Teen-Demon Tracts: Why baby-boomer parents fear their children.

AuthorLehmann, Chris

The Myth of Maturity: What Teenagers Need From Parents to Become Adults, by Terri Apter, New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 288 pages, $24.95

Parents Under Siege: Why You Are the Solution, Not the Problem, in Your Child's Life, by James Garbarino and Claire Bedard, New York: Free Press, 240 pages, 324

KIDS THESE DAYS. We all know the basic jeremiad: They're media-addled, affectless, nihilist, subliterate, a Clockwork Orange-style army of "superpredators," teen gunmen, and garden-variety sociopaths waiting to happen. Advertising has hypnotized them. Video games have conditioned them to kill without feeling. And pop culture has hammered every conceivable kind of coarseness--from anonymous sex to Satanism, from glorified violence to Internet passivity--into their poignantly echoing little craniums. Is it any wonder that most of them are but a bully's slight or a chatroom flame away from raining hot-lead vengeance on schoolrooms or playgrounds?

Well, yes, actually. It is, indeed, a considerable wonder that any part of this hysterical caricature should command serious discussion in the first place. As almost no media outlet is going to tell you, kids these days are astonishingly well-adjusted, nonviolent, educated, and polite. Nearly all the leading indicators of social ills among American adolescents--drug use, violent assault, teen pregnancy, drop-out rates, you name it--have been declining for at least 10 years now. More teens are graduating high school and attending college than ever before. A record number of American teens volunteer their time to charitable causes--twice as many as their counterparts of 20 years past. Math SATs are at a 30-year high. Hell, even teen literacy is increasing: A recent survey conducted by the National Education Association found that 41 percent of teen respondents said they read 15 books or more a year. How many adults can claim a comparable intake?

Meanwhile, social scientist Mike Males of the justice Policy Institute--one of the only honest inquirers into the condition of American adolescents--has cataloged the remarkable degree and scope of the recent turnaround in teen conduct. (His most recent research is available online at alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=10904.

In 1999 the number of homicides committed by teens was down 62 percent from what it had been in 1990. Over the same period, rapes in which adolescents were charged declined 27 percent, teen-perpetrated violent crime generally was down 22 percent, the incidence of sexually transmitted disease decreased 50 percent, births were down 17 percent, abortions were down 15 percent, and drunken driving offenses plummeted 35 percent.

The only behaviors registering upticks over the same period--smoking (up 13 percent based on average monthly intake) and drug fatalities (up 11 percent)--have been the targets of the most aggressive adult-sponsored "zero-tolerance" interventions, a development that Males soundly suggests is no coincidence.

Nevertheless, the dominant discourse on teen affairs is one of never-ending crisis--a sort of campfire parade of ghoulish shadowplay projected onto adolescence. Indeed, despite all the good news about American kids, a sprawling array of books, videotapes, and consulting seminars would have us believe that just the opposite is true. So would opportunistic politicians, from Bill Bennett, who specializes in Spenglerian prophecies of doom, to Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton, who trade in saucer-eyed paternalism. Whatever its source, the message is the same: Kids are out of control, beyond the reach of adult authority, losing all purchase on civilized behavior. And of course, always, always getting worse.

There's a simple force behind the fuss here: raging boomer narcissism. The alleged anguish adult Americans feel over the imperilment of our young is not really about young Americans at all. It is, rather, about the chronic inability of the boomer generation to own up to its own lack of moral authority, its steadily eroding cultural influence--indeed, the basic fact of its own mortality. This impulse courses through our popular culture at virtually every turn, from the boomers' odd, reverse-Oedipal reverence for the "greatest generation" (i.e., the very buttoned-down squares against whom the boomers launched their own storied youthful rebellion) to the embarrassingly sclerotic condition of our rock eminences, as chronicled in John Strausbaugh's recent Rock Til You Drop.

Nowhere can you apprehend this unlovely dynamic more plainly than in the wildly profitable cottage industry of parental advice literature. Anxiety over child-rearing is, of course, a perennial source of tension within any culture. It's the cultural reckoning that psychologist Erik Erikson, in a typically inelegant formulation, termed "generativity," by which he meant the imperative of instructing the next generation in the pursuit of useful lives. (The opposite of generativity, in Erikson's developmental scheme, is "stagnation," i.e., morbid self-absorption, a term that applies with equal force to...

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