Teenage Wasteland

“Teenage Wasteland” captures the sense of unease of white, middle-class parents in the aftermath of the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. As parents, the Cobles follow a traditional model in which the father only shows up to parent in extreme situations and in which the mother is responsible for childrearing. The form of childrearing Daisy engages in is intensive—she cooks the family meals, oversees Donny’s homework once he begins to struggle, and assumes that her children are in large part the making or breaking of her as a woman. The Cobles have all the pieces of a picture-perfect family life before the advent of feminism—two kids—a boy and a girl—an attentive mother who caters to her family, a husband who is the sole breadwinner, and the money to pay for private-school tuition.

The lives of the Cobles are nevertheless precarious. When the school principal calls the Cobles in to talk about Donny’s struggles, Daisy imagines that the principal sees the Cobles as “[f]ailures—both of them—the kind of people who are always hurrying to catch up, missing the point of things that everyone else grasps at once” (Paragraph 8). Daisy is overweight, wears “knee socks” (Paragraph 8) instead of the requisite pantyhose, and her husband’s suit is threadbare. These details and her worry over the high cost of Donny’s sessions with Cal intimate that the family is just holding on to the trappings of middle-class life.

Successful, presentable children are key markers of having made it in the middle class, and the presumption of parental authority over children is a privilege almost exclusively given to middle-class and affluent parents. That the Cobles are failing as members of the middle class becomes clear once Donny’s troubles at school lead to increasingly intrusive interventions from outsiders in the interior life of the family, starting with the principal, then the psychologist, then Cal, and finally, the police. When Donny disappears for good, and this chain of outside authorities witnesses that disappearance, the Cobles are forced to give up the ability to live out that idealized notion of the American nuclear family.

Like many people during the 1970s, the Cobles—and Daisy in particular—are caught in a moment of uncertainty about how best to manage life, especially family relationships. The 1960s brought with it a willingness to question authority vested in men, institutions like schools, units of social organization such as the family, and society as a whole. The wasteland that exists under Cal’s basketball net is there because parents like the Cobles have not yet figured out by the 1970s whether they want to embrace traditional, rulebound values or if they want to acknowledge these challenges to authority by giving a little more leeway to the young and rebellious like Donny.