Care & Feeding : Our Daughter Lied to Us & Went To a Pro-Life Rally

[minoanmiss]

I seriously thought she was a feminist.

Dear Care and Feeding,

Yesterday, my 17-year-old daughter, a junior in high school, told us she was going to her boyfriend’s house. It turns out she lied.

I only found out because today, I casually mentioned Roe v. Wade may be overturned, and she replied, “I can’t wait. So many innocent lives will be spared.” We got into an argument in which she ended up confessing her actual whereabouts—she went to a “pro-life” rally with her boyfriend.

We’ve grounded her and taken away her phone for going behind our backs, but she’s showing no remorse. I just can’t believe it. This is the girl who dressed up as Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Halloween when she was 10. She’s heading to law school in a couple years. I seriously thought she was pro-choice and a feminist. I’ve been taking her to rallies and protests since she was a baby. We’ve been educating her about safe sex and consent. We donate to Planned Parenthood every year for Christmas. I’m fine with her disagreeing with us on other topics, but I had an abortion years ago. We live in a conservative state. I don’t want her right to choose to be taken away.

And I’m furious at her for going behind our backs. I’m suspicious of her boyfriend—I know he’s a conservative-leaning Christian and I don’t want to have raised a daughter who votes for whomever her boyfriend does. How do I convince her being pro-life isn’t helping her in the long run?

— Just Trying to Raise a Feminist

Dear Just Trying,

I suppose I should say that sometimes we raise children who have different politics from our own, and if this proves to be more than a phase, you’ll simply have to respect that. Alas, I don’t feel that way; some politics are to be challenged at every turn, and there are even those that should result in one being cut off (in adulthood, of course). Luckily, she’s still in your house and still subject to both your influence and rules. Inundate her with pro-choice content. Require her to read articles and books that explain why it is important for women to have control of their bodies. Remind her that a person can choose for themselves to never have an abortion—or at least intend not to have one—while respecting the rights of others to choose otherwise.

Hopefully, you’ve already had conversations with your daughter about how your family’s politics differ from those of many of your neighbors. It’s time those discussions got more frequent and pointed. Talk about the importance of maintaining one’s own values in a relationship, remind her (as she may have heard otherwise recently) that it isn’t the job of a woman to follow what her man does without regard to her personal thoughts and needs.

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This may be a long and difficult battle. Hopefully, her interest in overturning abortion rights will be short-lived and she’ll move onto another romance. However, young love can be a hell of a drug, and she would hardly be the first girl to acquiesce to some nonsense because of a boy she liked. You need to stay on top of what sort of information she is taking home from this kid and figure out how deep his influence goes.

Don’t allow her to go to with him to any conservative events or any other environment where she’s likely to face some attempts at indoctrination, especially without telling you. You may want to limit the amount of time she spends around his family. Constantly challenge their politics without attacking them as people. Help her to connect the dots between what she (hopefully) feels deep inside and how this boyfriend’s values differ. Resist any urge to just suck it up and allow your daughter to do her own thing politically; you’re fighting for her character, her humanity, and her ability to extend empathy to others. You can’t let this boy win. Good luck to you!

— Jamilah

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Ugh, this is the kind of thing I have nightmares about.

[Rant about conservative Christianity deleted by the posting fairies]

Jamilah is usually better than this. Inundating the kid will cause her to stop listening to her parents, as will obviously turning her romance into some star crossed forbidden thing.

If I were advising LW :

1) Why does LW want daughter to be pro-choice? To agree with her or because recognizing one's own full humanity is better for a young woman (better for everyone but we're talking about a young woman here). I think LW should focus on why being pro-choice is better for her daughter as a person and not on having the same politics as her daughtr. (which is HARD, especially now when pretty much all political opinions are moral and ethical referendums.)

2) I think LW should talk to her daughter about having had an abortion, to make herself an actual person who had an abortion and thus help refute the view her daughter has of women who have abortions as That Mass Of Murderous Sluts Over There. She should explain that she waited till she was ready to have a child and if she hadn't she couldn't've marrried her husband or become the daughter's mother. LeGuin wrote an awesome essay about this, about how having had an abortion allowed her to have her children later when she was ready. She might even gently challenge her daughter: "am I a monster? do you think I enjoyed ending my preganancy? do I like killing babies?" Or not, depending.

