more distant my voice became. To my great shame–this was during the pandemic when we were getting on each other’s nerves—I once pushed my well-meant advice to the limit of mockery and insult. “Ok, I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” my daughter said. Days after my anger turned to frustration turned to tearful resignation, I apologized.
Given enough space and nurtured ease, the silence between parents and teenagers can become a sort of meditation. Answers to a parent’s “stupid” questions can assume the riddled tone of a Zen koan. What the hell is she thinking? What vexes her mind, body, or spirit? Is she all right? With the rhythm of childhood gone, the parent searches for hints of tempo. The map of your child’s emotions is being reshuffled. The law of probability says that if you walk or step on enough wrong paths and directions, you are bound to hit a few in the right direction.
If pressed, most adults will admit that life’s lessons land with more force, meaning, and permanence when learned by experience, not advice. It is the same for teenagers, and warnings from the lighthouse travel only so far. So your child crash lands on the rocky shore? We all hope our children do not have to learn life’s hardest lessons the hard way. We struggle not to reach the moment before it is too late. But such is life. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote the “Golden Book” of The Meditations, but he also had a dud for a son and successor in Commodus. (Aurelius also persecuted thousands of innocent, early Christians.) Numerous books have been written about how to live with kids who break our hearts.
Raising an adolescent with any sense of empathy means recalling your own teenage years in detail, and then finding a sneaky way to engineer those memories into your own child. It is an exercise in building a bridge that must be traveled both ways, backward and forward, until the paths in, out, and around become clear. With luck, the route will evolve on its own. But even among the lucky, the planks creak, and the ropes can snap, so you fall into a canyon. Building that bridge takes persistence and a brave parent who walks across it.
• • •
Aside from being the great painting it undoubtedly is, Richter’s Betty hints broadly that perhaps the best way to see any person, not just a teenager, is to attempt to see what they are seeing. If someone puzzles you, if someone enrages you, if someone is ignoring you, try looking in the direction they also look. You may not see all of what they see to understand them, but surely this is better than not looking at all.
The subtle truths of Richter’s painting are found in literature as well. Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s epic novel of WWII and the Stalinist terror that followed in Soviet Russia, describes in aching detail what one woman sees standing hours in line behind others, hoping to release her detained husband: “Yevgenia had never realized that the human back could be so expressive, could so vividly reflect a person’s state of mind. People had a particular way of craning their necks as they came up to the window; their backs, with their raised, tensed shoulders, seemed to be crying, to be sobbing and screaming.”
The future is written faster than we can read it, but that does not mean we cannot try, even if all there is to see or read are backs turned toward us, or eyes looking away. One trick of being a capable parent is not overplaying your hand or pressing your argument. Just do your best to see what your child sees.
It is clichéd because it is true: teenagers and adolescents are the future. We hold fast to the hope that our children will fly over the shell-shocked terrain of their teenage years to the far side of adulthood unscathed. There is no love without trust. The paradox of a parent’s love for a child is that it grows stronger in trust the more a parent lets go. To trust that your child will make it to adulthood is to trust the mysterious, often painful ways of adolescence. It is to trust that just because they are looking past you does not mean they have forgotten you, their parents, but that they are only looking forward.
