In 1990 the emblems of rebellion that once set teenagers apart have grown frayed. Their music now seems more derivative than subversive. The provocative teenage styles of dress that adults assiduously copied no longer automatically inspire emulation. And underneath the plumage, teens seem to be more interested in getting ahead in the world than in clearing up its injustices. According to a 1989 survey of high-school seniors in 40 Wisconsin communities, global concerns, including hunger, poverty and pollution, emerged last on a list of teenage worries. First were personal goals: getting good grades and good jobs. Anything but radical, the majority of teens say they’re happy and eager to get on with their lives.
One reason today’s teens aren’t shaking the earth is that they can no longer marshal the demographic might they once could. Although their sheer numbers are still growing, they are not the illimitably expanding force that teens appeared to be 20 years ago. In 1990 they constitute a smaller percentage of the total population (7 percent, compared with nearly 10 percent in 1970). For another thing, almost as suddenly as they became a highly visible, if unlikely, power in the world, teenagers have reverted to anonymity and the old search for identity. Author Todd Gitlin, a chronicler of the ’60s, believes they have become “Balkanized,” united less by a common culture than by the commodities they own. He says “it’s impossible to point to an overarching teen sensibility.”
But as a generation, today’s teenagers face more adult-strength stresses than their predecessors did–at a time when adults are much less available to help them. With the divorce rate hovering near 50 percent, and 40 to 50 percent of teenagers living in single-parent homes headed mainly by working mothers, teens are more on their own than ever. “My parents let me do anything I want as long as I don’t get into trouble,” writes a 15-year-old high-schooler from Ohio in an essay submitted for this special issue of NEWSWEEK. Sociologists have begun to realize, in fact, that teens are more dependent on grown-ups than was once believed. Studies indicate that they are shaped more by their parents than by their peers, that they adopt their parents’ values and opinions to a greater extent than anyone realized. Adolescent specialists now see real hazards in lumping all teens together; 13-year-olds, for instance, need much more parental guidance than 19-year-olds.
These realizations are emerging just when the world has become a more dangerous place for the young. They have more access than ever to fast cars, fast drugs, easy sex–“a bewildering array of options, many with devastating outcomes,” observes Beatrix Hamburg, director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Studies indicate that while overall drug abuse is down, the use of lethal drugs like crack is up in low-income neighborhoods, and a dangerous new kick called ice is making inroads in white high schools. Drinking and smoking rates remain ominously high. “The use of alcohol appears to be normative,” says Stephen Small, a developmental psychologist at the University of Wisconsin. “By the upper grades, everybody’s doing it.”
Sexual activity is also on the rise. A poll conducted by Small suggests that most teens are regularly having sexual intercourse by the 11th grade. Parents are generally surprised by the data, Small says. “A lot of parents are saying, ‘Not my kids . . .’ They just don’t think it’s happening.” Yet clearly it is: around half a million teenage girls give birth every year, and sexually transmitted diseases continue to be a major problem. Perhaps the only comforting note is that teens who are given AIDS education in schools and clinics are more apt to use condoms–a practice that could scarcely be mentioned a few years ago, let alone surveyed.
One reliable assessment of how stressful life has become for young people in this country is the Index of Social Health for Children and Youth. Authored by social-policy analyst Marc Miringoff of Fordham University at Tarrytown, N.Y., it charts such factors as poverty, drug-abuse and high-school dropout rates. In 1987, the latest year for which statistics are available, the index fell to its lowest point in two decades. Most devastating, according to Miringoff, were the numbers of teenagers living at poverty levels–about 66 percent for single-parent households–and taking their own lives. The record rate of nearly 18 suicides per 100,000 in 1987–a total of 1,901–was double that of 1970. “If you take teens in the ’60s–the “Ozzie and Harriet’ generation–those kids lived on a less complex planet,” says Miringoff. “They could be kids longer.”
