Youth and Human Rights Discussion
Host Mike Males

Participant
Anthropologist Mary Ellen Goodman once told me that the number one conversation topic in America is children, and that we are more anxious about children than are the people of any other country.

I suspect that we burden parents, and others who deal with children, with more advice and techniques and guilt than does any other nation. Perhaps that is a source of the resentment.

Mike Males
Gloria--As far as I know, sex education is not controversial in Europe, and sexual

expression by teenagers is considered normal rather than evidence of pathology. I wasn’t aware there was a new law/regulation requiring that sexually active adolescents be reported to authorities as abuse victims (that’s an awful lot of abuse that must be going on). Can you elaborate--every sexually active minor must be reported? It is clear that Americans are unwilling to accept adolescent sex in the way Europeans do and, unlike Europeans and Latins, we insist on discussing "teenage sex" and "teen pregnancy" as absolutely separate from and unrelated to adult sex--a delusional stance. You can demonstrate from solid research, for example, that nearly all HIV infections in teens of both genders result from sex with adults--often much-older adults--and all sides in America’s debate (liberal to conservative) will ignore that reality and continue to depict the problem as a couple of drunk and horny 15 year-olds. You can demonstrate that STI and pregnancy rates radically escalate with poverty rates, and all sides in America’s debate will depict the problem as equally serious in the suburbs as in the inner city. (The above points are not controversial in Europe, by the way, which is why HIV prevention is aimed at all ages and social insurance/ health programs counter poverty effects.) As for restrictions, the picture is complex. Many Catholic countries such as France apply restrictions to discourage abortion by all ages, adding parental consent for younger teen abortions as part of the general restrictions. I’m not aware of any society besides the USA that depicts teenage sex in such a negative and artificial manner, or that places significantly more restrictions on teen sexuality than is expected from that culture’s norms for adult sexuality. Does anyone else know more about this?

Mike Males
Donald--Excellent point regarding functional families, which I feel gets to the experience of many families we overlook in our obsession with the dysfunctional. I believe you are talking about a situation in which children were seen as integrated with adults, sharing values, and fate. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect discipline often was not necessary, since behaviors were "expected" and adults were also expected to be self-disciplined and set good examples. (I don't mean perfect--"healthy," to me, means "reasonably flawed"!). Certainly, I have seen families in which childraising was a happy experience, and these families tended to be ones in which parents and children shared expectations and a 67-year marriage certainly testifies admirably to the stable values you describe.

Of course, a key to whether the results could be described as virtuous depends on what values were being shared--racist families of the past, for example, were more likely to transmit intolerant values to their children. In some cases, we want youths to emulate their parents; in others, to "break the cycle" (to resurrect an eighties term). I am happy young people have more access to broader influences and information today than just families and local communities, though some of these influences are deleterious.

What I find frightening about the USA today is the universal assumption among experts, agencies, institutions, and the media, that parents and youths do NOT share values, expectations, or fate; therefore, modern childraising is fraught with danger and pitfalls, and parents who trust and respect their teenagers are simply in denial. This may sound bizarre, but in my years of working with youths in adult environments and later study of statistics, I cannot say that a 25- (or 40-) year-old is more mature than a 15 year-old--if, by "mature," we mean able to see the larger and future picture, act on interests broader than just our own, defer gratification, etc. That is not because I believe15 year-olds naturally are more mature than grownups, because grownups should at least have the advantage of more experience to learn from.

The problem is that I believe American society rewards immature behavior in adults--self-indulgence, primarily--and tacitly demands that adolescents fulfill adult roles while punishing them for doing so. For example, an American 40 year-old with an alcoholic drink is nearly twice as likely to drive drunk and kill someone, and five times more likely to overdose and die, than a 17 year-old with a drink. A large part of the reason is sanctioned adult immaturity--40 year-olds in America are more likely to drink harder liquor in higher quantity and in more dangerous settings than high schoolers are. The main difference between a 25 year-old and 15 year-old is that 25 year-olds are more likely to act irresponsibly, even when the opportunities to do so are equivalent. I realize this sounds counter-intuitive, but that is why I find our situation today so alarming—and other examples abound.

