The rise and fall of the american teenager pdf

/ THE RISE AND FALL

-OFTHE-

AMERICAN TEENAGER

Thomas Hine >, ,

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The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

Hine, Thomas The rise and £111 of the American teenager I Thomas Hine.-lst ed.

p. em. ISBN 0-380-97358-8

1. Teenagers-United States. 2. Adolescence-United States. L Title. HQ796.H493 1999 99-24381 305.235'0973-dc21 CIP

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ONE

The Teenage Mystique

America created the teenager in its own image-brash, unfinished, ebul-

lient, idealistic, crude, energetic, ~nnocent, greedy, changing in all sorts

of unsettling ways. A messy. sometimes loutish character who is nonethe- less capable of performing heroically when necessary, the teenager em- bodies endless potential not yet hobbled by the defeats and compromises of life. The American teenager is the noble savage in blue jeans, the future in your face.

Teenagers occupy a special place in the society. They afe envied and sold to, studied and deplored. They are expected to break some rules,

but there are other restrictions that apply only to them. They' are at a

golden moment in life-and not to be trusted. Ours is a culture that is perpetually adolescent: always becoming but

never mature, incessantly losing its none-too-evident innocence. We

don't want to admit that we're grown, mature and responsible. We ad-

mire people like Ronald Reagan, James Stewart, or David Letterman,

who maintain a charmingly awkward, fresh-faced teenage style into mid- dle age and beyond. We like fresmnan legislators and suspect the experi-

ence of professional politicians.

We are besotted with youth-it's nature's Viagra. Teenagers are filled

The Teenage Mystique 11

with new powers and the ability to use them. We respond with wonder, envy-and alarm. We know we can't keep up with these kids. We wonder if they will be able to keep their energies under control. We worry that they will run roughshod over everything that's worthwhile.

What was new about the idea of the teenager at the time the word first appeared during World War II was the assumption that all young people, regardless of their class, location, or ethnicity, should have essen- tially the same experience, spent with people exactly their age, in an environment defined by high school and pop culture. The teen years have become defmed not as an interlude but rather as something central to life, a period of preparation and self-definition, a period of indulgence and unfocused energy. From the start, it has embodied extreme ambiva- lence about the people it described. Teenagers embrace the latest dances and the latest fashions. Adults fear that teenagers will go totally out of control. The teenage years have been defined as, at once, the best and freest of life and a time of near madness and despair.

Our beliefS about teenagers are deeply contradictory: They should be free to become themselves. They need many years of training and study. They kuow more about the future than adults do. They know hardly anything at all. They ought to know the value of a dollar. They should be protected from the world of work. They are frail, vulnerable creatures. They are children. They are sex fiends. They are the death of culture. They are the hope of us all.

We love the idea of youth, but are prone to panic about the young. The very qualities that adults find exciting and attractive about teenagers are entangled with those we find territying. Their energy threatens anar- chy. Their physical beauty and budding sexuality menaces moral stan- dards. Their assertion of physical and intellectual power makes their parents at once proud and painfully aware of their own mortality.

These qualities-the things we love, fear, and think we know about the basic nature ofyoung people-constitute a teenage mystique: a seduc- tive but damaging way of understanding young people. This mystique encourages adults to see teenagers (and young people to see themselves) not as' individuals but as potential problems. Such a pessimistic view of the young can easily lead adults to feel that they are powerless to help young people make better lives for themselves. Thus, the teenage mys- tique can serve as an excuse for elders to neglect the coming generation and, ultimately, to see their worst fears realized.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, America can anticipate

12 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER

the largest generation of teenagers in its history. one even larger than

the baby boomer generation that entered its teens fouf decades ago. Some see these young people as barbarians at the gates, and others look forward

greedily to large numbers of new consumers. But all seem to agree that having so many teenagers around will mean something important for the country. That's why this is a crucial moment to question the teenage mystique and look for more useful ways to think about the young.

