Posted on 02/15/2004 7:57:18 AM PST by Cathryn Crawford
We want to protect them, so we pressure Abercrombie & Fitch to shelve its racy catalog with the photographs of nude and seminude young people frolicking alongside text discussing the practicalities of group masturbation, orgies and oral sex.
We want to control them, so we impose zero tolerance regarding what they can wear, say and do at school and we pass increasingly harsh laws to punish them.
We fear them, even when statistics tell us they aren't nearly as bad as what we see in the news.
"We" are adults.
"They" are teens.
How we view them dictates how we treat them.
But is our view realistic?
We can say that American youth have been viewed through narrowed eyes for much of the past century.
What's different today is the heightened fear – not just of the kid next door, but of the kid in the next room. We used to shake our heads or shake a finger. Now we just shake.
"What is scary to me is that grown-ups should be scared of their own children," says Alan Levy, a communications professor at Chapman University in Orange. "In America, we always said our children are better than us, and we want them to have better futures than us. But if we're scared of them, that's another thing."
Are they oversexed, drugged out, violence-prone? Materialistic, lazy and selfish?
Those are the kids we see in the controversial film "Thirteen" and the hit TV show "The O.C."
Those are the kids we read about in the headlines or see on the news.
The everywhere, all-the-time nature of today's news media and pop-culture machine makes it seem as if the kids aren't all right and have little chance of redeeming themselves, say Levy and other researchers.
That misperception bothers both those who study the statistics and those who are the statistics.
In a 1997 Public Agenda survey, 37 percent of Americans polled said they believe today's youth will make the country a better place. A follow-up survey two years later found slight change: a majority said they were disappointed with kids these days, and more people said kids were "failing to learn values such as honesty, respect and responsibility."
More than two-thirds of the adults surveyed in 1999 used the words "irresponsible" and "wild" to describe teens.
Mariela Segura, a high school senior who plans to become a paralegal, doesn't feel teens get a fair shake in fact or fiction. The canned-food drive at her school didn't get a mention in the local news, while "The O.C.," a prime-time soap about the lives of the young and the rich in Newport Beach, emerged as a fall TV-season hit.
Segura is not a fan of "The O.C." or other shows that she believes falsely portray youth and, worse, don't show consequences for bad behavior.
"They assume we're all one way. They make it seem like we're always sneaking out at night, not doing anything good," says Segura, 17.
She belongs to a group called Teens for Truth that encourages young people to remain chaste until they marry.
"Teens are trying to do good," she says. "We don't always make the right choices, but we try."
Levy finds some measure of fairness in "The O.C." because the adults are at least as dysfunctional as the kids.
But the feature film "Thirteen" is another story. Released last year, the movie is a disturbing depiction of a 13-year-old girl's blink-of-an-eye freefall into promiscuity and drug abuse. Its director tried to make the film a wake-up call to parents.
Levy called it "vicious, pernicious, absolutely poisonous."
"I think there was a certain amount of truth in that movie, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it was a cheap shot. It was only the one-dimensional view. That's the most poisonous impact the media has – the one view."
Others say the problem isn't with the film's content, but with how adults perceive it.
"It's not the movie, but the director of the movie and the reviewers of the movie insisting that it is some kind of statement on a generation," says social ecologist Mike Males, who teaches at UC Santa Cruz and is a senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.
"The movie is about several troubled individuals; it's not about an entire generation."
Charles Duckworth II, who acted in "Thirteen," said he initially was shocked at the script. But he believes it presents an honest view of what can – and does – happen to kids these days.
Duckworth, 18, played the part of Javi, the teenage love/sex interest of the film's main character.
"It's sad, but it's realistic. Definitely it has its exaggerations, just like any other media where you have to fit a long story into two hours. To be honest, when I first read the script I was like, wow. Because it was real graphic. People leave the theater moved, in one way or another."
Yet for all the controversy of "Thirteen," Duckworth said, he believes the news does more damage to teens' image.
"It's a worse portrayal in the news than in entertainment. It's almost propaganda that the media shows. It's like negative, negative. It keeps you pretty much in a constant state of fear."
It's a matter of proportion, Duckworth says.
"It might have been a cherry bomb that went off, and they expand it to the size of an atom bomb."
Males – formerly a researcher at UC Irvine, where he wrote a pair of books on the scapegoating of adolescents – returned to Orange County late last year to speak at Chapman University about the disparity he has documented and sees growing larger.
Statistics show that the overall rate of violent youth crime is down, as are teen births, teen drug use and teen smoking.
According to Males' research, Orange County teens are better off than their parents' generation of the 1970s. He says teens today are:
70 percent less likely to commit suicide. 67 percent less likely to die by violent means or drugs.
66 percent less likely to be arrested for a felony.
40 percent less likely to become teen mothers.
Dire predictions to the contrary are irrational, he says.
"Kids today are not worse than they were. Not by any measure we want to apply. I keep thinking that somehow some leadership is going to come along and say it's not nearly as bad. But I don't see that on the horizon."
