Abstract
This article discusses how Danish parents and their children communicate trust. Based on Niklas Luhmann’s sociological theory, the article explores new aspects of communication about alcohol-related rules. The analysis shows how the parents emphasize the importance of communicating trust, while the adolescents, on the other hand, observe the parents’ communication on the basis of their own, more instrumental, logic. Trust becomes a functional solution to the parents’ paradoxical situation, because it enables them to balance between a democratic family ideal, emphasizing the adolescents’ independence, while taking care of risk behavior. The article draws on Danish qualitative data comprising 37 focus group interviews with adolescents (14-16 years of age) and six focus group interviews with parents.
In late modern societies, the process of communication between parents and their children is very important for family relations. The present article offers an unconventional perspective on this communication by applying a sociological approach inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s work to a specific case; Danish adolescent’s alcohol use. Thus, the article analyzes communication between parents and their children about alcohol use and risk, parties and parental rules in relation to these practices. However, the focus of the article is primarily theoretical: to illustrate how the specific Luhmannian concept of trust creates new insights into parent-child communication. Thus, as the analysis will illuminate, the common sense notion of trust as applied by both parents and teenagers differs from Luhmann’s theoretical definition of the concept. But when investigating how parental trust actually comes to work in the parent-child relation, Luhmann’s concept is highly relevant because it enables us to describe the parents’ position and their focus on trust more precisely as a way of reducing the scale and number of issues—or in Luhmann’s terms the level of complexity—which they need to respond to. In the analysis, we will examine how parents communicate their trust to their adolescent children and how adolescents perceive this communication.
Young Danes’ drinking patterns are characterized by intensive alcohol consumption at weekends. Danish adolescents have repeatedly been shown to be at the top of the European list when it comes to early drunkenness debut and drinking towards intoxication (Hibell et al., 2009). A national survey revealed that 31.7% of Danish 16- to 20-year-olds were “binge drinking” (also referred to as heavy episodic drinking: the consumption of five or more units of alcohol on one drinking occasion) within the previous week (National Board of Health, 2011), and among 17- to 19-year-olds, 92% had been drunk at least once in their life (Järvinen, Demant & Østergaard, 2010). While the most recent surveys have documented a small decline (National Institute of Public Health, 2011), this trend is found among young people in other European countries as well, meaning that Danish adolescents are still among the most excessive alcohol consumers in Europe (Kuntsche et al., 2011).
However, high alcohol consumption in Denmark is not solely a youth phenomenon; on the contrary alcohol consumption is widespread in the adult population (only 7.6% abstainers in a national general population survey [National Institute of Public Health, 2008]). Consumption per capita was 12.86L pure alcohol in 2009 which is close to the European Union (EU) average of 12.5L, but entails high rates of heavy episodic drinking (World Health organization [WHO], 2012). Moreover, high levels of alcohol use are perceived as acceptable; 41.9% of respondents in a national general population survey believed that it was “okay” to drink in order to get drunk (National Institute of Public Health, 2008). Further, despite the relatively high levels of consumption, in the same survey 48.3% reported that they perceived their own level of alcohol use as “normal,” and 47% believed it to be “less than others’” (National Institute of Public Health, 2008).
At a policy level, Danish legislation has historically been liberal, with no minimum age for buying alcoholic beverages until 1998, when a legal age of 15 years was introduced. Generally, alcohol in Denmark is readily available, with no restrictions in terms of number of outlets and with late serving hours in bars and clubs (until 5 a.m.). The last decade has, however, brought a number of more stringent legal restrictions on the availability of alcohol. In 2004, the minimum legal age for buying alcohol was raised from 15 to 16 years of age, and in 2010 this was raised to 18 years of age for buying alcoholic beverages stronger than 15.5% vol. However, over the same period, duty on alcohol has been lowered to less than that in the other Nordic countries. Thus, to sum up, early and excessive youth alcohol consumption in Denmark is embedded in a liberal alcohol culture.
As these characteristics of the Danish alcohol culture indicate, the Danish case may be an extreme case (Flyvbjerg, 2006). This makes it particularly useful for pointing up some of the potentially conflicting situations and dilemmas that may arise as children turn into adolescents. This progression from child to adolescent is to be seen in the light of the family conditions in late modern society. Several sociologists—Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck being some of the most prominent—have described the consequences of societal changes for the family unit. They emphasize how increased individualization has contributed to a change in traditional family relations since today’s children can demand—and are considered to have—the right to “a life of their own” (Giddens, 1992; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002).