I'm going to begin with a horror story. one that is not at all typical of young people's experience today. It does, however, illustrate how the teenage mystique provokes us to draw spurious generalizations from a singular abhorrent act and how it can lead to strange and destructive fonns of denial.

On the night of June 6, 1997, an eighteen-year-old woman from Fork River, New Jersey, gave birth to a six-pound-six-ounce baby boy in the women's rest room of the catering hall where her high school senior prom was taking place. Her son was found dead, tied in a plastic bag in a trash can in the lavatory where he was born. His mother, meanwhile, was dancing, smiling, and to all outward appearances, en- joying what's supposed to be a magical night.

This story excited tremendous public interest, as true horrors do. Always there are questions. How could she not have known that she was pregnant? Didn't her parents, vvith whom she was living, know? And how about her boyfriend of two years, the presumed father? The explanation that she had taken to wearing baggy clothes didn't seem convmcmg.

The bigger, more fundamental question was how she could have done it. She said she believed the baby was bam dead. (Prosecutors felt otherwise, and in the end, she pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter and was sentenced to a fifteen-year jail tenn.) But even a miscarriage spurs more emotion than this young woman displayed. According to one account, she touched up her makeup at the bathroom mirror after dis- carding her child, then emerged smiling and animated, mingling with her classmates as if absolutely nothing had happened. When faced with shocking events, people search for reasons and meanings.

In this case, an explanation was close at hand: ,She was a contempo- rary teenager, a member of a generation that's out of control. "She has come of age," wrote columnist George Will in the June 15, 1997 issue of the Washingto/l Post, "in a society where condom-dispensing schools

The Teenage Mystique 13

teach sex education in the modem manner, which has been well-de- scribed as 'plumbing for hedonists.''' People magazine used the incident as an occasion to assemble a rogues' gallery of teenagers who have been charged with committing callously violent acts. One of these was another young New Jersey woman in her teens charged, with her then-boyfriend, with killing and disposing of her newborn in a motel Dumpster in Dela- ware. New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman quickly came for- ward with a $1.1 million program to cure what she called a "moral crisis" that led teenagers to kill their infants. She acknowledged that teen pregnancy was actually in decline, but added that she was alarmed at the phenomenon of teenage mothers who believe "the popular attitude that says, 'Anything goes,' including giving birth to a baby and discarding it in the trash."

Governor Whitman's statement demonstrates that the facts have far less power than what people believe is true. And what we seem to believe is that today's teenagers are uniquely threatening. One distin- guished criminologist has described a breed of lawless, heavily armed, and rutWess "teenage superpredators." There's no doubt that such people exist, particularly in some low-income city districts where drug dealing and other crimes .are just about the only economic activities. But there's a temptation to see all teenagers-with the possible exception of your own children and a few of their friends-as part of this savage horde.

By giving birth to and killing her baby at the senior prom, the young woman provided neighbors and pundits with a very strong temptation to cast what happened as a parable. M?-ny elements of the teenage mys- tique--sexuality, consumption, youth culture, hell-raising-coalesce on prom night.

Compared with most other societies, ours is short of rituals that meaningfully recognize young people's arrival at maturity. The senior prom is one of the few in which young people take an active, even enthusiastic role. It marks the end of high school, the near-universal experience of American youth, in a way that allows young people to be far more expressive than they are, capped and gowned, at graduation ceremonies. Both young people and their elders expect it to be a night to be remembered for the rest of one's life.

For older people, the senior prom conjures up gyms festooned with crepe paper and girls in frilly evening gowns. That sort of prom died most places during the 1970s. What replaced it, after a few promless years in some schools, is very different, though corsages and even cum-

14 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER

merbunds are still involved. The event is held in a hotel ballroom or catering establishment. The girls choose drop-dead sexy dresses that make them appear as adult as possible. Transportation is often by limousine, a practice that began as a concession to parents who knew that their chil- dren drink on prom night, probably because they had. It's an expensive event. A typical prom couple spends about $1,000 all told. The contem- porary prom is not a farewell to school days but a strong assertion of nearly grown-up status, a status that the society at large, doesn't fully accept.

