THE SOPRANOS AND SICILIAN YOUNG PEOPLE

We finished the last episode of a mega marathon Sopranos viewing. It took us quite awhile, and made for some great entertainment on cold evenings, but we have seen all of the last 4 and ½ years in order. This particular episode involved the problems with A.J. and his parents, neither of whom can do a thing with him. His constant backtalk and disrespect, his lack of regard for consequences and easy lying and scholastic laziness, all look as familiar to me as they would look to most US parents. Of course people who have never experienced personally raising adolescents have seen this behavior in others in America nowadays. But also in the episode we just watched, A.J. is determined to show his parents how much they are out of his life and how much of a pain it is to even be in the same room with him. Carmela cannot get over the hurt of being excluded so totally from her beloved children’s lives.
But I got to thinking about this. I have thought before when seeing this type of thing-you just don’t see this behavior in Sicilian young people. You see plenty of bratty and disrespectful small children. But you never see outward rebellion or disrespectfulness such as obvious looks of disgust when a parent talks or enters a room. Older children accompany parents to relatives’ houses, help parents into the car, wash dishes without being told, and keep their rooms clean. They call their parents daily on their cells, they seem to share their secrets and they respect curfews. In fact, they seem to willingly spend time with their parents! Even adolescent kids spend long hours sitting at table with relatives until they are excused. It is the accepted thing for children to stay in their parents’ lives for all their lives.
No, there is no outward evidence of any of that constant “testing” of parents’ will, nor efforts to break the ties with their parents, that striving for independence that our modern American kids all seem to go through to one extent or another. It could be all for show, but then why such a taboo on showing the struggle that spills out into so much of everyday American life? And I wondered anew what it is about this society that produces this closeness between parents and siblings, especially mothers and their children.
First off is that most Sicilian kids are in no way independent. What you do see often is a post adolescent group that appears, well, lazy, compared to U.S, standards and not all that serious. This “laziness” is evidenced by the fact that many people in their 20’s take twice the amount of time to graduate from college than US kids do. Many have no job by the age of 25 or 30, sleep late everyday, dress up in the latest (expensive) styles to go out and stay out with friends (equally jobless) till all hours of the night. They are in relationships but will not marry until they are financially stable. Often this stability occurs when the parents can afford to set them up. Marriage in the 30’s is more common than marriage in the 20’s. It all seems (to a foreigner) like a fearfulness to take chances in life, a hesitation to make decisions that could be wrong.
Among college graduates, there is also a lack of hope for a job in a chosen career as well as a certain amount of fear of taking chances in life in general. There just are no jobs here in Sicily. Many twenty and thirty year olds settle for the idea of lifelong dependency and by US standards, they waste time in careers they are not suited for. For when they do work, many settle for jobs backed by their parents’ own businesses or through parental effort. They live in the comfort of the family home, financed by the bank of mom and dad in a room they have slept in since childhood. Those who want to work in a particular field are forced to leave their homes and move out of Sicily to find jobs, often to the north or to other more industrialized countries of Europe.
But a big percentage stay put and wait for a job to develop while living at home. No one cooks pasta as well as mom nor washes and irons their clothes just right! The trade-off for this dependence is good behavior, a restraint toward manifesting the impatience that youth feels for adults. Individual freedom and responsibility that our American kids all develop (eventually) is just not as important as this security. A popular T.V. satire show, Striscia La Notizia, consistently refers to this lack of independence and responsibility with the slogan “Sono Ragazzi!” (“They’re just kids!”). The big joke is that they are referring to 30 year-olds that in any other society would have been out on their own for many years.