I was whisked off to the Cotswolds out of temptation's - and fun's - way, so most of my memories are sitting in traffic on the M I never sauntered down the Kings Road on Saturdays in Fiorucci white jeans or met my mates in Pucci's pizza place, let alone did anything as rebellious as taking drugs.
As for sex? You must be joking. As I had all the sexual charisma and confidence of a dead snake, I left my teenage years as I entered them: a shrinking violet and virgin. She says: I was 13 in I was wearing leggings and Kylie Minogue was the nation's sweetheart. Some things never change. I was an intense, passionate teenager who hated the greed-is-good ethos that had dominated the Eighties.
I admired my glamorous, yuppy auntie, but I knew that I wanted something different, so I welcomed the chilled- out, touchy-feely new decade. For me, this involved carrying a cotton Body Shop tote bag everywhere I went, circulating petitions to end cosmetic testing on animals and becoming a vegetarian.
I was a youth member of Greenpeace and Friends Of The Earth, organisations whose numbers were swelling in the early Nineties as the mainstream "green" movement put out its first shoots. Back then, we talked about the greenhouse effect, not global warming. CFCs in hairspray and deodorant aerosols were the 4x4s of their day, and I begged my family and friends to buy ozone-friendly products. I went to an all-girls' convent school, and my social life consisted of dance, drama and choir practice. I couldn't even talk to a boy without blushing, and I'd certainly never kissed one.
House music was the predominant-youth culture. My mum wouldn't let me go to a rave, but I did buy a yellow smiley face badge from a stall on Romford market. Then I pinned it on the inside of my denim jacket, in case the police saw it and thought I was a drug dealer. The huggy, hippy spirit of the rave scene meant that the tribalism that had pitched Mods against Rockers in the Sixties and punks against hippies later on dissolved in the bubblingly inclusive melting pot that was youth culture in the Nineties.
That's what matters to teenagers: they don't care about recessions and house repossessions - they just want to listen to their favourite bands without getting beaten up. By 16, I was obsessed with indie bands like Nirvana, James and Suede and revelled in the Britpop era, when live music was everywhere and pop stars were sexy, obnoxious and exciting in a way that the Stock, Aitken and Waterman stars who'd soundtracked my early childhood had never quite managed. I wouldn't want to be a teenager today.
I'd certainly have wondered whether my education was worth it. I'd also hate to have been exposed to today's harsh, judgmental body culture while my own figure was still developing. Plastic surgery was something that insane, ageing celebrities did, rather than something we hoped we'd get for our 16th birthdays. I didn't know what a size zero was, and I'd never seen a picture of a celebrity on holiday with her cellulite highlighted.
I'm grateful that I grew up in a decade of such optimism. For me, the Nineties ended in , when I graduated and voted in my first election. I was one of the trusting, optimistic new voters who helped to bring New Labour to power. She says: My friends and I were 15 years old when we clinked plastic champagne glasses into the new millennium. We spent the evening discussing what we should call the new decade. Being a teenager in a time frame often referred to as "The Zilches" or "The Double Zeros" filled you with foreboding, yet was somehow apt.
There were the goth kids, who were at war with skater kids, who picked fights with the preppy kids, and although we were all connected by a communal desire to get drunk on Friday nights, that was about as far as it went. The only conflicts we knew were the self-inflicted or psychological kind that presumably unite teenagers of all generations.
I fell in love for the first time when I was 16 and in the same year found out that my father had cancer, from which he later recovered, but like the rest of my friends I had almost no interest in what was going on outside my direct line of vision. Then the Twin Towers collapsed and our blinkered innocence ended. September 11 succeeding in uniting us around something more culturally profound than designing fake IDs or petitioning to legalise marijuana.
In my school common room, there were always boys watching action movies or playing video games on the TV and when I walked into that room on September 11 I assumed everyone was watching a scene from the latest Tom Cruise flick. My only query was why they looked quite so ashen-faced. It must be a good movie, I thought, before it dawned that this wasn't fiction, or fun, but the end of an era.
Before the Twin Towers crumbled we had the innocent luxury of being so far removed from issues of race that in multi-cultural London it hardly crossed our minds what colour someone's skin was. Suddenly there was more to life than just smoking behind the bike shed or drinking too much vodka on Wimbledon Common. To experience this site in your native language, click below. Meeting together over the past three years, we have engaged in many illuminating discussions about what works effectively with teens and young adults, and what does not.
Our programs have thrived because more than talking we listen to the experts themselves—the youth. Finding out what they want, how they think programs should be designed, and what we can improve upon has been our ongoing focus.
As we embarked upon this project, however, we knew that we needed to consult other experts in the field to substantiate and enhance what we knew from our experience. We reviewed developmental theories, sought to gain a better understanding of the brain, and explored the ways in which supporting youth in the arts could aid in their growth process. All of this was directed toward the goals of 1 developing a framework that could best explain the work we do, and 2 creating tools that could assess the indicators and the outcomes in the framework.