By giving birth at the prom, the young woman violated the old- fashioned meaning of the prom as a celebration of the end of a protected, almost childish mode of existence. But her act also undermined the more recent tendency by young people to use the event as an aggressive asser- tion of maturity. She proved herself physically capable of bearing a child, but not mentally, emotionally, or morally mature enough to handle it. She had, in a word, shown herself to be a teenager.

One element of this story that captured the imagination of those who reflected on it was the music. Not long after the young woman emerged from the women's room, she requested a song from the disc jockey. It was "Unforgiven" by Metallica, a group known for the kind of relentless, pounding sounds that give parents headaches and make them wonder what their children hear in this stuff-:-ar indeed whether they can hear at all. "If she is like millions of other young adults," wrote Will, sounding like countless generations of elders, "she has pumped into her ears thousands of hours of the coarsening lyrics of popular music." Others found significance in the lyrics of the song, which begins: "New blood joins the Earth and quickly he's subdued."

Adults have been deploring the rawness, primitive rhythms, and car- nality of young people's music ever since ragtime first became popular early in the century. It reminds them that their children are becoming openly sexual----::-and that they have some new moves of their own.

In fact, music is more corrunonIy a substitute for action than a provo- cation. Ballroom dancing is stylized seduction, but it most often leads only to another dance. People sing the blues to tell about how miserable they are, and it makes them and tlleir listeners feel better. Marches keep soldiers in line between battles. And heavy-metal fans-when asked how they react to the cacophonous sounds and nihilistic lyrics-tend to reply that the music calms them down. We probably can't blame Metallica. (Besides, the child in its song lives into old age.)

The Teenage Mystique 15

What did make her do it? One neighbor suggested it was the result of indulgent parenting; her mother and father gave her a car, and they even bought the gas for it. Others might blame Satan-or society. I'm reluctant to hazard such explanations, because the last thing I want to do is to seem to be making an excuse for such an evil act. But whatever the cause, the story illustrates the grotesque consequences of the teenage mystique. The young woman was unwilling to admit, even to herself, that her actions had consequence-in this case, a son. Moreover, the teenage mystique enabled those around her to deny the reality of her situation, and it allowed her to deny the gravity of her act. She accepted one of the mystique's key assumptions: What teenagers do doesn't really count.

Most of us treat the teenager as a self-evident phenomenon, an un- avoidable stage of life. Adults fulminate about teenagers, children are encouraged to look forward to being teens, and those who fit the defini- tion seem to accept it, at times reluctantly. Yet the concept of the teen- ager remains arbitrary and confusing.

The word "teenager" tells us only that the person described is older than twelve, younger than twenty. These seven years represent an enor- mous chunk of a person's life, one in which most people experience big physical, emotional, intellectual, and social changes. The word "teenager" actually masks tremendous differences in maturity between different members of the age group, and within individuals as they pass through the teen years.

Defining a person strictly in terms of age feels natural to contempo- rary Americans. Our society's commitment to equality seems to demand objective classifications. We don't trust people in authority to judge whether, for example, this young person is mature enough to drive or to vote, while another one the same age is not. We recognize that such judgments might be correct, but also that they are subject to abuse. Conferring and withholding rights is a serious matter, and age seems to be the most objective standard we can apply.

The trouble with creating a distinct group defined solely by age is that we conjure up phenomena that don't really exist. Is there really an epidemic of teenage pregnancy, or are women in their teens simply participating in a larger societal trend to bear children out of wedlock? Crime, especially drug crime, is a multigenerational industry in which people in their teens are active participants. Is it, then, meaningful to

16 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER

speak of a teenage crime problem? In 1998 Reuters reported on a scien- tific study that purported to show the neurological causes of "teen angst."

What the researchers found was that the "teenage mind" reacts to crises

while using a part of the brain associated with impulsive action, while adults ma~e greater use of the areas associated with rationality and experi- ence. Deep in the story. it was noted that older teens have brain responses close to those of adults. There is, in other words, no such things as "the teenage mind," only developing human minds.

