Many of today's teenagers have the kind of financial freedom and sense of entitlement that hard-working people three times their age will never achieve, thanks to the unquestioning support of their parents. How can parents rebalance the relationship? writes Kathy Sheridan
SOME WEEKS ago, while scratching around for a theme for a talk I was giving to a fund-raising lunch, it occurred to me that the project involved - the wonderful Tallaght-based education centre, An Cosán - was 22 years old, the same age as my youngest daughter.
A call to the project's CEO, Liz Waters, elicited a typical day in the life of a girl considering the monumental step of a return to education with An Cosán. She probably sits around most of the day in a rented flat, alone with her child, with no one to babysit and no money for a babysitter anyway. She can't afford a mobile phone although she has one anyway, but never has credit for it.
She eats rubbish, probably from the chip van, almost certainly smokes, probably has no relationship with the baby's father and struggles constantly with loneliness. Life is an endless struggle to make impossible ends meet. She resorts to the moneylenders for Christmas, first communions and confirmations. If she lives at home, it's intolerably over-crowded and often involves family relationship problems. She sees the doctor regularly for recurring stress-related physical ailments, flus, tummy bugs, chest infections. If she seems hard and tough, it may be because "too long a sacrifice makes a heart of stone".
And then you think of your own daughter and her friends, with all their myriad choices about where and how to live their lives. If they drop out of college, do you go on supporting them? At what point do you say enough is enough? Are we too full of guilt to ever reach that point? In the 22 years since An Cosán's birth, during which we have hurtled from stagnancy and recession to insane over-indulgence, have we implanted a dangerous sense of entitlement in our privileged Celtic cubs?
By way of example, I took the generally well-heeled audience on a shopping trip through the eyes of a typical, affluent 14-year-old private school girl in Dublin, a trip which went something like this.
First stop, Brown Thomas. False tan, fake eyelashes and nails are necessities for a night out and are therefore called upon at least once a week. A typical trip could include a trip to Benefit for a "Bad Gal" mascara (€25), foundation (€30) or false lashes from MAC (€15).
The nailbar is another option at €20 for a file and polish. The only fake tans to buy are St Tropez or Fakebake - about €30 a bottle.
No self-respecting cub is without a Juicy Couture tracksuit, €185 (top) and €140 (bottoms); Ugg boots at €200; a Louis Vuitton pouchette, a snip at €210; a Juicy Couture tote bag €265; and Juicy Couture dress €280.
An online order from Abercrombie and Fitch is a regular splash, with a typical spend being €300 to €400 every few months.
On Saturdays, the Dundrummies hit the Dundrum Town Centre where they while away an afternoon shopping and checking each other out over a Starbucks non-fat soy latte, sushi from Yo! Sushi for lunch, a Butler's hot chocolate later on and a trip to Movies @ Dundrum.
A shopping trip around Zara and H&M is a regular event just for a new "going-out top". For something truly important, like a pair of jeans, it's straight to BT2 for Sevens, True Religion or Sass and Bide, all more than €200. After all this, says my informant, Mum pulls up in the Range Rover and they zoom off.
Lest you imagined that 14 is too tender an age to be so high-maintenance, then be aware that there is a southside nail boutique, for instance, that offers a "Little Princess" package for under-13s; €25 for a polish and a soak.
These, roughly, are the same girls to be seen in their droves at "Wezz" disco every Friday night. The pre-drinks rituals lead to a lot of drunk teenagers outside - before, during and after.
The point is that many of these little girls obviously have "mates" for parents. They have the kind of financial freedom and sense of entitlement that hard-working people three times their age will never achieve, thanks to their "mates". Yet observe them trudging through the marbled halls of Dundrum Town Centre and the most notable thing about many of them is a kind of sullen boredom. Of course some of that can be put down to raging hormones, but you find yourself wondering - what would you give a girl like that for Christmas? And how many averagely well-off parents and their children now perceive all this to be the norm?
It all started with the children's parties; with the pricey entertainers and the increasingly upmarket goody bags until they became the norm. Then came the limos, the helicopter rides, the hotel lunches and the cases of champagne for the First Communions.
