Youth and Human Rights Discussion
Host Mike Males

Participant
While there are some cultures, even relatively primitive ones, where children are treated with constant affection, by and large the history of childhood would support Alex's contention that discrimination and violence against children has been almost universal. In modern times, however, as Mike has pointed out, most developed countries have laws, for example, against corporal punishment. In studying the problem, I was surprised to learn that childhood is an invention, and is reinvented from culture to culture and from one period in history to another. Four hundred years ago, children were not seen as important: no good records were kept, parents didn't know the ages of their children, because so many died in infancy, they had to have a lot of them to keep a few. They were in on everything--no one thought to hide adult life from them.

Then the clergy came into the picture, wanting to protect children from sinning. That was the beginning of schools. A century later, parents became the parties responsible for child rearing. Now we reinvent childhood with almost every book or article written about them. Parenthood itself is now an invention. Parent means producer of children, not raiser of children. The burdensome design of parenthood I suspect is connected to the way in which we regard children currently.

Participant
Children and young people were employed on the farm and family business until the 1910's and 1920's. Then we had war, depression and the move to the cities. Young people had less to do and moved from being contributors to being consumers and at loose ends. I’ve been reading English Novels the last few months - Tom Jones, Mill on the Floss, Jayne Eyre, and Dickens. Current situation doesn't seem that much worse until we make the comparison of the U.S. with contemporary Europe - which seems to be better. Yet there certainly is a real youth problem in much of Europe. My impression is that there is more loss of meaning here in the U.S. In Europe young people have more complex understandings of social problems. Makes them angry but less alien.

But none of this seems adequate to the power of your questions. I have been shocked by how we call them "kids" rather than children or young people, and the word "adolescence" seems more of a stigma than friendly.

I sense that we fear we are doing badly for most of those in the first 1/3 of life, and that maybe we are doing badly with the other 2/3. Youth is the time revolutionaries, poets, and great lovers emerge. Do we hate and fear them for the depths of their passions we have given up on? Fear for their safety in a society we over-adapted to? Hate our own anxiety brought to the surface by the questions they ask? Both in words and by just being?

As a therapist the wonderful thing about these young people is that their biology is so powerful they are willing to create a new approach to life in order to relate sexually and emotionally with others - and themselves - body and mind.

Is our culture—Late America post Christian—adequate to serve the biology and psyche of young people?

Participant
Thanks, Mike, for the invitation into this wide-ranging and authoritative discussion.

These comments are less coherent than many other tightly-focused contributions.

I’d like to pick up on the notion of how "youth" as well as "adulthood" is socially constructed in particular ways, at particular times, in particular places.

More specifically, there might be very functional reasons why youth policy is so punitive today and in the US: adults themselves (despite Mike’s correct assertion that they get away with more anti-social behavior than youth) are increasingly feeling the disciplinary fist across wider and wider fields of activity – letting a meter lapse in Oakland will now cost you $35!

But, as Mike will quickly point out, these functional/instrumental reasons for increasing discipline over youth can not nearly explain the degree to which this culture has gone.

On the other hand, while I’m intrigued with the cross-national core of this American exceptionalist question – the US being exceptionally brutal toward its young. Some might consider this a "spatial" analysis. But there is also time. As an historian, I’m even more intrigued with questions of how the US has relatively treated its youth population. As Mike and I have discussed in other venues, for instance, (revolutionary youth politics aside) the Boomers were received very well by this culture: access to unparalleled post-war wealth, education, and legal status. Somewhere American culture took a hard turn against young people. How might that compare to other post-war societies?

With respect to our present discussion, however, I’m more persuaded by a broader argument examining the seeming volatility and instability of current "adulthood." Affluence, science, alleged fidelity to the "free-market," are all charter features of "the American Experience." These factors seem to conspire currently (in this time and place) against "traditional" forms of citizenship (independence, possession of critical analytical skills, responsibility for one’s behavior, concern for one’s community) and toward adulthood being constructed through infantalization. We’re feeling ourselves more as audience and consumer than citizen. Note Bush’s post-9/11 admonition: shut up and shop. Adults bucking discipline in the market, or at work, do so increasingly at the risk of their livelihood and identity.

A few years ago I was captured by Jeremy Rifkin’s book about the end of work. More significant for me was the issue of specific American adult identity, one more and more assembled without a steady, 40-hour-a-week "career," no benefits, an identity constantly "on the market" for the next "project" or grant. Who is an American "man" without a career or job? Who is a husband? Who is a father? HOW is a father? These example questions spin here toward men, but they also necessarily beg female adult identity as well. And I think they ring particularly and disturbingly American.

From these questions, I believe, we can fold back over our culture’s particular reactions to youth. While in grad school I asked faculty members what kind of identity future they felt they were preparing these elite students to occupy. They had never thought about it. The absence of any kind of analysis of this question, by teachers (!), tells a big story on how these adults, the "wise" of our tribe, do not see youth as young people looking into their futures. Faculty, and I might project, adults, largely just see "students:" static widgets on the same market-driven conveyer belt they themselves are on – the one we’re calling "education." In this way adults are "treating" youth as adults.

With a thing of such cultural importance as adult identity itself at sea, it may not seem so strange that the generation of boomers coming of real "elder" status now, with all the guilt they feel for what they did to their own parents’ (the reputed "greatest generation") would punish in the ways they felt they were punished – only far more harshly. It’s less about method than degree.

A final random thought… society is not simply "dealing" with youth vis youth policy. Policy is also reconstituting and producing the next generation of adults. Thus, for me at least, to uncouple youth rights from discussion of the larger context of eroding human and civil rights in the US obscures a major project at work on many levels of society – from the state down to the domicile.