Until the twentieth century, adult expectations aEyoung people were determined not by age but by size. If a fourteen-year-old looked big and strong enough to do a man's work on a farm or in a factory or mine,

most people viewed him as a man. And if a sixteen-year-old was slower to develop and couldn't perform as a man, he wasn't one. For young women, the issue was much the same. To be marriageable was the same as being ready for motherhood, which was determined by physical devel- opment, not age.

Sometimes young people could display learning, skills, or religious inspiration that would force their elders to acknowledge their maturity. The important thing, though, was that the maturity of each young person was judged individually.

Today's teenagers serve a sentence of presumed imnlaturity, regardless of their achievements or abilities. The prodigy has to finish high school. The strapping, well-developed young man shows his prowess not at work but on the football or soccer team. The young woman who is ready to be a mother is told to wait a decade instead.

That doesn't mean that we have given up thinking about ourselves and others in terms of size, only that this mindset coexists uncomfort- ably with our practice of regimented age grouping. Recent studies show that young people who view themselves as more physically de- veloped than their peers are more likely than others to be sexually active, to drink; and to engage in risky behavior. They often cause discipline problems in schools because they are unwilling to accept society's assertion that they are not grown up. They are also more likely to attempt suicide.

Today's young people grow to their full size and reach sexual matu- rity sooner than did members of earlier generations. The mismatch be- tween young people's imposing physical development and their presumed emotional, social, and intellectual immaturity is dramatic. Will these pow- erful young people, who are judged not yet ready to join the adult world,

The Teenage Mystique 17

assert themselves and immediately careen out of control, endangering

themselves and others? This is -a perennial anxiety that's near the heart

of the teenage mystique.

Teenagers spend much of their lives dealing with people who do not know them as individuals, and under the control of institutions that

strive to deal with people uniformly. Once they leave the house, they are at the mercy of a battery of bureaucracies. Chief among these are public high schools, junior high schools, and middle schools, all of which

have become increasingly large and impersonal. Moreover, issues such as insurance liability and fear of sexual harassment charges have weakened

relationships between students and teachers.

When the school day ends, teenagers in public are a suspect class, of

particular interest to local police and the security forces of shopping malls and other private businesses. Teenagers are often expected to be

transgressors, and when they do fail to conform to the frequently

ambiguous rules within which they are expected to live, they can be punished very severely. Institutionally, teenagers are treated as some-

thing less than real people-sometimes resembling children, sometimes

adults. And during the 1990s, it has become politically popular to punish them as both.

In recent years, adults' disapproval of teenagers has grown. In a 1997

survey, 90 percent of adults said that young people are failing to learn such values as honesty, responsibility, and respect, and two thirds agreed

that the next generation will be worse than the last.

The media offer reasons for pessimism. Just about all the news they report about teenagers is bad. (Most news about anything is bad, of

course. Part of the problem may be that "teen" is such a short and

seemingly descriptive word for headline writers. You rarely see a headline

that says FOUR TWENTYSOMETHINGS ARRESTED.) Still, some of the stories are memorable. Young males show up at

school with automatic weapons and mow down students and teachers

who slighted them-or anybody who happens to be around. A teenage male murders a child who came to his door selling candy bars to raise

money for his school. Two teens in a remote hou~e order out for

pizza-because they plan to kill the delivery man. A gang of teens on

their way to play baseball in the park bludgeon a stranger to death with their bats. The litany can go on and on. Teenagers seem to be descending

18 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER

to a level of brutality beyond what many adults can remember, or

even imagine.

"We know we've got about six years to tum this juvenile crime

thing around, or our country is going to be living in chaos," President

William J. Clinton said in 1997, expressing an opinion shared by others across the political spectrum. At the time he made the statement, he

knew that crime by young people had actually been declining for two years, but he responded to public perceptions of a massive increase.