What he sees instead is a contradiction: Adults suspect kids of doing worse than the very things they try to protect them from.
Recently, individual parents and watchdog groups bore down on clothier Abercrombie & Fitch, upset by the suggestive photos in the store's Christmas Field Guide catalog – a publication that targets the youth market.
When the catalog disappeared from store counters, a spokesman for the company said the $7 catalog was removed to make way for a new perfume. Now the catalog goes for $100 and more on eBay.
"On the one hand, we imagine adolescence to be hypersexual and/or violent. At the same time we condemn fictional portrayals and advertising that makes them look that way," says sociologist Barry Glassner. His 1999 book "The Culture of Fear" gained renewed interest this year after Glassner appeared in Michael Moore's Oscar-winning documentary "Bowling for Columbine."
Tragedies like the 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School – and the dramatization of similar circumstances in the 2003 movie "Elephant" – feed that fear.
"(Teens) are either causing the problems or are helpless victims of the problems. With school shootings, we get to have both caricatures," says Karen Sternheimer, sociology professor at the University of Southern California and author of "It's Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture's Influence on Children."
Sternheimer's book grew out of public discussion over what role video games, cartoons, music, movies and the Internet played in Columbine. She argues that poverty, family violence and education have far greater impact on children's lives.
Even if we don't fear our own kids, we worry about those "other" kids we just know are up to no good. Fear of the future – and of youth as the future – is common in human beings.
In the 1940s, people worried that the first generation of adolescents to be defined as "teenagers" would perform poorly on the battlefield because they'd had so much leisure time, Sternheimer writes. They were considered "layabouts."
Now we salute them collectively as "the Greatest Generation."
It's one thing to consider youths lazy, another to consider them dangerous.
"Many Americans imagine that just about every young American male is a potential mass murderer and every young American female is a potential teenage mother," Glassner says.
Glassner, who also teaches at USC, blames news coverage for demonizing youth.
He cites statistics from a study that looked at one month's worth of newspaper and television news stories on children and found that 4 percent of the coverage explored health and economic issues, while crime and violence accounted for the basis of 40 percent of stories about children in the nation's leading newspapers and 48 percent on the three national network newscasts.
Given the competitive nature of news organizations and the 24-hour news cycle, Glassner doesn't foresee a different attitude anytime soon.
"People are becoming more aware of it and are more skeptical about what they see," he says. "But that alone isn't going to change much."
The teens aren't the problem. The liberal adults who created this environment are.
Problem is, today's teens are clueless about what went wrong, why it went wrong, or how they can get back to normality.
The greatest disappointment of the 20th Century is that the so-called "greatest generation" spawned the absolute worst--until the following one.
The teens aren't the problem. The liberal adults who created this environment are.Yep. With all those problems us late 70s/early 80s teens had, we ended up being among the most conservative generations. Even in our 20s, we voted 2/3 for Reagan. Those who went into the military were instrumental in its renaissance.
The main problem I see seems to be caused by the public schools, which are increasingly teaching collectivization and what-to-think instead of how-to-think. "Self esteem" has replaced self respect, which is based on objective justification. Skills neccesary in a highly structured workplace also seem in short supply, unless they have gone to a private school, attended college, spent time in the military, or had "mean" parents. This wasn't the case even ten years ago, let alone twenty.
-Eric
The kids today laugh at the follies of their parents.
Anyway, The "bad teens" of previous generations did not have the filth, depravity, distractions, and arrested development today's teens do. What was bad then doesn't even make the radar screen today. Elvis Presly was the devil! Now we have Devil music! In 1964, it was I Wanna Hold Your Hand. In 1987, it was I Want Your Sex. What is it now? Can you predict what kind of absolute SHIT your kid will eventually sneak behind your back?
If you went back in time and handed your average parent this article, what would they say? They wouldn't conceive any of this stuff. Think hard and try to tell me how this behavior can get any worse, say, 30 years from now.
How about female (and male!) pre-teen/teen Prostitutes? Dropout gangs who turn suburbia into war zones? 10 million jobless, government-dependent, undeucated, bisexual, drug addicted, violent humanoids? Will we become like the slums of Brazil?
My point is, things are getting worse. Time is running out to save what is left.
Last part is not true at all, The Xers are way better than the Worst Generation (a.k.a. Baby Boomers)
And that's the reason teens today are "Getting Better" and will continue to improve because more and more Gen-X is starting to replace the me,me,me,me baby boomers as being parents of today's teens.
The truth is, Elvis was not the devil incarnate, as it turns out--and all of this filth and stuff going on now will have it's day pass.
About every third generation, people seem to go back to very conservative, moral thinking, and things sort of even up.
There have been some very bad, very decadent seasons in our past, that in some ways were very much worse than what we are seeing today.
Guess I'm an optimist--but that's how I see it. And I still maintain that good parenting will produce good people, in the majority of the cases.
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