Maternity leave to care for teenagers – 03/25/2024 – Vera Iaconelli

In November 2023, an article by Barbara Ellen published in the English newspaper The Guardian discussed the new expression “teen-ternity leave” — something like teenage maternity leave. The term arose from the realization that some women were giving up their careers to return to their homes and ostensibly care for their teenage children. This behavior is obviously associated with women who have the financial means to pause their work. It also does not go unnoticed that this is a break taken by mothers and not by fathers, after all, the gender bias in caring for offspring is known.

The fact that the solution ends with women and is restricted to the wealthy class does not eliminate the need to ask ourselves what is happening to teenagers so that they need a real “recall” of care. Adolescence today refers to the age group for whom social networks were presented as an inseparable part of life. A generation for whom the internet is not a discovery that revolutionized the world, it “is” the world. For them, having a cell phone at hand is equivalent to having electricity, in the absence of which, everything stops.

This is also true for us, but, unlike these children, we still remember a time when it wasn’t like that, which makes us question our dependence. Children trust devices like they trust their own parents who, after all, gave them to them.

The game here is the difference between the “lived” life and the “edited” life. The first has smell, texture, touch, dirt and so on, while the second is based on vision, sound, therefore entirely aseptic and editable. Live relationships have awkward silences, fleeting glances, displacement in space and time to arrive, stay and leave. In the virtual world, there is no way of knowing where the interlocutor is looking — usually at their own reflected image. Time is controlled as everything can be stopped instantly. The bodies do not interfere — they do not hurt each other — nor do they affect each other.

The contemporary lifestyle leaves children without the tools to deal with the external and internal world, which makes the transition to adulthood almost insurmountable. Furthermore, as the subjective constitution only occurs in the relationship between real human beings, it is subjectivity itself that is being compromised. We are talking about a generation whose effects of the indiscriminate use of the internet have already been denounced by countless studies. They range from self-mutilation to suicide, including self-image disorders, depression, and anxiety. The autistic spectrum, for example, is quickly moving towards encompassing all the children —and adults— around us, in a logic that leads to Machado’s short story “The Alienist”: if everyone is the exception, it is urgent to review the rule.

The internet is not a tool loose in time and space, taking its place within the neoliberal regime. The way it is marketed without shame, without filters and without any type of regulation responds solely to the dictates of the market. It falls into the vacuum of authorization from parents, who since the 1980s have been searching for the manual that would teach them how to perform better in their children’s education. She works as a caregiver in times when work takes up everyone’s life and children cannot be left alone. It gives the false impression that the child is learning something, responding to the parents’ current pedagogical furor.

If it’s to go back home and take care of the kids, let it be to ask ourselves what we aspire for our descendants. If the answer is happiness, let’s remember that this is the false promise with which the networks hypnotize us.

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