Teenagers' crimes have become deadlier and more spectacular, but

that's largely because of the weapons being used. The switchblades used by the juvenile delinquents who were so menacing during the 19505 were surely lethal, but an individual wasn't able to harm more than one

person at a time. When young people have access to guns, a private

dispute can tum into a massacre. Indeed, many of the most dramatic

recent incidents have happened in mral areas, where school violence is

extremely rare, but firearms are common. A recent national study of

adolescent health identified guns in the home as a measurable risk to

teens' health, along with dmgs, alcohol, cigarettes, and automobiles. In

a 1998 survey, one in six teenagers claimed to cany guns occasionally,

and 6 percent said they take them to school.

Thus, even as serious crimes by teenagers decreased by more than 11

percent between 1994 and 1996, Congress and many state legislatures con-

sidered or enacted legislation requiring people as young as eleven to be tried

and punished as adults for a wide range of crimes. In the November 19,

1995 New York Times, Princeton criminologist John DiIulio provided a justification for toughness when he called the mid-1990s crime lull "the

calm before the storm" and warned of a coming generation full of teenagers who are "fatherless, godless, and jobless." Today's teenagers are a menace,

and tomorrow's are going to be even worse, the argument goes.

Youth crime rates have been declining throughout the 1990s. Still,

as has always been the case, people in their teens-especially males-

commit a lot of crimes. Throughout the 1990s, a bit less than a third of

such serious offenses as murder, rape, larceny, and auto theft were com-

mitted by people in their teens. (In 1979 teens committed about half of such crimes, but that was largely because there were more teenagers

then.) Violent crime for [mancial gain, like athletics, is a young man's

activity, requiring daring, physical confidence, and to ~ome degree, belief

in one's own immortality. Such criminality tends to peak along with

men's physical prowess during their twenties.

The Teenage Mystique 19

Crime is one of the few pursuits in contemporary life that allows young men to reach economic maturity at around the same time as their bodies. Before the invention of the teenager, most young men were making money on their own at fourteen or so, and they weren't consid- ered a breed apart but simply members of the workforce. Crime is one of the few occupations to which youthful entry is not foreclosed.

We are more accustomed to thinking of contemporary teenagers as predators than as victims, but there are good reasons to worry about them. Far more of them are growing up in low-income households than was the case a few decades ago. They spend more time on their own; today's young people are able to be with their parents ten to twelve fewer hours each week than was the case three decades ago.

They are likely to attend schools that are overcrowded, a condition that will worsen because few school districts expanded their secondary schools to accommodate the larger numbers of teenagers they will enroll during the next decade. Many school districts have little choice in the matter, because they are starved for money. Public schools, new taxes, and teenagers are three of the least popular causes in contemporary America, and when you put them all together, it's a political loser.

Even those who aren't poor will have a harder time realizing their ambitions in an economy in which higher education is becoming ever more necessary and ever more expensive. Four years of college are no longer enough to bring substantial financial rewards. The median income for college graduates is equivalent to what high school graduates earned in 1970.

The good news about contemporary teenagers is that they are coping very well despite these challenges. They are, in general, far better off than their parents were at their age. They are healthier than ever, and although their risk of being shot or murdered is higher than it was forty years ago, their risk of dying during their teens is considerably lower. They are less likely to die in automobile accidents, and despite recent upticks in alcohol and drug use, these remain far below the levels of twenty-five years ago. Teenage pregnancies are in decline. So are high school dropout rates. Young people's aspirations for higher education are on the upswing for nearly all racial and ethnic groups, with the significant exception of Hispanics. They express greater optimism about their lives than yonng people of the 19705 and 19805.

It's good to feel hopeful about the prospects for the young and to

20 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER

feel confident that today's and tomorrow's teenagers will turn out all

right. Yet, sometimes this heartfelt desire to see young people tum out well gives rise to a destructive aspect of the teenage mystique. We tend to believe that young people are not fully formed and that there is still time to help them correct any mistakes they have made. This is a gener- ous belief that contains a substantial element of truth. But this optimism becomes distorted when, seeing the teen years as the last chance to perfect troubled young people before they tum into vicious adults, our drive to perfect the young becomes coercive and arbitrary.