3) I would offer LW some hope. When I was 17, coming off a conservative Christian upbringing [further ranting deleted] I was anti-choice. By the time I graduated college I was pro-choice. I grew up a bit, learned that different people's lives are different, read "The only moral abortion is my abortion", and realized I was a full human being who deserved to own myself.

4) if possible point out how Christian Boy is making daughter shrink herself to be acceptable to him (I would bet $10 that he is -- I grew up in that milieu)

5) kids gotta rebel somehow. ahahahahah.

[sciatrix]

What a stunning example of advice that is likely to completely rupture the relationship with this girl and her parents, driving her right into this conservative boyfriend's arms and making it far more difficult for her to backtrack if she decides later on that her boyfriend's values don't align neatly with her own.

I'm just flabbergasted. I'm as pro-freely-available-abortion as the next woman but this is an awful way to practice political praxis as well as terrible parenting: there are much, much better ways to challenge conservative talking points than by reflexively attempting to control and force the daughter into the same values her parents hold.

[melannen]

I know! I was just amazed at how terrible that advice was. Has Jamilah never met a teenager ever??

LW, your daughter doesn't trust you enough to tell you things like this. It could be just that she's a teenager. It could be the boyfriend's influence. It could be because she knew that if she told you, you would react the way you did.

Work on building the kind of trust that will convince her to tell you the things she's learning and doing, and then work on ways to respond to that which make it clear you disagree without making her feel like you're trying to control her. (You do respect women's rights to make their own choices, don't you?) For LW, this probably *doesn't* feel all that different than any other way she might try to assert her independence - except that it works a lot better.

Honestly LW, if there were foolproof advice for how to get teenage girls away from boys who were very bad for them, all of human history would be very, very different. But the advice in this letter will just drive her farther in.

[gingicat]

"...if there were foolproof advice for how to get teenage girls away from boys who were very bad for them, all of human history would be very, very different."

True.

[ashbet]

I am so, so incredibly pro-choice, and this is terrible advice.

I can't think of a better method to drive a rebellious teenager further toward extreme ideology.

(Like, doing SOME of this is good, such as the LW talking about her own abortion and why she thinks it's important that women have the right to choose. But we don't actually *indoctrinate* our kids, we have to expose them to ideas and let them make their own judgment -- forced compliance is not going to be helpful here.)

[movingfinger]

I would advise LW to absolutely not allow her daughter to be alone with this boy, because a surprise baby would not be a surprise, in these circumstances.

The advice is beyond bad. This is teenage rebellion combined with boner feelings, a powerful drug combination. Maybe they can find activities for her that do not expose her to this child.

Jamilah is not the right person for this job. I wish they'd hire minoanmiss instead!

[jadelennox]

Jamilah is not the right person for this job. I wish they'd hire [personal profile] minoanmiss instead!

This.

[minoanmiss]

*blushes* But there's so much I don't know. I seriously don't know how to handle the relationship with Christian Boy such that it's allowed to burn out in due course without giving him the opportunity to baby-trap their daughter OR turning the relationship into a Forbidden Love Affair that has her climbing out of her window 3AM to see him.

[ioplokon]

why is the advice to inundate LW's daughter with literature (which 100% she won't read lmao) vs having a conversation about her changing beliefs - when+why this happened. I think LW needs to take the long view here, explain her beliefs & system and just continually engage her daughter. People generally don't back down when challenged outright, but it's pretty common to get 'hey, I thought about what you said and...'

i think the boyfriend issue is complicated but the answer to not letting yourself be defined by hour partner shouldn't be letting yourself be defined by your parents.

idk when i was a teenager, i was briefly pro-death penalty bc i was mad at the Catholic church. It didn't take too long to self-correct. I'd keep an eye on the relationship & also maybe be aware of if she's being radicalized? but mostly i think just trying to keep her trust and knowing that when shit goes wrong with the bf or she's tired of his nonsense, her family has her back.

[conuly]

This advice is actively bad wtf.

[gingicat]

I asked my local teenagers and they were at a loss regarding what would bring them back if they'd gone that far right.