In Denmark, the late modern family is a democratic unit in which all participants are considered equal, and where trust and negotiation are crucial. Parents cannot make decisions concerning the child without explaining these decisions to the child and ensuring that it also understands the underlying rationale (Giddens, 1992). Furthermore, the family is an arena for self-development, which presupposes a great deal of freedom and self-determination for parents as well as children. This requires that everybody trusts each other. The ideal within the democratic family is to maintain a continuous and friction-free dialogue between parents and children. However, while this democratic ideal is very much in evidence in the present empirical material, the data also suggests that the communication between parents and their children is not as straightforward as the theories emphasize.
To sum up, within the sociology of the family, the democratic ideal is central to understanding how Danish parents communicate with their children. However, this is reflected to a very limited extent within the (mostly epidemiological) body of research on parenting in relation to youth alcohol and/or drug use. Within this research tradition, there has been greater focus on what is effective, for example, in terms of parenting styles and alcohol- or drug-specific socialization (see review by Becoña et al., 2012; see also Abar, Fernandez, & Wood, 2011; Adalbjarnardottir & Hafsteinsson, 2001; Baumrind, 1971; Ennett, Bauman, Vangie, Pemberton, & Hicks, 2001; Foxcroft & Lowe, 1991; Kelly et al., 2011; van der Vorst, Engels, Meeus, Dekovic, & Van Leeuwe, 2005), rather than on family relations and how the communication takes place. A few studies in the alcohol and drugs field, though, have dealt with family communication about alcohol-related risks. For instance, Miller-Day (2002) looked at whether or not adolescents talk to their parents about alcohol and drugs, and which members of the family they talk to. Guilamo-Ramos, Jaccard, Dittus, and Bouris (2006) studied what adolescent assessments of parental reliability, availability, and expertise mean for the outcome and effect of parents’ communication of risk. This is closer to the present perspective in that the study utilized a complex socio-psychological model of communication (described in Jaccard, Dodge, & Dittus, 2002), which also recognizes the role of the social context in a communication process. This was also found in a Norwegian study which described how both children and parents perceive the communication about alcohol rules based on their respective social contexts of friendship networks and parental discussions (Henriksen, 2000). Thus, the social context is not necessarily the same for both sender and receiver. In the following, we will introduce Luhmann’s approach to communication and describe how this conceptualizes these different social contexts.
Luhmann: Social Systems and Communication
Luhmann’s theory is a sociological theory that views reality as composed of systems. Luhmann distinguishes between social systems, psychical systems, and organisms. Social systems, the theory’s focal point, can be further divided into interaction systems, organizational systems, and societal systems. For the purposes of the present article, interaction systems are the most interesting. According to Luhmann (1995, 2000), the family is an interaction system (see also Teitelbaum, 1996). As such, it is unstable, but through various social systems, which are connected to the specific interaction system, stability is created. Luhmann focuses on how systems can communicate with each other, and how systems perceive each other’s communication (Luhmann, 1995). In the following, we introduce the concepts of observation, complexity reduction, and trust, which are all essential for the present analysis. However, it should be emphasized that we do not adopt Luhmann’s entire approach and terminology, since this would mean omitting discussion of, for instance, parents and children as such, but solely of systems. This appears as an unnecessary estrangement considering the analytical interest of the article.
In his concept of observation, Luhmann emphasizes that social systems observe each other and then communicate on the basis of this observation (Luhmann, 1995). In the present analysis, this means that one needs to reject the fundamental assumption that parents and their children necessarily share their “life-world” (Lebenswelt). They do not always find themselves in the same system, but relate to their respective “systems” of peers. It also means that one cannot assume that a system immediately reacts to another system’s communication; rather it needs to observe and “decode” this communication first.
This leads to the second concept: reduction of complexity. It is central to Luhmann’s theory that systems wish to reduce the complexity of their environment to understand it. This can happen in several ways. One way is to observe the world through a “binary code” specific to each system. For example, the political system observes its environment through the code government/opposition, while the legal system observes through the code legal/illegal. The binary code thus works as a mechanism to make other systems’ communication understandable to oneself. Luhmann has described the family as a system that communicates on the basis of “intimacy” (Luhmann in Blom & van Dijk, 1999, p. 207). However, when children enter their teens, this code is called into question, as mentioned earlier. From a social systems perspective, this means that parents and teenagers observe through different codes and thus, as it were, they do not speak the same language.