The social index is only one of the yardsticks used on kids these days. In fact, this generation of young people is surely one of the most closely watched ever. Social scientists are tracking nearly everything they do or think about, from dating habits (they prefer going out in groups) to extracurricular activities (cheerleading has made a comeback) to general outlook (46 percent think the world is getting worse and 62 percent believe life will be harder for them than it was for their parents). One diligent prober, Reed Larson of the University of Illinois, even equipped his 500 teen subjects with beepers so he could remind them to fill out questionnaires about how they are feeling, what they are doing and who they are with at random moments during the day. Larson, a professor of human development, and psychologist Maryse Richards of Loyola University, have followed this group since grade school. Although the results of the high-school study have not been tabulated yet, the assumption is that young people are experiencing more stress by the time they reach adolescence but develop strategies to cope with it.
Without doubt, any overview of teenage problems is skewed by the experience of the inner cities, where most indicators tilt sharply toward the negative. Especially among the minority poor, teen pregnancies continue to rise, while the institution of marriage has virtually disappeared. According to the National Center for Vital Statistics, 90 percent of black teenage mothers are unmarried at the time of their child’s birth, although about a third eventually marry. Teenage mothers, in turn, add to the annual school-dropout rate, which in some cities reaches as high as 60 percent. Nationwide, the unemployment rate for black teenagers is 40 to 50 percent; in some cities, it has risen to 70 percent. Crack has become a medium of commerce and violence. “The impact of crack is worse in the inner city than anywhere else,” says psychiatrist Robert King, of the Yale Child Study Center. “If you look at the homicide rate among young, black males, it’s frighteringly high. We also see large numbers of young mothers taking crack.”
Those are realities unknown to the majority of white middle-class teenagers. Most of them are managing to get through the adolescent years with relatively few major problems. Parents may describe them as sullen and self-absorbed. They can also be secretive and rude. They hang “Do Not Disturb” signs on their doors, make phone calls from closets and behave churlishly at the dinner table if they can bring themselves to sit there at all. An earlier beeper study by Illinois’s Larson found that in the period between ages 10 and 15, the amount of time young people spend with their families decreases by half. “This is when the bedroom door becomes a significant marker,” he says.
Yet their rebelliousness is usually overstated. “Arguments are generally about whether to take out the garbage or whether to wear a certain hairstyle,” says Bradford Brown, an associate professor of human development at the University of Wisconsin. “These are not earth-shattering issues, though they are quite irritating to parents.” One researcher on a mission to destigmatize teenagers is Northwestern University professor Ken Howard, author of a book, “The Teenage World,” who has just completed a study in Chicago’s Cook County on where kids go for help. The perception, says Howard, is that teenagers are far worse off than they really are. He believes their emotional disturbances are no different from those of adults, and that it is only 20 percent who have most of the serious problems, in any case.
The findings of broad-based studies of teenagers often obscure the differences in their experience. They are, after all, the product of varied ethical and cultural influences. Observing adolescents in 10 communities over the past 10 years, a team of researchers headed by Frances Ianni, of Columbia University’s Teachers College, encountered “considerable diversity.” A key finding, reported Ianni in a 1989 article in Phi Delta Kappan magazine, was that the people in all the localities reflected the ethnic and social-class lifestyles of their parents much more than that of a universal teen culture. The researchers found “far more congruence than conflict” between the views of parents and their teenage children. “We much more frequently hear teenagers preface comments to their peers with “my mom says’ than with any attributions to heroes of the youth culture,” wrote Ianni.
For years, psychologists also tended to overlook the differences between younger and older adolescents, instead grouping them together as if they all had the same needs and desires. Until a decade ago, ideas of teen behavior were heavily influenced by the work of psychologist Erik Erikson, whose own model was based on older adolescents. Erikson, for example, emphasized their need for autonomy–appropriate, perhaps, for an 18- year-old preparing to leave home for college or a job, but hardly for a 13-year-old just beginning to experience the confusions of puberty. The Erikson model nevertheless was taken as an across-the-board prescription to give teenagers independence, something that families, torn by the domestic upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s, granted them almost by forfeit.
In those turbulent years, adolescents turned readily enough to their peers. “When there’s turmoil and social change, teenagers have a tendency to break loose and follow each other more,” says Dr. John Schowalter, president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. “The leadership of adults is somewhat splintered and they’re more on their own–sort of line “Lord of the flies’.”