[minoanmiss]

There's going and then there's going. I suspect that LW's daughter is experiencing a combo of "omg this wise amazing guy showed me a whole new perspective on the world" and "REBELLION" but I think it's unlikely that she's fully thought through all the implications of her new POV,, and some more time to think/breaking up with Christian Boy might give her impetus to reconsider her perspective. But not if her parents make this political position part of her Young Adult Separation From The Family Unit.

(Have I mentioned recently what wonderful senses of justice the kids have? Even when they forget it temporarily in the interest of not doing chores?)

[shanaqui]

Whoa whoa whoa.

I get that the daughter's point of view is discomforting for the parents here. And it sucks to be at odds with the ones we love. But the whole thing with punishing her right when they're disagreeing with her beliefs is going to backfire.

So I guess this'd be how I'd try to rescue this situation:

"Sorry I flew off the handle. This is really emotional for me because this issue is so important and near to my heart. I can see that it is for you too. While we don't agree, and I don't want to spend all the time arguing about it, I do want to tell you a little more about why I believe what I believe. Are you comfortable to sit down and have a chat with me at the weekend about it, when we have plenty of time? I think it's going to make me quite upset, and I want to give us both the time to approach it in a positive way. Let's not talk any more about it until then, OK?

Regarding your grounding and your phone, [this will end at the usual time/you can earn your way out in the usual way], and it's because you went behind our backs to do this. It's always important that we know where you are and that you're safe. I know you're pretty much an adult now and we'd like to trust you to be responsible, but lying about your whereabouts rather than having an adult discussion with us about where you want to go is not a good sign here. It shows that you didn't trust us, and it means we can't trust you. Let's work on that together.

If you want to go to rallies and protests, let's set some ground rules so that we know where you are, and you know you can contact us if you need help. We want you to be safe and that will never change."

If the situation is so volatile that the daughter would argue back too much to get the whole speech out, then perhaps it can be delivered by note? I know that some people place all the importance on face-to-face discussion, but I personally hate it as someone who prefers to choose my words and gets scared of conflict and even uncomfortable with eye contact. It's usually my chosen method of de-escalation in a lot of situations... and it works. I can take a deep breath and back the fuck down when I've overstepped much easier when I can do it calmly on my own. Maybe it should be a thing?

[feldman]

This is such a better tack to take.

[lethe1]

I agree with this advice.

[melannen]

This is great!

[castiron]

Exactly this.

[castiron]

Sundry thoughts:

1. Back in Usenet days, I remember a young woman who posted in feminist groups about how feminism wasn't necessary, women have the same rights as men now, etc. Several years later, I ran across her in another forum after she'd been working in tech for several years. She now identifies as feminist.

2. My parents allowed me to go to a revival at a local conservative church with a boyfriend when I was teen. I'm sure my mom had to clench her jaw to keep from saying no, but since I came out of that revival thinking "if this is Christianity, I want nothing to do with it", I think my parents made the right call. That said, mileage varies. (Also, a week later when the van of the youth group from that church showed up unexpectedly on my doorstep inviting me to join them, Mom said "no". Which was also the right call.)

3. I think a lot about what I'm going to do if my kids grow up to have different political opinions than I have -- after all, my siblings and I don't have identical beliefs; my parents don't agree on every political issue, though over the decades Dad's moved closer to Mom's views; my parents don't agree with all their siblings; Spouse's family runs the gamut. And what I ultimately come down to is, I am willing to maintain a relationship as long as they continue to treat me with respect. I get along great with my sister whose political and religious views are very different from mine, but that's because we've tacitly agreed not to discuss a lot of topics, and because we assume that our differences of opinion are due to our being people of good will who prioritize different values, not due to one of us being ignorant or evil. If we didn't have that baseline of respect, we wouldn't be able to get along. (Though also, none of the opinions we disagree on cross a line for either of us. But I suspect someone who held one of the line-crossing opinions wouldn't be capable of treating me with respect.)

4. If I search-and-replaced this letter and the columnist's response to make it about a LGB* rights rally rather than an anti-abortion rally, I would shake my head and go "yeah, I don't see that advice working". So. Yeah, I don't see that advice working.