The following section provides a brief review of adolescence as a stage of life and some of the latest findings about the brains of adolescents. Both topics help to elucidate the necessity of addressing the specific needs of youth in our work and the ways in which youth arts development programs are ideally suited to address these needs. Stanley Hall, was credited with discovering adolescence Henig, , p. Because of the influence of Child Labor Laws and universal education, youth had newfound time in their teenage years when the responsibilities of adulthood were not forced upon them as quickly as in the past.
Stanley Hall, He identified three key aspects of this phase: mood disruptions, conflict with parents, and risky behavior. Other work appearing in the late s through the s in Europe and America helped adolescence emerge as a field of study important earlier work by Freud, Piaget, Maslow, and Kohlberg also addressed stages of development. Erikson , pp. Erikson looked at life in eight stages. We felt that our age group of year-olds actually struggled with the following three stages:. Psychosocial Stage 4 — Industry vs.
Inferiority, age Main Question: Am I successful or not? Through social interactions, children begin to develop a sense of pride in their accomplishments and abilities. Psychosocial Stage 5 — Identity vs. From it sometimes came the dreams, the hopes and the soaring aims that charged life henceforward with meaning and [gave] us our poets, artists, scientists. But youth today has abandoned solitude in favor of pack-running, of predatory assembly, of great collectivities that bury, if they do not destroy, individuality.
In the crowd, herd or gang, it is a mass mind that operates—a mind without subtlety, without compassion, uncivilized. The press bears out Dr. Every week—sometimes it seems every day—there are several reports like the following, from the News:.
Two students were attacked by four members of a lower East Side street gang and slashed on the face yesterday as they stood minding their own business on a terrace of Metropolitan Vocational High School. The following conversation took place between Dinkens [a Sportsman] and Brancaleone [one of the victims].
With this, police said, Dinkens swung at Brancaleone, cutting him on the left side of the face with a sharply honed penknife. Another is the Egyptian Dragons, fifteen of whose members were arrested last summer for the murder of Michael Farmer, a fifteen-year-old cripple, at a city swimming pool; of them, eleven were fourteen or younger.
Some of the gangs, as these two indicate, go in for romantic names—the Crusaders, the Corsairs, the Templars, the Golden Wings, the Sand Street Angels, and, barely squeaking in under the rope, the Astoria Gents. There is even a bunch that calls itself the Villains. Two of the largest and most dangerous of the gangs are named, for reasons now lost in the mists of history, the Bishops and the Chaplains, while another is even more mysteriously named the Jonquils.
The police estimate that there are about a hundred and twenty such wolf packs in the city, with a total membership of eight thousand. But teenage crime in general continued to rise. Police Commissioner Kennedy has pointed out that three-fifths of the arrests for burglary, half of those for holdups, and three-fourths of those for auto thefts in the city last year involved teenagers.
Moreover, while the total number of arrests last year was twenty-eight per cent higher than in , arrests in the sixteen-to-twenty age bracket went up forty-two per cent, and—most disturbing of all—arrests of children fifteen and younger went up a hundred and five per cent. It is not just a matter of big-city wickedness. Quite the contrary. Figures compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that teenage crime in communities of twenty-five thousand or less was sixteen per cent higher last year than the year before, in contrast to a mere eight-per-cent rise in the big cities.
In general, the F. Reports to Washington from the police departments of twelve hundred and twenty cities showed that arrests of persons under eighteen rose ten per cent in , a year when arrests of persons of all ages rose only four per cent, and that fifty-four per cent of the burglaries in those cities and sixty-seven per cent of the auto thefts were committed by teenagers.
The single note of cheer was that of those arrested for aggravated assault and for murder only nine per cent and six per cent, respectively, were teenagers. One wonders whether the statisticians have allowed for the take in their estimates of teenage income. Nor is it any longer a matter simply of poverty, broken homes, substandard housing, and the other classic causes of juvenile delinquency. And a more recent survey by the same paper found that in the suburbs of New York teenage crime has been increasing faster than the teenage population, and sometimes even faster than teenage crime in the nation as a whole.
Several, who noted that the 10, [suburban] youngsters in trouble last year came from. The teenagers have created a world of their own, but it is not primarily a criminal world, absurd or repugnant though it sometimes appears.
Adolescence, at any time and in any place, is an unsettling business; its very name is repellent—only slightly less so than that of its kid sibling, Pubescence. George J. Mohr and Marian A. When one considers the natural ills that adolescent flesh is heir to, one can be more philosophical about the extra touches our teenagers have contributed. Like other tribes, the teenagers have their folkways. The notes on tribal customs that follow are meant to be suggestive rather than definitive; the Malinowski of the teenage culture has yet to appear.