Finally, we utilize the concept of trust. Trust is a specific way of reducing the complexity of the system’s outside environment. Luhmann’s concept of trust describes the relationship between belief and knowledge among different persons or systems (Luhmann, 1979). According to Luhmann, trust becomes relevant when one does not have firm knowledge of what will happen, but at the same time cannot deal with all possible outcomes. Trust helps to overcome the fact that a system must constantly be open to changes that will affect how it can respond: “By introducing trust, certain possibilities of development can be excluded from consideration. Certain dangers which cannot be removed, but which should not disrupt action, are neutralized” (Luhmann, 1979, p. 25). Thus, trust is based on an inner increase in tolerating uncertainty, which makes it possible to act without having certain knowledge, for instance about one’s children’s whereabouts.
This leads to the specific concept of personal trust. First, personal trust is characterized by the other person’s freedom to act differently. Thus, trust always implicitly entails this risk. Second, personal trust requires that one is dependent upon the actions of others. Thus, Luhmann describes personal trust as a process where the first step is a “risky investment” (Luhmann 1979, p. 24), that is, one trusts the other person without actually being certain that this trust will not be breached. This, however, creates an expectation that the other person will reciprocate the trust and act accordingly. While personal trust presupposes the freedom of the other, it also restricts this freedom, because it demands that he or she acts according to the implicit expectations. Thus, trust can (within limits) be described as a ‘generalization of expectations’ (Luhmann 1979, p. 26).
In relation to the present analysis, the parents, on the one hand, allow their children greater freedom by trusting them, and on the other hand, expect them to refrain from doing certain things in order not to betray this trust, thereby limiting their scope of freedom. Through the analysis it will become clear how this perspective on trust sheds new light on the communication between parents and their adolescent children, and in the discussion, we will return to the question of how the parents’ common sense understanding of trust actually comes into play in more or less the same way as that entailed by Luhmann’s concept.
Method and Data
The data stems from a large research project on youth and alcohol in Denmark and consists of three waves of focus group interviews with adolescents as well as one wave of focus group interviews with parents of (other, i.e. not related) adolescents. The large number of focus groups with adolescents, especially in combination with focus groups with parents in the same study, is rare and makes this study unique. An example of a similar combination is a study on the use of cannabis in Switzerland (Menghrajani, Klause, Dubois-Arber, & Michaud, 2005), where the aim, as in this article, was to try to understand the discrepancy between the perceptions of the adolescents and the parents about use of the substance.
Focus group interviewing is a research method that can be placed between individual interviewing and participant observation, because the moderator (the interviewer) asks questions and presents themes for discussion as well as observing the interaction within the group (Demant, 2012; Morgan, 1997). In this sense, the “what” as well as the “how” is part of the data (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995; Halkier, 2010), but in the present analysis the focus is on the former.
Thirty-seven focus group interviews with adolescents, aged 15 to 17 years, were conducted over a period of three years, first when the adolescents were in the 8th grade (in 2004), the second time 1 year later, when they were in the 9th grade and, in some cases, the third time when they were in the 10th grade/first year of upper secondary education. The schools were selected from both urban and rural areas (one in Copenhagen, two in towns in other parts of Denmark) in order to obtain a wide range of views. All schools were municipal, and while they as such represented a wide range of sociodemographic backgrounds, none were situated in either specific low-income or high-income neighborhoods. Further, none of the participants had ethnic minority backgrounds. The adolescents were contacted in the school classes in 8th grade and then contacted directly the two following years.
Each focus group comprised an average of six participants, sampled either from the school class or from circles of friends, where recruitment was done by the adolescents themselves. Twelve focus groups were gender-mixed, 11 were male and 14 female. In total, 230 adolescents participated in the focus groups over the three years. The interviews were carried out by a moderator and a cointerviewer (of different genders) unless the groups were small; in these cases only one moderator was present. The interviews were moderated in as relaxed a setting as possible in order to enact the character of everyday discussions (Green & Hart, 1998). The interview themes varied slightly from year to year, but generally the focus was on alcohol consumption practices, ways of partying, being drunk, maturity, and parental rules. The interviews lasted between 1 hour 30 minutes and 2 hours, they were video-taped and transcribed fully in anonymous form afterwards.
The focus group interviews with parents consist of six interviews conducted with parents of 9th grade adolescents during the spring of 2006 (see Østergaard, 2008) at schools in urban, suburban, and provincial areas. The schools were not the same as the ones for the focus groups with adolescents, but their characteristics were virtually identical: All schools were municipal and sociodemographically diverse; none from specific low-income or high-income neighborhoods and none of the parents had ethnic minority backgrounds. The parents were recruited via a letter or at parents’ meetings at the schools. The focus groups consisted of an average of six participants, both men and women, who were familiar with each other beforehand, as they were parents of pupils in the same school class or in the same school. Some of the participants were in a relationship (mostly married), while others were single parents or representatives of the family. In total, 37 parents participated in the focus groups.
