So's Your Old Man
Teen-agers are notorious
for taking things very personally, for blowing them way out of proportion. But
they could be forgiven for feeling that they were given an unusually tough time
of it during this presidential race. Curfews, V-chips, harsher penalties for
juvenile crime, school uniforms, drug tests to get a driver's license: Both
candidates were, like, really on their case.
The
get-tough-on-teens strategy was only picking up on the mood of the hour. When
the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., the largest "retail and
entertainment complex" in the country, announced a curfew and chaperone policy
for adolescents in September, teen-agers seemed well on their way to becoming
national pariahs. Every Friday and Saturday night, from 6 p.m. on, no teen-ager
under 16 may enter the mall unless accompanied by a parent or adult over
21--this at a place where kids aren't watching TV, aren't driving recklessly,
aren't having sex or committing prosecutable crimes. (Sure, they sometimes
fight, but "let's be clear," a police chief said, "we're talking about
noncriminal conduct by a bunch of snotty-nosed kids.") What they are doing is
hanging out and engaging in that national pastime, spending money on junk.
It is a 20 th -century American habit
to portray adolescents as incipient juvenile delinquents, when not idealizing
them as "the future of our society." But it doesn't take a pollster to see why
alarm has suddenly intensified, as it did in the late 1950s when another bulge
of kids began to hit puberty. (Publicity about urban gang violence aroused a
sense of panic then.) Baby boomers, a generation whose self-conscious identity
was forged in the crucible of adolescence, now have adolescents of their own.
That's not an easy stage to live through, even in the most orderly family or
era. You have to show a big kid--one who may be bigger than you--who is still
boss. And baby-boomer parents are bound to find this phase especially daunting.
After all, as adolescents 25 or 35 years ago, they gave the boss a very hard
time and had a pretty wild time themselves.
Shouldn't parents just
relax, on the grounds that they lived to tell (or not tell) the tale? They
faced far fewer restraints in their teen-age days than teens do now. You could
get a nicotine fix by just opening the door of any decent student lounge in
high school. Between 1970 and 1975, 29 states lowered the legal age for buying
alcoholic beverages. Dress codes were dumped. Drug panic and AIDS fears didn't
crimp youthful fun--and peer pressure couldn't have been stronger to go ahead
and do more than experiment.
But
panic over youth is a natural reflex of middle age, when the oat-sowing past
comes back to haunt one. As a newly affluent "youth market," it was baby
boomers who helped usher in a commercialized popular culture that has become
more powerful and awful than they could have imagined. You don't have to be Bob
Dole or Dan Quayle to believe that virtues such as self-restraint and
discipline are getting harder to sell, and ever more socially desirable.
Adolescent drift and empty hedonism can't be brushed off merely as a phase,
readily outgrown. For some vulnerable teen-agers, these traits can't be
outgrown. Think of all the inner-city girls who have babies, and all the
inner-city boys who are dead.
What is frustrating about the current crusade
to rein in teen-agers, though, is that it seems so, well, adolescent. The
high-decibel concern about wayward youth is full of defensive bluster and
muddle-headed ambivalence, and it is strikingly lacking in realism.
A couple of well-timed new
books about teen-agers usefully criticize the distortions of today's anti-teen
rhetoric, though they also succumb to distortions of their own. Mike Males, the
author of The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents , tends
to be overzealous when he argues that adults attack kids as a way of coping
with their own problems, but he has a point. In a recent Washington Post
op-ed piece surveying the grim drug and crime statistics for youth, he made a
persuasive case that could be summed up as, "So's your mother." Yes, the
violent crime arrest rate among adolescents has increased by 65 percent since
1980, but it has risen by 66 percent among adults between 30 and 50. Yes,
reports suggest that teen-age marijuana use has risen five percentage points
since 1992, but the big news of the 1995 National Household Survey on Drug
Abuse is that people over 35 have the most severe drug problems.
