Turns Out Kids Need Boundaries. Does Politics Supply It When Parents Don’t?
Apparently, Neo-Nazi groups, Antifa and Islamism give kids a script and sense of direction.
During a tricky spell in my life which I have taken to calling The Mad Year, I had the sense that the normative structure I had inherited from my family — that is, the system of values, standards and beliefs without which none of us can really function — had begun to crumble. This left me in a constant state of uncertainty: I could neither affirm nor deny anything: all options seemed equally valid and invalid. I had somehow become a postmodernist. And the result was inertia. What to do? How to be? Believe me when I say that you can have a mind so open your brain begins to fall out.
I discovered later on that this sort of thing is actually quite common. Your husband leaves home. Your wife starts sleeping with the gardener. Your best friend steals your copy of Mario 64 because you have more stars than he does. We find it discombobulating. In fact there is a idea of trauma called the ‘shattered assumptions’ theory, which claims we are wounded emotionally when we are forced to shed a deeply held belief. I am not so sure that theory is true; but the loss of a belief certainly leaves you feeling off-kilter. According to Christopher Hitchens, some of his Communist comrades clung onto their illusions even after the Soviet empire fell just because they could not bear to lose beliefs that had sustained them and informed so much of their lives. In any case, I bounced back after the Mad Year — still a bit mad, perhaps, but otherwise reasonably normal.
Christopher Hitchens said that some of his comrades clung onto their illusions even after the Soviet empire fell because they could not bear to lose beliefs that had sustained them.
Now, I tell you all this to show you that we need structure. We might not know it, but we all have working beliefs that guide what we do in life. If we do not have those beliefs, or our beliefs are weak, or we are unsure of what we believe, then we are liable to go looking for something in which to believe. And this is why, as various studies in the fields of criminology and sociology bear out, children who grow up in home where is there is no consistency in discipline or authoritative (as opposed to authoritarian; the difference is important) parenting are more likely to end up in gangs. What is fascinating is that, in the name of kindness, well-to-do parents are increasingly shirking the duty of building that normative structure for their kids. And as these kids grow up, they look in the world around them for what they lacked in childhood — namely, a normative structure. Radical movements, rather than gang membership, then supplies it.
This, at any rate, is the view of Myrieme Nadri-Churchill, a psychotherapist and executive director of Parents for Peace, which helps parents rescue their children from extremist groups, from Neo-Nazis to the Taliban. She notes that most of the children drawn to these movements are from ‘nice, liberal families’. As Abigail Shrier writes in Bad Therapy:
In so many liberal American families today, she said, parents disavow their authority, give children endless choices, and constantly solicit kids’ opinions on major life decisions. But the hunger for authority and boundaries is profoundly connected to a child’s sense of self and well-being. It does not dissipate simply because parents fail to supply it.
Most of the children drawn to these radical movements are from ‘nice, liberal families’.
For Nadri-Churchill, extremist groups and ideologies—she cites ‘Neo-Nazi groups, Antifa and even Islamism’—give these kids a ‘script, a sense of direction’, which they desperately need. ‘It’s almost like extremist groups have replaced parenting,’ she adds. Research in developmental psychology, by Erikson (1968) and others, suggests that teenagers, who are at a stage at which identity formation is crucial, are vulnerable to radical ideologies that offer clear, if rather extreme, answers to their identity troubles if the lack of a well-formed normative structure means they cannot crystallise a sense of selfhood.
So there you have it. But is it really that surprising?