That period helped plant the belief that adolescents were natural rebels, who sought above all to break free of adult influence. The idea persists to this day. Says Ruby Takanishi, director of the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development: “The society is still permeated by the notion that adolescents are different, that their hormones are raging around and they don’t want to have anything to do with their parents or other adults.” Yet research by Ianni and others suggests the contrary. Ianni points also to studies of so-called invulnerable adolescents–those who develop into stable young adults in spite of coming from troubled homes, or other adversity. “A lot of people have attributed this to some inner resilience,” he says. “But what we’ve seen in practically all cases is some caring adult figure who was a constant in that kid’s life.”
Not that teenagers were always so dependent on adults. Until the mid-19th century, children labored in the fields alongside their parents. But by the time they were 15, they might marry and go out into the world. Industrialization and compulsory education ultimately deprived them of a role in the family work unit, leaving them in a state of suspension between childhood and adulthood.
To teenagers, it has always seemed a useless period of waiting. Approaching physical and sexual maturity, they feel capable of doing many of the things adults do. But they are not treated like adults. Instead they must endure a prolonged childhood that is stretched out even more nowadays by the need to attend college and then possibly graduate school–in order to make one’s way in the world. In the family table of organization, they are mainly in charge of menial chores. Millions of teenagers now have part-time or full-time jobs, but those tend to be in the service industries, where the pay and the work are often equally unrewarding.
If teenagers are to stop feeling irrelevant, they need to feel needed, both by the family and by the larger world. In the ’60s they gained some sense of empowerment from their visibility, their music, their sheer collective noise. They also joined and swelled the ranks of Vietnam War protesters, giving them a feeling of importance that evidently they have not had since. In the foreword to “Student Service,” a book based on a 1985 Carnegie Foundation survey of teenagers’ attitudes toward work and community service, foundation director Ernest Boyer wrote: “Time and time again, students complained that they felt isolated, unconnected to the larger world . . . And this detachment occurs at the very time students are deciding who they are and where they fit.” Fordham’s Miringoff goes so far as to link the rising suicide rate among teens to their feelings of disconnection. He recalls going to the 1963 March on Washington as a teenager, and gaining “a sense of being part of something larger. That idealism, that energy, was a very stabilizing thing.”
Surely there is still room for idealism in the ’90s, even if the causes are considered less glamorous. But despite growing instances of teenagers involving themselves in good works, such as recycling campaigns, tutorial programs or serving meals at shelters for the homeless, no study has yet detected anything like a national groundswell of volunteerism. Instead, according to University of Michigan social psychologist Lloyd Johnston, teens seem to be taking their cues from a culture that, up until quite recently at least, has glorified self-interest and opportunism. “It’s fair to say that young people are more career oriented than before, more concerned about making money and prestige,” says Johnston. “These changes are consistent with the Me Generation and looking for the good life they see on television.”
Some researchers say that, indeed, the only thing uniting teenagers these days are the things they buy and plug into. Rich or poor, all have their Walkmans, their own VCRs and TVs. Yet in some ways, those marvels of communication isolate them even more. Teenagers, says Beatrix Hamburg, are spending “a lot of time alone in their rooms.”
Other forces may be working to isolate them as well. According to Dr. Elena O. Nightingale, author of a Carnegie Council paper on teen rolelessness, a pattern of “age segregation” is shrinking the amount of time adolescents spend with grown-ups. In place of family outings and vacations, for example, entertainment is now more geared toward specific age groups. (The teen-terrorizing “Freddy” flicks and their ilk would be one example.) Even in the sorts of jobs typically available to teenagers, such as fast-food chains, they are usually supervised by people close to their age, rather than by adults, notes Nightingale. “There’s a real need for places for teenagers to go where there’s a modicum of adult involvement,” she says.
Despite the riskier world they face, it would be a mistake to suggest that all adolescents of this generation are feeling more angst than their predecessors. Middle-class teenagers, at least, seem content with their lot on the whole: According to recent studies, 80 percent–the same proportion as 20 years ago–profess satisfaction with their own lives, if not with the state of the world. Many teenagers, nevertheless, evince wistfulness for what they think of as the more heroic times of the ’60s and ’70s–an era, they believe, when teenagers had more say in the world. Playwright Wendy Wasserstein, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Heidi Chronicles” was about coming of age in those years, says she has noticed at least a “stylistic” nostalgia in the appearance of peace-sign earrings and other ’60s artifacts. “I guess that comes from the sense of there having been a unity, a togetherness,” she says. “Today most teens are wondering about what they’re going to do when they grow up. We had more of a sense of liberation, of youth–we weren’t thinking about getting that job at Drexel.” Pop-culture critic Greil Marcus, however, believes it was merely the “self-importance” of the ’60s generation–his own contemporaries-“that has oppressed today’s kids into believing they’ve missed something. There’s something sick about my 18-year-old wanting to see Paul McCartney or the Who. We would never have emulated our parents’ culture.”