The interviews were moderated according to four themes: attitudes to adolescent drinking, rules for their own children’s partying, risks associated with alcohol, adolescents’ right to privacy, and the perceived importance of alcohol for Danish adolescents. These interviews lasted between 1 and 1 hour and 30 minutes, they were also video-taped and then transcribed fully in anonymous form afterwards.
In Denmark, there are no institutional boards for the approval of social science studies, but we do not consider the study to be in any way in conflict with the Helsinki Declaration. The Danish Data Protection Agency has approved the study, and all interviewees were informed about the topics of the interview and the purpose of the study prior to participation. Further, all participants were informed of the possibility to interrupt the interview, should they no longer wish to take part.
As a first analytical step, the transcripts of the focus group interviews with the adolescents were coded with NVivo 2.0 (2002) according to three predefined general categories: adolescents’ reflections on parental rules, adolescents’ strategies concerning parental rules, and finally adolescents’ observations and descriptions of parental attitudes, developed from Luhmann’s concepts about binary communication codes (trust—rules). Within each theoretical code, a range of “open codes” (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p. 61) were created, based on the wealth of the material (Saldaña 2009). For the transcripts of the focus group interviews with parents, reverse themes were applied; however, owing to their smaller size, that material was coded without a software program. Subsequently, the passages in both general and open codes were analyzed according to Luhmann’s concepts of communication and trust.
Results
In the analysis, we first examine what the parents consider most important in their communication with and relation to their children. This is followed by an analysis of the adolescents’ perception of the parents’ communication and their reaction to it. This part of the analysis is divided into three subsections, focusing on (a) trust as a strategic tool, (b) trust and presentation of self, and (c) managing knowledge.
Trust as the Parents’ Strategy
By viewing the family as a social system, several aspects that are not apparent when viewing the family as an emotional unit come into focus. On the one hand, the participants in the family are bound together by a commitment to the system. On the other hand, this commitment is ambiguous because it is heavily influenced by choice. The ambiguity is accentuated as the children become adolescents and increasingly need what Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) referred to as a life of their own, which challenges the understanding of the family as a unit. This creates a paradoxical situation, as the next two excerpts from the focus groups interviews with parents show. On the one hand, the parents perceive this process of liberation frustrating, while they on the other hand—as will be discussed later—wish to promote this emotional process of emancipation:
I would probably watch my words a little, because at that age nobody wants to be told any longer that something is just not OK: “Don’t do that,” right? They [the adolescents] have reached an age where they want to emancipate themselves, and you can do very little other than giving them good pieces of advice. So, one has to let go, right?
As Ulla explains, it is no longer considered legitimate to impose strict rules that interfere with the adolescents’ personal freedom. This implies a break with the previous, more hierarchical parent-child relation, and with the almost automatic closeness that was previously experienced with the child. In the quotation, Ulla indicated that it was impossible to “do very little other than giving them good pieces of advice.” In other words, parental scope for action narrows down as the adolescents perceive still fewer actions as legitimate. When the children become adolescents and start distancing themselves from the family system, they begin to decode the parents’ communication using their own code. However, this process of emancipation is also to a great extent promoted by the parents in line with the late-modern family ideals. The following interview excerpt illustrates this:
In my house, I prefer . . . not the control, but that we’re open about it. . . . And that we’ve talked about it. If he [her son] drinks half a bottle of vodka, then it is his own responsibility. Of course I’ll pick him up, if he gets so drunk that he cannot stand on his legs. I know that they [his friends] will call me. I’ve tried it twice, where he has been really, really drunk. And I just feel that I would rather have that we are honest, and he tells me he has been drinking this or so much, and then I can say: “Well it’s your own responsibility, tomorrow there is work, and you must show up for work.”
While the adolescents’ emancipation process in the first quotation was portrayed as though it were driven by the adolescents themselves and as something that “took something away” from the parents, in the quotation above, it appears rather as something that Marianne actively contributed to, because it came with a reward.