That morphed seamlessly into the generation that swoons over My Super Sweet 16(an American TV hit with viewers aged zero to 25, which featured an Irish family last year), where children are indulged with designer gowns and fast cars on their 16th birthdays, encouraged to bully their less well-off "courtiers" with threats of exclusion from the marvellously narcissistic party, and are given a power and status they haven't even begun to earn or understand.
And how do you follow that for an 18th birthday party? Well, you need a dress or two (because duh, you can't wear the same one twice in a birthday season), from Alila, Dolls and Chica, costing anything from €600 up. And if that's a dilemma, here's a worse one. Do you supply alcohol or meekly condone its presence when you know that half the guests haven't even reached the legal drinking age? If the first, do you consult all the parents first in the event of some stomach-pumping being required at some stage?
We can draw a veil over the school debs, a well-documented blow-out to which entire magazines are dedicated, although their extravagance seems under-stated now compared with all that goes before and after.
Twenty-first parties are staged on the scale of mini-weddings, while weddings themselves have become such overblown three-day extravaganzas, the drive for perfection so obsessive, the Bridezillas so repellently narcissistic, the whole event so staged, that it has become a branch of theatre rather than a public commitment to love and cherish. It's worth noting that Dadzillas are a new entrant in the weddings category (ie fathers of the bride who fancy themselves as event organisers).
As for the guest, the professional advice in this magazine a few weeks ago was that they have the right to say no thanks to an invitation to bankruptcy. But that is to ignore the problem - that weddings have become so ridiculously demanding that a young professional whimpered recently that she'd prefer to get a summons than a wedding invitation.
Hand in hand with this has come a parental insistence on the rightness of their child's decisions or actions. When they set their children off on an early-life assault course of Suzuki violin and Kumon maths, they probably didn't know that the same child would still be dithering about how precisely to make a living for themselves at 25.
One of the great parental challenges now is to discern the difference between lazy choices and courageous dreams where our children are concerned. Are we slowly stunting them with our airy promises of unconditional support, no matter what; with the implied assurances that we can always fix things for them when their impulsive decisions or unwillingness to get stuck in bring the inevitable fall-out? And what becomes of the pampered young bride when the little scion arrives? Southside lore suggests that she chucks in the job and summons night nannies, day nannies, cooks and cleaners to enable her to survive this uniquely demanding and exhausting sacrifice.
After our lunch, an accountant mused that with the economic slow-down, the "Dundrummies" are being reined in as we speak, leading perhaps to fewer "mates" of the parent-child variety. But has the damage been done? Has the national guilt-trip over house prices for first-time buyers, for example - the pressure on ageing parents to re-mortgage to help out their children - created another monster?
A friend tells a true story about a 30-something who had been living at home and announced to his parents that he was moving in with his girlfriend. That's grand, said the parents. But the girlfriend, said the son, had a heavy mortgage on the apartment. Umm, that's life, said the parents. But the son ploughed on undeterred. Since his room in the family home would be empty, he thought it was only fair, surely, to allow him to rent it outso he could make a contribution to the mortgage!
Astonishingly, two weeks later, when the parents had begun to exhale again, a pleasant lady with several suitcases and a tenuous grasp of English turned up at the door.
Is this the corollary of our efforts to lavish our children with money, possessions and choices that we never had? Did we forget about the bit in-between that makes acquiring your own mortgage a singular event, something extraordinary and liberating?
Sure, we've moved from barefoot schoolchildren to the high-maintenance, Heatgeneration in the blink of an eye and what sane person would want to go back? And of course, it's more fun being a "mate" to your children and a lot less trouble. It cuts out the relentless battles over study times and Saturday night curfews. And if you and your "mate" fall out, you can always flounce off, unlike old-fashioned parents who have to stand their ground, now and forever.
But it can be salutary to be discussing these matters in the surrounds of a five-star hotel, where a young client of An Cosábravely takes the podium to talk about achieving her dream of a certificate in childcare. And all credit to her generous audience, the irony escaped very few of them.
An Cosán offers people in Tallaght a path to learning and leadership by providing community-based education and childcare. More information from www.ancosan.com