Participant
To identify the author of this last comment, I want to welcome Participant as a special guest resource to this conference. Anthony is the director of youth services for the Oakland, California, Libraries, and an advocate for the rights of youth. We are glad to have you with us, Anthony.

A few decades ago anthropologists like Margaret Mead were writing about what they saw as a fundamental shift in cultural development--a reverse transmission of culture. Because of the points Doug and Alex are making, and because the educational opportunities for the young are greater than for their parents, that the young now had more to tell their elders than at any time in history, perhaps more than the elders could tell the young. I wonder now if anthropologists still feel that way.

Mike Males
Anthony raises another point that has long puzzled me: why and where in the last 30 years our culture took a hard turn against children. The post-World War II years saw a bipartisan American consensus to move toward European models of greater social investment--rapidly rising social security, child/family welfare, the GI Bill, the civil rights victories, gigantic increases in education spending and more egalitarian, meritocratic movements in higher education, and vast support for liberalizing reforms in primary and secondary education, to name a few. (Indeed, Douglass's comments seem very much attuned to a 1950s view of children, and that's a compliment--the idea among radical education reformers of that golden era of school reform that adolescents were not flawed, incomplete adults, but a stage of life with unique perspectives and insights to counter an increasingly conformist culture--see Edgar Friedenberg, "The Vanishing Adolescent," 1959, or "The Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms," 1964, for wry affirmations of adolescents.)

Why, in the increasingly harsh post-1970 climate, did the very baby-boom generation expected to refine modern youth culture and become model, indulgent New Age parents, swerve into anger, fear, selfishness, cocooning, and repression--all of which have their root in rising fear of youth? True, baby boomers had bitter experiences with our efforts at political and social reform in our youthful 1960s, but I would not have expected that our distrust of politics would mature into support for far-right-wing politicians bent on dismantling government in favor of corporate governance. True, post-Vietnam stress,

drug abuse, violence, premature death, and personal disarray have taken a tremendous toll on baby boomers, worse for our defensive, incessant claims that everything is fine with us--it's just those damn kids. Even given all of that, my prediction would have been that baby boomers would age into a graceful middle-age, growing longer in serenity as we did in tooth, mellow aging hippies with strong sympathies for our offspring, who would warn kids away from our pitfalls with open discussion rather than deploying police, zero tolerance, Ritalin, and prison. I am in a continuing state of shock at the vicious repression our aging has brought and our combination of anger and indifference toward young people--and the growth in these hostile attitudes seemingly with no limit in sight. How on earth did this happen?

Kip-- It seems to me the question you raise--adult irritation at having our values questioned, sometimes not politely, by the 13 year-old that accepted them implicitly as a child only a year or two earlier--has a bearing on why teens are resented. I'm not suggesting that any adolescent criticism of the flaws of adult cultures be held sacrosanct; there is much to be criticized in various youth cultures as well. Intergenerational tension is a good thing, in my view, the way the world progresses cautiously. But my generation has not reacted well to any hint of criticism, rebellion, or even alternative ways of living among teenagers and has taken extraordinarily harsh measures to suppress it--censorship of student expression, medication, psychiatric treatment, even police intervention. A new book, The Primal Teen, by New York Times science editor Barbara Strauch argues, in essence, that the huge mass of research and testing showing teenagers generally as cognitively competent as adults has now been debunked by post-1996 brain scans showing teen and adult brains process input in different ways. Presumably--how is not really explained--this neurological difference demonstrates that adolescents are irrational and childlike, and she argues that adults can simply dismiss any criticisms by teenagers as the product of their naturally crazed thinking. (By the same logic, the antiwar dissent and civil rights agitation by baby boomer youth in the 1960s was also childishly irrational.)

There's a lot wrong with this latest resurrection of bio-determinism, including that it is founded in the resurrection of long-disproved stereotypes about teens, but its popularity strikes me as the product of a uniquely defensive adult generation. I don't know why we feel so threatened--teens today do not seem to be shaking the rafters with rebellion--but it could be, as Kip suggests, that there are monumental social problems boomers in particular set out to solve 40 years ago, most of which have only become worse on our watch. As a generation, boomers have much to be proud of in terms of redressing traditional American injustices--up until about 1972, after which we hit a three-decade skid. I would suggest the chief benefits we've brought to America since--casual midlife dress, stronger coffee, better-quality bussing, and popularizing of Thai food (any others you can think of?)--don't offset the grotesque social crises we've precipitated and let get out of hand. Adults are always at a disadvantage in a rapidly-changing culture that baffles us but which our kids seem to understand as second nature, but we our letting our fears run wild--perhaps because they are rooted in self-fear.

Understandably, we don't want to hear about all that from a pubescent we have to convince ourselves is even worse than we are. So we dismiss, suppress, and delude ourselves. A lot of our virulent castigation of youth today (most angrily when we catch them emulating our real values and behaviors) is really a way of affirming our own superiority, which I think we secretly doubt. Take a look at the rash of popular boomer books--Boos in Paradise, Joe Queen Ana’s stuff, I'm Okay, You're a Brat, all the psycho-kid books for parents. Most consist of nonstop, unexamined self-praise in the form of lambasting kids. Introspective and tolerant we isn’t.

Participant
I was curious about why the U.S. did not ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Turns out to be an interesting story, which I'm sure Mike knows already but was news to me. At first it appeared to have solid bipartisan backing (officials from the Reagan and first Bush administrations participated in the drafting sessions, there was a national committee in support of it chaired by Richard Lugar and Bill Bradley) and then along came a big lobbying campaign from the Christian right, supported by Jesse Helms. Their worry was that the convention was a threat to family values and would undermine parental authority.

Seems to me that gives us a part of the answer to the question Mike raised at the beginning of this conference -- not all of it, of course.

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