The paradox that the emancipation process generates is that the parents wish, on the one hand, to preserve the family as an emotionally close unit, and on the other hand, they try to prepare their child for a society that demands independent and responsible individuals. This is done by accepting, and even encouraging, the adolescents’ emancipation from the family system. This implies that it is not legitimate to set firm rules for one’s children. However, this also leads to the dilemma of how to give one’s children the freedom they are entitled to, and still know how they feel and what they are doing. The parents do, however, have different strategies to handle this dilemma, as the following quotation from a discussion on how to make gentle inquiries about a teenage party shows:
It’s difficult to ask “How are you doing?”, because a direct question like that often elicits a defensive reaction, so sometimes I try to ask very specifically: “Are there any chairs you can sit on?” or “Are there different rooms?” to get a picture of it [the adolescents’ night out] in my head.
We should have a parents’ get-together as a team when the kids go out (everyone laughs)!
There’s no doubt that we could weave a good web around them [their children] by talking more [with other parents], and I also feel that it is somehow a choice not to . . . Because I also believe, again, that it has something to do with trust. If I called you every Sunday to ask you “Well, when did your son come home?” and “Do the stories match?,” well, then we would just be encouraging them to be more creative [in coming up with half-truths and lies].
As the children grow older and, to a lesser extent, involve their parents in their activities, the parents must, as Karen puts it, piece together the stories themselves to get an idea of how and what their children are up to. Although initially this was not satisfactory for the parents in this focus group, it was still their strategy of choice. It is not worth starting to scrutinize and cross-check stories, because it does not lead to more knowledge about the adolescents’ lives, but to “counter strategies” on their part, for example, the “creativity” that Karen mentions. These parents are aware of the fact that the adolescents observe the parental reactions through their own autonomous system and often delimit how much their parents need to know about their lives. The parents, on their part, accept this and trust the adolescents instead of insisting on detailed information.
Thus, trust becomes a strategy for handling both the normative ideal of independent adolescents as well as the risks related to alcohol and the lack of knowledge about what goes on at the teenage parties. This is in line with psychological research on parents’ trust in their children, which shows that knowledge gained by the parents’ questioning and control primarily has a negative effect on the level of trust. On the contrary, knowledge that the parents get when their children voluntarily tell them about their activities enhances the parents’ trust in their children (Kerr & Stattin, 2000; Kerr, Stattin, & Trost, 1999).
Trust becomes the parents’ main strategy for coping with the paradoxical situation in which they find themselves. This is the case in almost all the focus group interviews with parents. However, trust is not just a strategy which the parents pursue to overcome the paradoxical situation in which they find themselves. It is equally central to the parents that this trust is also communicated to their children. The following quotation illustrates this:
I also think that they should trust their parents; they should feel they can call us.
Yes, we have to make it clear to them along the lines of “If you get sick [from too much alcohol], or want to go home at any time, then you just call.”
But that means you have accepted that they drink. Then it’s no good if you say “You are not allowed to drink tonight but if you get sick then . . . ” (everyone laughs).
But we’ve actually heard some stories about girls who were so out of it [drunk] one day in winter that if their friends had not been there, they would have been lying there frozen to death. The point is that the girl says: “But I don’t dare to call my dad, because he gets angry.” So, we are trying to tell to our [children] “It should not come to this! Whatever you have done, don’t hesitate to call.”
Yes, because trust is the most precious thing you can lose, really.
As the interview excerpt shows, it is essential for the parents to communicate to their children that they can trust their parents, regardless of the situation the children might end up in. This is evident in all the focus group interviews with parents. It is also evident that rules are perceived as being in opposition to trust, and that one, as a parent, must choose between the two. Trust is, according to Lillian, “the most precious thing” that parents can lose. This is in line with the previous quotations, which showed trust to be the only legitimate approach.
The quotation also thematizes the question of knowledge mentioned earlier. In the quotation, Knud says that trusting the adolescents equals “accepting that they drink.” Through this unlimited acceptance, the parents cut themselves off from potential feedback. According to Luhmann, feedback is key to building trust, that is, that one can verify whether trust is actually met by a corresponding response in the young person that does not undermine the parents’ trust. Thus, Knud’s statement contradicts Luhmann’s understanding of trust. The parents in this interview excerpt, and in other interviews, emphasize communicating trust to such an extent that the adolescents’ actions are almost irrelevant, because this solves the parental paradox between control and autonomy. As a consequence, trust comes to describe a relation that is not based on an understanding and potential control of actual actions, but on how these actions should be dealt with if they involve risk-taking.
In the following section, we turn to the adolescents’ discussions of the parents’ communication and examine how this communication of trust is observed.
