In the wake of Kip Kinkel, Mitchell Johnson, the Menendez brothers, and the Backstreet Boys, to list just a few of the usual suspects, it's no wonder that a new book, The Nurture Assumption, has struck such a resonant chord among parents. In it, Judith Rich Harris argues that DNA and that weird neighbor kid who likes to conduct physics experiments on frogs have far more influence on the development of your child than any number of hugs, flashcard sessions, and spankings you might administer. For parents who manage to survive the surprise assaults and precision, theme-park hoofing of their aberrant offspring, it's a welcome message of absolution. Indeed, enduring the inevitable supermarket ostracism and Inside Edition conjecture is hard enough without having to battle the terrible knowledge that a few hours reading Dr. Seuss with the sociopathic little creep might have prevented the tragic demise of Old Fido and the junior high school chess club.
According to Harris, the greatest gift parents can give their progeny is the gift of conformity: Because peer groups play a major role in children's development, it's crucial that they infiltrate the most desirable ones. In other words, those flamehead jinkies and Air Max Shake 'Em Ups along with pre-adolescent rhinoplasties aren't just fashion statements -- they're important investments in a child's psychological well-being. And if your kid isn't fashionable? If he doesn't sport all the necessary accoutrements of the in-crowd? Well, maybe you ought to just go out and get him his M-21 Super Match assault rifle right now.
While Harris' pundit-friendly riff on the old nature vs. nurture chestnut has even the most circumspect academics brandishing laudatory adjectives with movie-reviewer abandon, a pack of prescient TV producers have been dramatizing the same peer-centered model for almost a decade now. In 1990, the debut of Beverly Hills 90210 marked a fundamental shift in teen programming: the family-centered sitcoms from previous decades, wherein no child's problem was so great that his or her parents couldn't solve it within 22 minutes, gave way to hour-long traumedies in which groups of teens overreacted to and then overanalyzed their so-called strife. The occasional parent could still be found in the new world, but with a greatly diminished role. Mr. and Mrs. Walsh had been downsized into Ralph Malph and Jenny Piccalo, respectively.
In 1994, My So-Called Life made the mistake of featuring the meddlesome, self-absorbed Chase parents on a far too frequent basis. The show was cancelled after just one season. In contrast, the two most successful teen traumedies to follow in 90210's wake honed the parent-free model to even greater perfection than their predecessor. The whole premise of Party of Five is based on adolescent orphanage: After the progenitors of the notoriously thin-skinned Salinger brood succumb to some tragic incidence of emotional hemophilia, the five ultra-sensitive siblings are forced to raise themselves. Last season, when the eldest's fatherly finger-wagging grew a bit too tiresome, the producers sabotaged his authority by saddling him with Hodgkin's disease.
The creators of Dawson's Creek, if slightly less lethal than those of Party of Five, have been just as imaginative in liberating the show's main characters from the fetters of parenthood. Throughout the first season, Jen lived with her doddering grandmother and comatose grandfather; apparently, the producers finally got tired of paying the old guy to sleep and killed him off. Joey's mother is similarly dead, and her father's in jail. Intermittent viewing has left us somewhat unclear on the status of Pacey's parents, but if his penchant for older women is any indication, he's probably momless at the least. And while Dawson actually lives with two supraliminal forebears, he's clearly the adult of the household: Mom's a needy philanderer, and pop's an ineffectual dad-bot played by an actor so alarmingly wooden he probably requires the services of a refinisher rather than a makeup artist before each new episode is shot.
What's interesting about these shows is how they manage to have it both ways. To make themselves (and their associated advertisers) more appealing to teen viewers, they construct idealized realms of parent-free autonomy. But at the same time, these shows are still created by adults. And despite the fact that the generation gap is now all but confined to that fragment of the imagination that lies between Old Navy and Banana Republic, adults are more scared than ever of spree-killing, pot-smoking, Manson-worshipping teens. As a consequence, shows like Party of Five and Dawson's Creek are ultimately exercises in wishful thinking. Their teen heroes are model kids -- articulate, prudent, ambitious, sincere -- who don't really require the parental supervision they lack. From time to time, they might experiment with drunk driving or anxious, unsatisfying sex, but such moral detours inevitably end up tempering their essential good judgment. Indeed, while Dawson's Creek quickly earned a reputation for its sexual preoccupation, two of its main characters are virgins, and one's on sabbatical. In the end, the entire first season of the winsome foursome's exploits contained less casual deflowering, remedial blow job instruction, unpunished inebriation, and quotidian abortion (in the '90s, only God can abort) than the 92-minute '80s classic, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Of course, Fast Times was produced in a less enlightened era. A dearth of TV newsmagazines left the public vulnerably ignorant regarding the dangers of teen carnage, and the connection between Pong and random playground blitzkriegs had yet to be discerned. Today's fictional teens, alas, must serve as the reassuringly docile counterbalances to their real-life brethren -- the pubescent, trash-talking flatbackers who exoticize the Jerry Springer Show, the callow killetantes who round out Dateline NBC and PrimeTime Live. Were Pacey Witter and Claudia Salinger allowed to indulge their hormonal mandates with the reckless, consequence-free abandon of Jeff Spicoli and Stacey Hamilton, who knows what havoc the Kip Kinkels of the world might wreak?
Alas, TV, even in its "peer" mode, seems to have the same impact on teen behavior that Harris suggests parents have: very little. Indeed, even with supermodel role models like Brandon Walsh and Julia Salinger to guide them, kids like Kinkel continue to show not even trace amounts of restraint, compassion, and maturity. In their outbursts, however, they do suggest a contradictory, if not quite so articulate, alternative to Harris' peer-centered perspective: While these adolescent time bombs usually manage to kill at least a few of their schoolyard acquaintances, they almost always make sure to kill Mom and Dad first. And if that's not persuasive testimony in favor of the primary role that parents play in the lives of their children, what is?
