WHAT'S WRONG WITH KIDS TODAY?
The teenage Question

Terrie Schauer

When the son swore Diogenes slapped the father.

Oppression is a big word. Once it has been applied to Afrikaans South Africa or the Sudanese slave-state, we make a travesty of the term if we apply it to a society as democratic, unbiased and peaceful as our own. Indeed, to do so strikes one as mockery. Or does it?

Consider for a moment the social and legal roles of women before the suffragettes. Not only were they denied the right to vote and the right to ownership, but, more importantly, the medical and scientific establishment professed - a view taken up by popular consciousness - that women were hysterical, irrational, over-emotional and, thus, unable to bear the weight of responsibility associated with making their own decisions. As a result, bars, taverns and many social clubs were closed to the female population. Furthermore, social censorship was imposed on women who chose to smoke, drink and/or establish themselves as independent. Wanting a career was unthinkable. Indeed, attempting to seriously enter the political sphere or to hold anything other than a menial or low-level job, resulted in, at best, a severe scoffing at.

Yet this is a well-know story. It shouldn't come as news to anyone who has even the slightest inkling of Western history.

Why rehash it then? Because we seem not to have learned from our mistakes.

In contemporary North American society, there is a group that holds comparable rights and status.

They're on every street corner, in every movie-theater, mall or video-arcade. You probably speak to them whenever you order a burger from a fast-food chain or buy a pair of pants from the GAP or the Levi's store. Graffiti, petty acts of vandalism - you can be pretty sure that they're behind it. When you sit, safe in your home, reading about the latest rash of high school shootings, and wonder why anyone would buy the dirty-mouthed, angry music that gets played on the radio and MTV, or what's wrong with kids today? Stop for a second and think about oppression.

Why is it, for example, that the teenage suicide rate is higher than that of any other segment of the population? Why do violence, drugs and alcoholism affect adolescents more than anyone else?

Rather than cite these statistics as proof of teenagers' incapacity to act responsibly, we should perhaps question what it is that drives them to such lengths. Are teenagers really unable to handle the vices and trials of the adult world, or is the impetus perhaps deeper and more insidious than age-related myopia?

Could the issue's crux in fact be North America's inability to deal with its youth?

I am not suggesting that we eliminate age restrictions or restructure our pedagogical models or do something as radical as offer kids a hand in determining their own futures; no, that'd be going too far. Rather, I propose that we take an honest look at the social conditions that cause teenage disenfranchisement.

The simple fact is this: few avenues exist for young people to gain validation. Outside of academics and athletics, there are only two domains of public life in which adolescents can glean peer as well as adult recognition - consumption and delinquency.

Beyond the clothes they wear and the music they listen to, modern adolescents lack forums for association and self-expression. Today's youth is condemned to an obsessive preoccupation with self-image.

Advertising agents have done their demographic research. As adolescents can only prove their self-worth according to their patterns of consumption, corporations continue to feed their insecurities. For young women, this means problems such as anorexia, bulimia - briefly, the full complement of eating disorders. Young males prove their self-worth by adhering to the consumption patterns prescribed by a host of semi-delinquent sub-cultures.

Furthermore, kids found spending leisure time outside the confines of academic, athletic or consumption-based space are seen as a potential problem. We demonize them as possible criminal elements.

The right to free assembly, where adolescents are concerned, is truly a joke. While coffee shops, when they allow loitering, sports fields and parks, during the day-time, offer some respite, there are still glaring lacunae when it comes to unathletic kids and kids with little disposable income. In these cases, few legitimate activities exist. The sad reality is that there are few channels open for teenage energy besides 'causing trouble', consumerism and image-creation.

European cultural policy has certain limited strategies for combating such problems. In Ireland, for example, or Bavaria, where the drinking age is fourteen, something as simple as allowing young people into bars - in effect giving them the right to assemble - decreases the youth crime-rate.

On this side of the Atlantic, our puritanical governments would argue that allowing youngsters into bars would precipitate alcoholism and rowdiness. Not so. We need only compare the behavior of most American college students with that of the average Bavarian fourteen-year-old. I believe the American establishment would shudder with embarrassment.

But this isn't the point. While giving kids another forum for controlled consumption might alleviate some stresses, it certainly doesn't tackle the problem at its base.

The time has come for the adult community to take responsibility for the emotional repercussions of its interdictions. We cannot continue to blame adolescents for their troubles, least of all when it is our rules which are their direct cause. Taking into account the lack of rights, freedoms and means of self-actualization available to today's youth, is it any wonder that so many kids turn to vandalism and petty theft? Is their aggression really a surprise? What about the host of emotional and psychosomatic problems and disorders? Are these really the fault of adolescent instability, or are they symptoms of a larger issue?

It is time for us to stop asking what's wrong with kids. There is another more pressing question - what's wrong with the way we treat kids today?

THE END

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