Adolescents’ Observations of Parents’ Communication of Trust
In contrast to rules, trust relies on voluntariness on both sides and can therefore create the impression that no information check is necessary. In the data, a few examples of this mutual trust can be found, for example, in the following quotation from a 9th grade (15-year-old) girl:
The most important thing for me is that my mother trusts me so much that she relies on me; so, I don’t want to ruin that in any way . . . so, this is not so much about rules.
Trust, as Marie describes it, solves the dilemma between control and freedom, and between trust and knowledge, because there is no basic conflict between Marie and her parents. However, such instances are very rare in the Danish material. The dominant pattern is that the adolescents observe their parents’ communication of trust on the basis of their own logic. In the following, we take a closer look at the various ways in which these observations take place.
When trust becomes a strategic tool
The following quotation is from a focus group interview with five 9th grade boys:
It’s also showing them a bit of respect, right; it’s a bit embarrassing to come home while you are still wasted.
It would also be embarrassing if they found out, when they have . . . when they trust you that much, that might change then.
The boys talk about respecting the parents and their trust in their children’s ability to manage their drinking. For these boys, it would be embarrassing to break this trust. Thus, they regard the parents’ communication of trust precisely as trust, that is, as a relationship where they commit themselves to each other, respect each other, and honor agreements—such as how much is acceptable to drink. At the same time, however, they are also aware of the fact that it is an advantage to reciprocate the parents’ trust, because breaking it could lead to less flexible boundaries.
However, it is not certain that the parents’ communication of trust is actually decoded by their children as trust. This is illustrated in the following quotation, where two 10th grade girls discuss their parents’ rules and limits and what they term “the ladder of trust”:
As I have free rein, I go out clubbing, and if I screw up completely—for example, by making my mum pick me up at the disco, because I have puke all over me, or I am really gross and can’t find my jacket and things like that—well, then I just drop a few rungs down that ladder, the ladder of trust. . .
Oh no! The ladder of trust!
Yes, the ladder of trust. Yes! And then the next time, she would say “This time you’re sleeping at home” and stuff like that. But it is not really . . . not really strict rules, but I do have to prove that, well, I can handle this. And if I can, well, then the reins are free. Then I can come home at 4 p.m. the next day, if I want to.
Here, the girls are observing the parents’ communication strategically in order to maximize their own freedom of scope. The trust that parents communicate to their children is translated into a logic whereby one can obtain more or less fixed boundaries, depending on whether one follows the rules set by one’s parents. The girls accept this logic and consider it legitimate, and they therefore try to conform to the limits set by their parents, not out of respect for their parents’ direct demand for trust, as in the previous quotation, but because this means that they can maintain their “free reins.”
The expression the “ladder of trust” is thus the girls’ way of acting strategically toward their parents’ trust; to view it not as trust, but as a way of maintaining control over their children’s whereabouts. Considering the parents’ point of view, however, the ladder of trust actually reveals a concordance between Luhmann’s definition of trust and the parents’ application of the concept in that the parents here actually do perform “reality checks” and withdraw their trust if the recipient is no longer worthy of it (Luhmann, 1979) and vice versa: their trust is strengthened when their adolescents’ have the opportunity to break it but do not do so; in such cases, one moves a step further up the ladder of trust.
The next quotation is from an interview with a group of 8th grade boys. It shows how the adolescents are not always oriented towards the family as a system, but (also) towards their friends:
But do you tell [your parents] when you drink?
No, I don’t . . . perhaps mostly because . . . I don’t really feel like it . . . and I just don’t want to . . .
But, if I were to be the parent here, then I would say that if you don’t tell me, I would never be able to put myself in your situation and make some rules that you feel are reasonable.
But then you are not sure that you are allowed to go. Then I’d rather hope that they don’t find out . . . We want to go, you know. We don’t want a “no.” It’s about having fun!
The boys here are talking about how they fail to tell their parents when they have been drunk, or when they are going to a party, because they do not want to risk getting a “no” from their parents. In this quotation, unlike the previous ones, there is no indication of respect from the adolescents regarding their parents’ situation. Instead, the boys are acting solely on the basis of the code that regulates the friendship system. This system, in contrast to that of the family, is freely chosen and is therefore only based on a desire to participate. As such, this system’s understanding of its environment—including the parents—is shaped by mere perception of whether this environment facilitates or restricts pleasure, or as the boys put it, “it’s about having fun” (see also Demant & Østergaard, 2007; Laghi, Lonigro, Baiocco, & Baumgartner, 2012). Consequently, “fun/not fun” is one of the central codes used by the adolescents in assessing the parents’ communication.