Anecdotal support of Males'
view is easy to find in Sydney Lewis' A Totally Alien Life-Form:
Teenagers , an oral history of contemporary American adolescence. Almost all
of the messed-up kids she interviews have messed-up parents. Jason Hudgins, a
chronic runaway who has done every drug imaginable, been molested, and
assaulted members of his family, grew up with two alcoholic parents who
violently beat him and a mother who was herself battered and raped. Even the
kids who report to Lewis that they're doing OK speak of parents who've been in
real, often long-term trouble: with drugs, alcohol, abusive relationships,
crimes. In the life stories the teen-agers so eagerly share, it's hardly rare
for fathers--or even mothers--to run away.
Both
Lewis and Males go overboard, he by playing loose with statistics that demonize
parents, she by romanticizing teen-agers. Males invokes Department of Justice
findings that show "parents and caretakers inflicted a half-million serious
injuries on children and youths in 1993, quadruple the number reported in
1986." Surely that reflects altered reporting standards, not a seven-year surge
in sadistic adults (just as the implausible Justice Department discovery that
teen-age drug use doubled in one year reflected a radical rewriting of the
survey that year, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out). And where
Males reduces teen-agers to mere victims of adults, Lewis is inclined to make
them all struggling victors in spite of adults. Her interviews routinely end
with hope running high. Even Jason Hudgins gets to soar. "I look in the mirror
and I think to myself: 'Look at the person that you're coming to be.' "
It's a little hard to believe that the Jasons
of the world end up "straightening out," as Lewis titles the section about the
worst-off cases, just as it's hard to buy the extreme view that parents are
hopeless screw-ups. What the current fixation on teen-agers really shows is
that adults are just as confused and ambivalent about their rights and their
responsibilities as their kids tend to be.
They want laws that require
of teens that they behave like obedient children. They want laws that punish
them as full-fledged adults. They want laws that demand of parents that they
act like authority figures. They want laws that punish them as delinquent
babysitters. On the one hand, many of the curfews cracking down on teens also
entail a fine on the parents of youthful curfew-breakers. A spate of explicit
"parental responsibility" laws passed by states and communities over the last
couple of years give judges the power to make parents pay for juvenile
detention or undergo counseling with their kids. Parents can even be threatened
with imprisonment themselves if their teen-agers run amok.
On the other hand, some
states have passed new laws that treat juvenile criminals as responsible
adults. Of the People, a conservative lobbying group, has launched a nationwide
campaign to add a "parental rights amendment" to state constitutions declaring
it "the inalienable right" of parents to "direct and control the upbringing,
education, values and discipline of their children." An initiative to introduce
it is on the ballot in Colorado. The obvious targets of the sweepingly vague
amendment are clinics offering confidential medical services, and schools
providing sex-ed classes and suspicious curricula and books. But presumably the
amendment could also be used against judges who come down hard on lax
parents.
The
contradictions are blithely overlooked, as is any spirit of practicality. Who
actually thinks that having teen-agers line up to pee after they've
demonstrated their parallel parking skills is a reasonable way "to demand
responsible behavior by young people when it comes to drugs," as Clinton
proclaimed? Sixteen-year-olds can drive perfectly on the momentous day they
present themselves at the Motor Vehicles Bureau, and then speed recklessly the
day after. They're also savvy enough to show up for the road test clean (or
with a $19.95 package of drug-free urine in their pockets). Clinton's
vote-getting gimmick is cynical posturing--not what the experts call good
role-modeling behavior.
Erik Erikson once observed that "we who know so
much about the child in the adult know so much less about the fate of the
adolescent in him, whether as a continued source of renewal or as a split-off
younger self alternately idealized and repudiated, revived and 'murdered'--and,
of course, reprojected on the young." Caught up in the backlash against teens,
adults might look in the mirror and think to themselves, "Look at the person
that you're coming to be." The sight of the inner teen-ager acting out ought to
be fairly sobering. (Dick Morris, the man who came up with Clinton's get-tough
agenda--now there's a hormone-driven delinquent for you!) Parents need to deal
with teen-agers' troubles personally--which means, paradoxically, taking them
less personally; this isn't about the collective guilt of grown-ups, but
about the prospects of individual kids. Politicians should also take
teen-agers' troubles seriously. Above all, that means improving education, and
providing lots of extracurricular activities for the adolescents in direst
shape. It doesn't mean blowing the problems out of all proportion.