But perhaps that’s the point: the teens of the ’90s do emulate the culture of their parents, many of whom are the very teens who once made such an impact on their own parents. These parents no doubt have something very useful to pass on to their children–maybe their lost sense of idealism rather than the preoccupation with going and getting that seems, so far, their main legacy to the young. Mom and Dad have to earn a living and fulfill their own needs–they are not likely to be coming home early. But there must be a time and place for them to give their children the advice, the comfort and, most of all, the feelings of possibility that any new generation needs in order to believe in itself.
They run in packs, live off pizza and fries and shush each other at the cineplex until their moms come to pick them up. FAVORITE BANDS Guns N’ Roses U2 Paula Abdul FAVORITE MOVIES “Pretty Woman” “Nightmare on Elm Street” (Parts 1-5) “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” FAVORITE TV SHOWS MTV “Headbangers Ball” “Married . . . With Children” “America’s Funniest Home Videos” MOST TYPICAL ACTIVITIES Cruising Moussing Air guitar MOST RECENT PURCHASES Dick Tracy T shirt Sassy Magazine Maybelline ShineFree
House Music and Hip Hop are their beat, Malcolm and Michael their main men. The ’60s are hip, the ’90s are “fly.” FAVORITE BANDS Technotronic Soul II Soul Young M.C. FAVORITE MOVIES “House Party” “Lethal Weapon 2” “Another 48 Hrs.” FAVORITE TV SHOWS “Arsenio Hall” “The Simpsons” “In Living Color” MOST TYPICAL ACTIVITIES Line dancing Cold lampin’ Doing the right thing MOST RECENT PURCHASES Suede Fila hightops Cowrie shell jewelry Patchouli oil
Sharp heads, clunky shoes. They’re suckers for anything Euro, prefer java to joints, darkness to light. FAVORITE BANDS Madonna Pet Shop Boys Sinead O’Connor FAVORITE MOVIES “Blue Velvet” “Heathers” “Mystery Train” FAVORITE TV SHOWS “21 Jump Street” “Twin Peaks” “Club MTV” MOST TYPICAL ACTIVITIES Thrift-shopping Drinking coffee Eurailing MOST RECENT PURCHASES Nose ring gustier Crystals
Preppy heirs with healthy hair. Hip’s not happenin’–too busy learning good answering-machine etiquette. FAVORITE BANDS The B-52s Phil Collins Grateful Dead FAVORITE MOVIES “Driving Miss Daisy” “Back to the Future III” “Born on the Fourth of July” FAVORITE TV SHOWS “Doggie Howser, M.D.” “L.A. Law” “Saturday Night Live” MOST TYPICAL ACTIVITIES Volleyball Keggers Princeton (SAT) Review MOST RECENT PURCHASE Gap Pocket T Sony Discman Clinique products
There are still 24 million teens-and a growing number are minorities. Yet, relative to everyone else, they’re losing ground. Minority Teens AS A PERCENT OF TOTAL TEENS Black and other races White 25.7% 74.3% 1985 34.2% 65.8% 2010() () DATA FOR 1990 AND BEYOND IS PROJECTED SOURCES: U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, HIST. STATS. OF U.S.
Drugs, abuse, poverty drive the index down. Adult-strength stress creates a list of problems. Their Shaky Well-Being… …And 10 Top Worries Having good marriage and family life Choosing a career/Finding steady work Doing well in school Being successful in line of work Having strong friendships Paying for college The country going downhill Making a lot of money Finding purpose and meaning in life Contracting AIDS SOURCES: (INDEX) FORDHAM INSTITUTE FOR INNOVATION IN SOCIAL POLICY; (CONCERNS) JOURNAL OF HOME ECONOMICS, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