Trust and presentation of self
Luhmann emphasizes how personal trust must be based on a credible presentation of self, and not on generalized or stereotypical actions. In the analysis of the focus group interviews, the parents were reluctant about setting rules for their children’s drinking and party-going. A corresponding resistance to rules was seen among the adolescents – especially the ones with most drinking experience. This is illustrated by the following quotation from a conversation with a group of 10th grade pupils:
I think that my mother has got really tired of me. In the beginning there used to be a lot of rules, like “you’ll be home at 4 am,” and this and that, but she has sort of realized that it actually doesn’t help. So, the rules now are that “you are a loser, if you come home at 7 in the morning, because you can’t do anything the next day and you are the one who suffers.” But it is not like they call me [on the phone]—well, they may call at 6.30 [a.m.] if I’m not home yet, because they think “what the hell has happened” if they wake up. But otherwise, no. We have a rule that I write [a text message] if I’m not sleeping at home. Not that I always write the right place, though.
Even though Lea’s parents set only a few rules for her daughter, Lea considers these as being too many and therefore sometimes evades them. Rules are perceived as something impersonal; something that does not respect the other as a person. The quotation describes how the parents’ rules are bent in relation to Lea’s practice. Although this is only part of how rules work, it is a good example of how parents, as well as adolescents, perceive rules: Rules are unreliable and do not support the relation of trust. Instead, flexible agreements are negotiated from time to time.
In this quotation, Lea appears somewhat surprised that her parents do not worry about her whereabouts, when she is out late—that they do not care to get up to check whether she has gotten home safely, but only call “at 6.30 [a.m.]” if she is not home, when they get up. This can be interpreted as a contradiction between parental commitment and caring on the one hand and giving Lea completely “free reins” on the other, and such a contradiction makes the (few) rules appear to be automatic reflexes. This supports Luhmann’s argument that self-presentations work both ways: If the adolescents are to perceive their parents’ communication of trust as credible, then they expect the parents to have a continuity in their self-presentation without it being standardized. The communication of trust relies on the parents’ ability to master the balance between flexibility regarding the situation and continuity in their self-presentation.
Managing knowledge
As we have seen, knowledge takes on a paradoxical role in relation to trust. In the following we turn to how the adolescents deal with knowledge and how they observe the way in which their parents deal with knowledge about their children’s actions. The quotation below is from a focus group interview with 9th grade girls who discuss how much their parents know about what they usually drink:
They know that you drink, but not that you drink this much for sure.
They think, like: “Ah, you get to bring a Smirnoff Ice [27,5 cl. alcopop], then you are covered.”
Yes, for half an hour!
If they ask how much you drank: “Yeah, the two beers I got.”
No, then you just say “not so much.”
You say “nothing.”
They don’t ask (everyone laughs)
They don’t want to know.
As the quotation shows, the girls withhold part of the truth when they tell their parents about a party. At the same time, however, the parents also seem to be satisfied with the limited knowledge and, according to the adolescents, the parents are not interested in more detailed knowledge. This cuts off the possibilities for checking that the children are really doing what they say they are.
Especially in 8th grade, and to some extent in 9th grade, the adolescents described an intense secretiveness surrounding their party-going and alcohol-drinking activities. However, they also talked about how they experienced, from 8th to 9th grade and especially in 10th grade, a change in the parents’ need for knowledge. Earlier on, the parents were interested in detailed knowledge about how a party had turned out, while later their interest was limited to asking about the general setting; a change that was, to a large extent, perceived as satisfactory for the adolescents.
As described earlier on, the adolescents’ system is based on its own binary code for communication; fun/not fun. This code is not necessarily compatible with the trust that governs the family system, and the adolescents must balance the two systems. This is not always easy or necessarily satisfactory for the adolescents as the following passage from an interview with a group of 9th grade girls shows:
Yes, I’m allowed to go to parties and things like that, but the thing about drinking, they [the parents] are not so happy with that somehow. But I do it anyway and I feel a bit like, I’m a little sad sometimes that I have to, or not that I have to, but that I don’t tell the truth and stuff like that. I would really like . . . my parents to know what’s going on, in case something happened.
Had Karina told her parents what she was doing, this would have been an expression of trust. But, Karina is clearly afraid of losing her opportunities to party by doing so. When she chooses not to disclose the information, although she is not comfortable with hiding it, it is simply to ensure that the parents maintain their trust in her, even if she does not reciprocate this through her actions.