The belief that the teenager is an unfinished person helped give rise,

a century ago, to the juvenile justice system. This placed the courts in a quasiparental role toward young people and created separate procedures and punishments-along with a large roster ofoffenses that are considered crimes only if young people commit them. A similar desire to shape the teenager to society's liking also underlay the early twentieth-century movement to make high school, which only a small fraction of young people then attended, into a universal experience. This ambition was achieved during the 1930s.

Although these two institutions are currendy under fire for being ineffective, efforts to perfect teenagers are stronger than ever. Indeed, reforming the behavior of teenagers has become a surrogate for trying to deal with many problems of the society at large.

The weaknesses we see in youth are our own, and we know it. We become angry with teenagers because we want them to grow into health- ier, wealthier, and wiser versions of ourselves. We convince ourselves that by whipping today's young people into line, society will achieve temperate perfection a few decades hence, and we will atone for our own shortcomings.

Teenagers are the target of nearly every effort to cut smoking, alcohol abuse, and illegal drug use. Mter all, the teen years are when most people acquire bad habits they'll have the rest of their lives. Yet, despite laws prohibiting sales of tobacco products to minors, the disappearance of cigarette vending machines, and massive advertising and educational ef- forts, smoking by teenagers increased during the 1990s. One has to won- der whether, by focusing so single-mindedly on teenagers, these laws and exhortations convey the message that smoking is an adult activity-not merely a stupid one. (Smoking is also an effective, low-key way to revolt against health-obsessed baby boomer parents.) Young people have for many years asserted themselves as grown-ups by acquiring adult vices.

The Teenage Mystique 21

We tend also to overlook older age groups in which drug use and

drunken driving is increasing, while we pay very close attention to teen-

agers whose behavior has, in general, been improving. One result of this

attention is a national movement to restrict the driving privileges of the

young by limiting the hours they can legally drive or forbidding them

to carry other young people in their car. Yet even the American Auto-

mobile Association, which supports such restrictions, concedes that the

main problem with teenage drivers is not their age but their inexperience.

There has also been a widespread revival of youth curfews in cities

from Washington to Los Angeles, Phoenix to Detroit, and Dallas to San

Jose. By 1997, 146 of the 200 largest American cities had curfew laws

requiring young people under sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen to be off

the streets after a certain hour. So did many of the large suburban count-

ies that surround the cities. In most places, the curfew is enforced inter-

mittently and selectively. It is a tool that allows police to detain young

people without cause. Meanwhile, evidence that curfews stop crime by

young people is scant. Most crime by juveniles is minor and happens

immediately after school gets out. In San Diego, a group challenging the

city's curfew on constitutional grounds found that-during a period when

the curfew wasn't being enforced-83 percent of youth crime occurred

outside of curfew hours.

No part of the teenage mystique is more alluring and perplexing than

sexuality. Being a teenager is, in some respects, an unnatural act, an

imposition of culture on biology. It means continuing to be a child when

your body is telling you otherwise. Young people nearing the peak of

their physical and sexual powers are expected to delay using them, and

focus these energies on acquiring skills and moral values. Adults, especially

parents, hope that young people will remain innocent of their sexual

power. They are embarrassed to talk with their children about sexuality,

fearing that doing so will only encourage their children to have sex. But

they suspect, correctly in most cases, that teenagers are already exploring

their sexuality.

Teenage sexuality suffuses and confuses the culture. Like a tree in

first bud, the potential adult body seems more attractive than one that is

fully formed. Adults envy teens for their energy, their freshness, their

passion, and they seek to imitate them. There's something crazy about

the way grown-ups try to recapture an evanescent moment. Meanwhile,

22 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER

television, magazines, and ftlms are saturated with seductive imagery of teenage bodies acting out adult fantasies.