And there are special difficulties in this particular field. For one thing, teenagers in big Eastern and Midwestern cities like New York and Chicago behave, on the whole, in a less specifically teenage manner than those in the rest of the country; they have less opportunity to take part in sports and to tinker with automobiles, and are more conservative in their dating habits.
For another, there is something artificial about the concept of the teenager; it would be more natural to divide the young into grammar-school students six through thirteen , high-school students fourteen through seventeen , and college students eighteen through twenty-one.
Surely the thirteen-year-olds have more in common with the twelve-year-olds just below them in school than they have with the nineteen-year-olds in college, or even with the fourteen-year-olds just beginning high school. But the statistics are mostly set up on a teenage basis, and since current usage leans that way, too, perhaps the main thing to be emphasized is the long, dark corridor between childhood and maturity. Furthermore, most generalizations about teenage behavior are based on the results of polling—a complicated art, which has not been reduced to a science.
These are rare, but lesser slips are not. There are close to 35,, families with TV sets. This was rather like omitting rice from a description of the Chinese diet, since listening to disc-jockey programs on the radio is one of the chief teenage stigmata. Nor is the academic method of polling always foolproof.
For almost twenty years, the Purdue Opinion Panel, which was founded, and is still directed, by Dr. Remmers, a professor of psychology and education at Purdue University, has been surveying teenage opinion. By now, it has established itself as the most authoritative academic group in the field. Yet a reading of a volume by Dr. Remmers and a colleague named H. Not about the so-called processing of the material; the I. It is the material itself that makes one wonder.
A glance down this lengthy list produces a feeling of dizziness. Although from No. And what seven-league boots of intellection could compass No. Another weakness of the academic mind in dealing with teenagers, as with other topics, is a tendency to substitute vocabulary for thought. The eminent Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons has defined the three chief aspects of teenage culture as:. Compulsive independence of and antagonism to adult expectations and authority.
This involves recalcitrance to adult standards of responsibility. Practically anybody would agree with this summary, and practically anybody could have made it, though in less stately language: Teenagers are disobedient, group-minded, and unrealistic.
These caveats having been registered, the time has come for field notes on teenage culture. Teenagers read a magazine called Mad, which ridicules the movies, television, advertising, and other aspects of mass culture. Indeed, it is teenagers who have been mostly responsible for the fantastic success of the publication, which in a few years has built up a circulation of a million and now has half a dozen imitators, including Frenzy and Thimk.
But Mad itself has a formula. It speaks the same language, aesthetically and morally, as the media it satirizes; it is as tasteless as they are, and even more violent. So a Romanized barbarian might have rebelled against the decadence of Rome, and such, essentially, is the quality of teenage revolt today. Teenagers communicate extensively by telephone—an average of an hour a day, says Gilbert, and, among girls of sixteen and over, eighty minutes.
The Ohio State savants look suspiciously on the teenager who shies away from the instrument; perhaps he is insecure, or perhaps—even worse—he has no friends to call up. Children under twelve are the chief TV watchers. Teenagers now drink more than they did ten years ago.
Matthew Chappell, of Hofstra College, reports that eighty-six per cent of all teenagers in Nassau County, on Long Island, drink, as opposed to sixty-four per cent in Racine, Wisconsin, and fifty-six per cent in Sedgwick County, Kansas. Teenagers Go Steady more than they used to. But what is coolness, anyway? In sociology, it is sometimes defined as a positive rebellion. It means breaking away from an illegitimate mainstream in a legitimate way.
That might sound like a fussy definition. But it has its uses. But not always. What about sagging your slacks at a school memorial for war heroes? At the end of the 20th century, many teens gravitated to logos. The long economic expansion from the s and the s gave them the means to spend lavishly on clothing emblems.
In recent years, the smartphone screen displaced the embroidered logo as the focal point of teen identity. It was once sufficient to look good in a high school hallway, but today, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram are all high school hallways, where young people perform and see performances, judge and are judged. Many decades after another mobile device, the car, helped to invent the teenager, the iPhone and its ilk offered new, nimble instruments of self-expression, symbols of independence, and better ways to hook up.
And so, in half a century, teenagers went from being a newfangled classification of awkward youth to an existential threat to American security to a valuable consumer demographic and a worthy topic of research.
For adults, especially those with power and money, the rules are what keep you safe. It is precisely because they have so little to lose from the way things are that young people will continue to be the inexhaustible motor of culture. Copyright by Derek Thompson. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now. This is so true. Being a teenager myself, I can definitely agree with almost everything that is said here. We are indeed on of the most targeted audience for almost any product. I just never realized why, I always taught that it was just because we were the ones who made our parents buy the things. But now I realize, after reading this, that it is true that we are more open to new things, new experiences than the older generation.
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