PDK International | Phi Delta Kappan: Lewis V78 N5 pp 343-344 Jan 1997

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Lay Off the Kids

By Anne Lewis

This year I have a New Year's resolution to offer to all and sundry: stop the kid-bashing. Last year seemed to be the year of overblown rhetoric for all sorts of people -- politicians, policy makers, the media, social commentators. Taking turns, they dealt the young people of this country one incredibly low blow after another. "Unless something is done," the public heard one candidate assert, "some of today's newborns will become tomorrow's super-predators, merciless criminals capable of committing the most vicious acts." Teen pregnancy, according to the other candidate, "is our most serious social problem." The picture drawn by these statements and many others like them is that of a teenage population drugged, rampantly violent, underachieving, undisciplined, and lying in wait for innocent adults.

The solutions to the "youth problem" were just about as zany as the description of the problem: put them in uniforms; take them off welfare; allow them to go to private schools with public money; put guns back on the streets (that one failed in Congress); keep them from watching what adults watch on television; and, in the current genre of motivational programs for parents, get tough and withhold love, if necessary.

Some of these ideas represent extremes, of course, and more positive solutions were also proposed. Yet the perceptions of youth mirror the ancient uneasiness of adults with teenagers who are beginning to emulate adult behavior but are considered too young to do so with our blessing. In our community-less society, these perceptions build mostly from what the public sees and hears in the media.

Defending young people from scapegoating in no way minimizes the frustrations of teachers trying to cope with unmanageable students. In most of these situations, students, teachers, and parents all need to observe truces and make commitments to change their behavior.

Still, young people won't get a fair shake until some of the myths about this "bad" generation are challenged with facts. Mike Males, whose work has appeared on occasion in these pages, is the author of a book on the subject of scapegoating youth (The Scapegoat Generation, Common Courage Press, 1996). He came prepared with myth-breaking evidence to a recent conference on "Telling the Truth About America's Youth," held at the Wingspread Center in Wisconsin. In a report on the conference, prepared by the publication Youth Today, Males took apart the worst myths about young people.

Myth: violent crime among the young is skyrocketing. According to the FBI, arrests for violent crime among young people climbed 65% between 1980 and 1994, but arrests for violent crime among adults between the ages of 30 and 49 increased 66% during the same period. When poverty is factored out, our young people are no more violent than those in European countries with low levels of youth crime. In 1993, 350,000 juveniles were arrested for violent crimes. In the same year, 370,000 juveniles were officially confirmed as victims of violent or sexual assaults within their own families.
Myth: schools are cauldrons of violence. Between 1992 and 1994, there were 60 murders in school buildings. During the same period, Males reports, between 4,000 and 6,000 children and young people were killed at home by their parents or caretakers.
Myth: teenage birthrates are out of control. Teenage birth rates are identical to those of adults, and poverty is the overriding factor; six of seven teen mothers are poor before they get pregnant. Furthermore, their pregnancies are largely caused by adult males: three-fourths of babies born to teenage mothers were fathered by men over age 19, and about half by men over age 22. Moreover, the most recent national statistics show a decrease in the teenage birthrate.
Myth: among all age groups, teenagers are most at risk of drug abuse. In fact, according to the latest statistics, teenagers are least likely to abuse drugs. The age group from 35 to 44 has the highest rate of drug-related deaths, five times that of 18- to 19-year-olds. ·
Myth: teenagers smoke because of immaturity, peer pressure, and tobacco ads. Young people from homes in which parents smoke are three times more likely to smoke than others.

The message that runs through all these statistics is not that the youth culture is uniquely defective. Instead, it is that the youth culture is heavily influenced by the adult culture. The concept of teenage problems ought to be modified, says Males, because there really is no such thing as "teenage" sex or "teenage" violence, smoking, and drinking. Rather, these behaviors are simply reflections of behaviors indulged in by adults and to some degree condoned by them for their own culture.

Males is very hard on the older generation. Its members have had unprecedented help from vast public investments: public schools, the GI Bill, heavily subsidized public universities, mortgage tax credits, Medicare, and Social Security. But they are now working hard to reduce such benefits for the next generation, and that requires scapegoating, Males argues. Young people have to be seen as unworthy. He also points out in his book that, among 17 industrialized Western nations, the United States has the highest per-capita income and the highest level of child poverty.

Young people don't much like the public portrait of their generation. Jack Calhoun, executive director of the National Crime Prevention Council, also lashes out at the perception of teenagers as "predators." He told an American Youth Policy Forum that his group's surveys of even the poorest, most turned-off kids in the inner cities show emphatically that they want opportunities to make their neighborhoods and lives better. Similarly, a new effort to honor programs for out-of-school youths found that one of their most important components is giving young people a voice. Kids who were troublemakers in school turn out to be very good at sharing management, setting policies, and giving good feedback to adults. When they have strong, committed, caring adults to emulate, they will emulate them.

The interplay between young people and the adults in their lives can be thrown into sharp relief by taking a 20-year perspective on the mood of American youth. Comparing a 1996 survey, sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the Horatio Alger Association, with similar surveys taken in two previous decades reveals that the fears of young people parallel those of adults. In 1973, the major fear of young people was nuclear war; in 1983 it was global conflict. In 1996, the two top fears of young people were crime and a belief that the world will not be a better place for young people than it was for their parents.

Adults, take notice of what's really going on with this "predatory" generation that will replace us in society and support our retirement. When young people were asked to name a personal hero, the most frequent response was "no one."

ANNE C. LEWIS is a national education policy writer living in the Washington, D.C., area (e-mail: aclewis@crosslink.net).