That's unsettling to adults and young people alike. The worship of taut young bodies sends a message to-adult women that their own matu- rity is a kind of failure. Ycung people live in an atmosphere in which erotic images of young female and male bodies are being used to sell nearly everything. (And we are only now beginning to realize how often adults' erotic feelings are acted upon with teenagers.)

Contemporary teenagers are sexually active. Among seventh and

eighth graders, about one in six reports having had sexual intercourse, while among ninth through twelfth graders, nearly half report intercourse. Meanwhile, young people are changing their perceptions of various sex- ual acts. Some researchers have found that oral sex is increasingly defined as just another form of "making out," s~ort of real sex, though most parents would not agree.

And although the abstinence education programs offered by many school districts advocate postponing sex until marriage, the shape of con- temporary young people's lives makes that unlikely. Today's teenagers are faced with the prospect of an adolescence that stretches well into their twenties, as graduate and professional education are increasingly required for jobs paying a middle-class salary. Forty years ago, teenage marriage was commonplace; now it's close to unthinkable. It's one thing to tell a fifteen-year-old to save sex for marriage when the event is likely in three years or so, but quite different when the event is a decade or more away. Few are going to wait for those ten years, so they reason, "Why not now?"

Still, even though adults, teens, and children live in a hothouse of adolescent sexual imagery and innuendo, we persist in a belief or a hope that young people can be kept sexually innocent. We cling to a biologi- cally naive belief that if teenagers aren't told anything about sex, the problem will go away.

Parental reticence about sexuality is nothing new. Even Sigmund Freud's son Martin complained that his father was too embarrassed to tell him anything about sex. The sex-drenched character of contemporary commercial culture would seem to demand that schools and other institu- tions that serve teenagers provide information that might put the media's seductiveness in context.

Nevertheless, Congress has passed a law providing extra funding to states that initiate programs encouraging abstinence as the only means of

The Teenage Mystique 23

birth control. Before the 1997 school year began, parent volunteers in one rural North Carolina county gathered to slice three chapters out of the ninth-grade health textbook. The subjects considered included mar- riage and parenting, contraception, and AIDS and sexual behavior. Teachers were instructed to tell students that they should find out about these things at home, probably from parents who are even more squea- mish about sex than Freud was.

There's no evidence that information about contraception-or even distributing condoms in school-gives young people the idea of having sex. The entire culture and their own bodies seem to be doing that quite effectively. Indeed, if there is anyone thing that can make sex dull for teenagers, it is to teach it in high school.

Like sex, money plays a complex, often contradictory role in our thinking about teenagers. Teenagers' buying power is as robust as their sexuality, yet we believe that young people do not and should not play a role in the productive economy. Teenagers are to be protected .from the world of work, whether they want to be or not.

Teenage consumers help drive such leading industries as popular music, movies, snack foods, casual clothing, and footwear. They spend about $100 billion a year, just on things for themselves. Two thirds of this comes from their own earnings, the rest from their parents. In addi- tion, large numbers of people in their teens shop for food for their families and influence purchases whose estimated worth, depending on the assumptions you make, ranges from $40 billion to $100 billion a year. Because their numbers are increasing and their buying habits aren't yet fixed, teenagers are of intense interest to marketers. Their tastes and habits hint at the world of tomorrow. Teen consumers are believed to have the economic power to make a new television network succeed or to enable retailers to make money on the Internet. Indeed, because mar- keters find that people under twenty buy products based on their "aspira- tional" age, usually about five years older than their real age, young Americans become part of the "teenage" market around the age of nine.

Adults may not approve of everything teenagers do with their money, but they are complacent about teenagers' role as consumers. However, the prospect of teenagers earning money, especially a lot of money, trou- bles many adults.

That's because our culture tells us that the "job" of teenagers is not to work for a living, but to go to school and acquire skills that will

24 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER

enable them to be fully productive five or ten years later. Educators and social workers call for teenagers' pay to be kept low so that they won't be tempted to enter the job force and become independent prematurely.