Discussion
The limited scientific focus on communication processes about alcohol has created a view of young people that relates first and foremost to their consumption patterns (e.g., Highet, 2005), often in connection with politics (local or national) and rules (family or school) associated with their consumption. Previous research has shown how rules on alcohol limits and the time of coming home at night influence drinking among adolescents (Järvinen & Østergaard, 2009; Koning, Engels, Verdurmen, & Vollebergh, 2010; van den Eijnden, van de Mheen, Vet, & Vermulst, 2011). Further, research has revealed how parental rules, even in societal contexts in which parents are initially positive toward setting rules, are complex and frequently inconsistent (Friese, Grube, Moore, & Jennings, 2012). We believe that it is important to consider how the communication process within the family takes place and how it is perceived by adolescents, when studying youth, parents, and alcohol. Thus, this article has, with concepts derived from Niklas Luhmann, described the communication process as the parents intend it and the adolescents perceive it and how both of them reflect on and relate to it.
In Luhmann’s view, communication is more than an empathic relation between the family’s participants. Instead, the theory is based on the bold, epistemological assumption that the relationship between children and parents is not necessarily founded in shared “life-worlds” or mutual communication. Thus, the theory emphasizes how both parents and adolescents perceive communication in terms of the social context they are part of, for example together with friends or within the family. By applying this perspective, the analysis is able to draw attention to other—equally important—aspects of parent-child communication and relations than analyses based on, for example, a social capital approach, because this conceptualization of trust can shed light on the situations in which the social network is not activated, that is, when parents refrain from checking their children’s whereabouts with other parents.
The Danish parents in the present study were fairly dismissive of stringent rules on alcohol. Stringency was considered as being in opposition to a democratic relationship within the family. To understand this position, the Danish context, both in terms of Denmark’s liberal alcohol culture and in terms of the prevailing ideal for the democratic family, needs to be taken into consideration. Firm rules on alcohol appear to hold no legitimacy among most Danish adolescents, because rules are incompatible with democratic family relations. The adolescents therefore negotiate their own agreements—often with reference to the parents’ own alcohol practices, both now and in their youth. However, the parents’ choice to trust their adolescents should not only be interpreted as the “second best solution”; as a way of making a virtue of necessity as they realize their lack of parental authority. On the contrary, (most of) the parents question the legitimacy of rules no less than their children. In their view, rules oppose the development of the independent, young adult and therefore need to be replaced by trust. Thus, the parents’ critical stance toward rules is based upon a more long-term perspective or project (Marshall et al., 2011) aiming at educating their children to be able to handle their own choices. The present case has described some paradoxical logics of enabling adolescent children to handle complex self-management issues in a potentially risky arena such as alcohol use. As such, this case should rather be perceived as an insight into the parents’ difficult and paradoxical situation, more than as an example of a lenient parenting style.
When analyzing the parental definition of trust in terms of Luhmann’s theory, we find differences as well as similarities. Even though the analysis showed a few examples of situations in which the parents did run checks that their children were actually doing what they said they were, the general trend in the data was a lack of such checks and thereby a lack of information on the parental side. This pattern does not square fully with Luhmann’s definition of the concept, since trust is based precisely on the expectation that the other system acts credibly; an expectation that is rooted in the small bits of concrete information one receives. However, this does not necessarily mean that the parents do not have anything on which to base their trust. Quite the contrary, instead of basing their trust on specific knowledge, they base it on their prior knowledge of and familiarity with their children—their “generalized expectations.” This is the specific advantage of the family system, but also its limitation, as the children often respond to the offered trust on the basis of their own interaction system(s) (their circle of friends).
The parents’ application of trust still functions in the same way as Luhmann’s theory describes, namely as a mechanism for reducing complexity. Had they obtained detailed knowledge about their children’s whereabouts and party-going, they would have had to relate to and potentially act on this knowledge. In having no certain knowledge, but trust, they reduce the amount of situations they have to deal with. The specific use of trust that was found in the analysis is consequently still a functional solution. As such, trust enables the parents to deal with—and neutralize—certain dangers which cannot be removed within a family based on a democratic ideal. The parents’ use of trust and lack of rules might conceivably in other, non-Danish, contexts appear morally questionable or impotent. But Luhmann’s perspective makes it possible to illuminate how the actual use of trust by the parents is a way to solve a problem of accommodating the adolescents’ significant social relations with their friends, the ambition of accepting them as taking part in the family’s (democratic) decisions and at the same time caring for their wellbeing and risk behavior. These findings do, however, call for a discussion of this complicated position in which especially the parents find themselves. It is central to target this situation in future alcohol abuse prevention efforts.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors would like to thank the Rockwool Foundation in Denmark for supporting this study.