Underpaying young people is, thus, a virtuous act, done for their own

good. We tend to view teenagers as more or less of a leisure class, even

though it's clearly not true. They are to be seen everywhere in the service economy-flipping burgers, working in stores, delivering parcels

as they did a century ago, though now with a fashion-forward attitude.

A recent Gallup poll found that about half of all high school juniors and

seniors work part-time, averaging fifteen hours a week.

Despite the evidence of teenagers in productive positions--and the

existence of entire industries that depend on their labor-we tend to

view their work as inessential, a way for young people to buy the luxuries they demand while learning skills that will be useful later in life. In fact, a study by Tulane University researchers suggests that working teenagers

are more likely to come from relatively affiuent two-parent suburban

households than from poorer, urban, or single-parent households, which isn't too surprising, considering that s'uburbia is where the service jobs

are found.

While having a teenager in the household once gave parents useful labor and even a positive cash flow, contemporary teens are far more

often a financial drain. What never seems to change, however, is the

effort to harness teenagers' productivity while limiting their economic

rewards and the personal independence these could provide.

Young people today seem to be in a world of their own. They go

to school with their age mates. They are with them on the job. They hang out with them and they buy products and seek out entertainment

designed just for them. The existence of this teenage culture, which

seems wholly impervious to adult influence, is one of the most conten-

tious aspects of the teenage mystique. Talcott Parsons, the sociologist who was the first to study contempo-

rary youth culture during the 1940s, concluded that it placed a higher

priority on humanistic values than does the society at large., He observed that while adults are judged on a relatively narrow range of competencies,

being what teens then termed "a swell guy" required a wide range of

physical attributes, atWetic ability, social skills, confidence, and to a lesser

The Teenage Mystique 25

extent, intelligence. In practice it's very demanding to constantly undergo such all-encompassing assessments. And it's extremely inconvenient that it should come at the same time as pimples.

More recently, youth culture has taken on a more sinister aspect. Parents often feel as if their teenage offipring have suddenly become members of an alien tribe whose members pay attention only to one

another. Parents feel their opinions count for nothing, compared with the judgment of the other kids at school. In reply, teenagers often com- plain to interviewers that they have been abandoned by their parents,

who are working hard, divorced, or uninterested in them.

Those on both sides of the generational divide have a point. Some

degree of withdrawal from one's parents is a necessary part of growing up, and parents inevitably find this separation emotionally wrenching.

Likewise, many families have been caught between falling wages and

rising material expectations, forcing longer work hours for parents. Friends help fill the gap.

Nevertheless, young people crave contact with their families. One

of the most important incentives to teenage pregnancy, researchers have found, is that it is a way for the young woman to win individual attention

she wouldn't ordinarily receive from family members.

Indeed, the most powerful positive factor that determines the well- being of young people, according to the 1997 adolescent health study,

is the presence of parents who are engaged in their children's lives and

have high expectations for them. On average, young people spend more

time hanging out with people their own age. Still, just about every study that has been made of young people in their teens shows that they seek

a connection with their parents and are very sensitive to their actions.

The teenage mystique, which encourages parents to treat their young as

if they were some strange and exotic species, plays a big role in creating the youthful anomie and deviant youth culture that adults so fear.

The upcoming generation keeps changing its shape-from tormentor

to victim, from innocent to voluptuary, from consumer to creator, from menace to hope. It's not surprising; teenagers quite literally embody

change. They undergo a series of physical transformations that can be

discontinuous, seemingly unpredictable, and unsettling for the young and

their elders alike. They become walking, back-talking metaphors for the speed and inexorability with which our lives are being transformed.

But of course they are more than metaphors, more than passive

26 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER

receptors and reflectors of social.visions. They are individuals who will learn and create and say "No!" at seemingly inopportune times. They will, like every generation, face the difficult task of making sense of their lives in difficult times.

It's even possible that they will, with OUf help, revise or escape the teenage mystique and invent new and better ways to be young.