It seems to me that individuality trumps age. To extend Richard's comments, are we more concerned about how RESPONSIBLY a person exercises various behaviors, or the AGE at which they do it? We live in a culture and time in which 14 year-olds can act like 45 year-olds, and vice-versa. On reason for adult irresponsibility in our culture is the proliferation of legal age limits for rights: achieve a certain age and one is granted rights regardless of one's practical, individual capability to exercise them well. The legal right to drink cannot be taken away from an American adult even if he/she has ten DWIs.

I would like to defer what that means in specific terms (should 14-year-olds drink whisky, legally have sex with adults, etc.) to later discussion because I think it is a very complex question that confounds present arrangements (in which adults have vast, arbitrary power over adolescents) with ideal ones (which might grant rights more on individual merit than on age alone). I also think there is an "age of reason" or "full operational thinking" (the ability to perceive larger realities that connote maturity), which varies by individual but is found in cognitive studies generally to develop between ages 11 and 15. Hundreds of practical studies of adolescent and adult cognitive abilities indicate that beginning around puberty; teens and adults closely resemble each other. Further, a wide array of real-life outcome measures show teens are more likely to act like the adults around them than teens of other cultures.

Participant
John, your thinking suggests to me that the basically middle class parental generation feels an obligation to socialize their children to avoid the bad behavior of the street kids on the one hand and the career destroying sex and cocaine activities of the very upper on the other hand. The basic issue is control in order to prevent children from experiencing life outside the constraints of confinement. There is also the issue of parents avoiding embarrassment as in the cases of the Bush daughters.

Participant
In seeking sources of resentment of children, we probably should not ignore the changing nature of parenthood. The history is worth examining. For most of history, parents did not raise children. To the extent that children were "raised", it was done by the community and, because families tended to be large, by other older children. But raising them had little of the meaning now attributed to it. It was only about three hundred years ago that the task of raising children, protecting them from sinning, was given to the parents, and only in the last half of the last century do we have the massive, intensive interest in training and advising parents. Each book or article adds a new responsibility to parenthood, reinventing it into an almost undoable job.

This morning's TODAY show featured an interview with the head of a group dealing with missing and exploited children (a greatly distorted issue, by the way) which outlined a frightening new responsibility for parents and a set of tasks all but impossible to carry out. Last weekend the NY Times carried an article by a New York policeman blaming parents for the misbehavior of their/ adolescent children: criticizing them for not supervising closely enough, and recommending that prison sentences be given to the parents when the children go astray. This continual reinvention of parenthood knows no limit, and has become so burdensome that disagreements in raising children has become the second leading cause of marital discord leading to divorce.

Feelings of responsibility and helplessness are a dangerous combination. When you feel responsible for performing some new task (and every new admonition or new parenting skill adds a new responsibility) and yet are still essentially helpless (as parents are in most situations) this combination predictably leads to frustration and often abuse. Parents, increasingly isolated from the community, become frantic, and too often take it out on the children--leading the US to have high child abuse statistics--and I suggest, a generalized resentment of children as an unmanageable population, even as we often adore our own.

Participant
I don't mean to ignore the expertise or sensitivity that Mike brings to this discussion, nor the urgency of the problems that American children encounter that Dick has long introduced to this group, BUT:

It seems to me that the difficulty encountered by children is so intertwined with the many defects we have been discussing in our civilization (and governing skills) as a whole that we should not be discussing child problems in isolation.

I believe that child rearing and its results today are a bit like a paraphrase of the opening sentence of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities (do I have the right title?)--they are the Best and the Worst of all previous generations.

If we could point to the many success stories of modern good upbringing (that I suspect many of us in ILF have witnessed and helped to bring about) and then try to expand these skills to a much wider percentage of the population, we would be on the right track.

To do this would require both money and skills in spreading success strategies to different levels and ethnic backgrounds of our population -- but might illustrate new pathways towards the results we want.

I venture to add this amateur opinion not because I wish to argue with Mike, but to express a mind set that just may be similar to others who are in our group and which may be a barrier to understanding just where Mike is leading us.

Participant
Sorry to have been away for several days....

Discussion of the volatility of adulthood or parenthood is becoming something of a thread - one way or the other – throughout our exchanges. I brought it up myself with respect to an eroding environment of civil rights among adults and the implications that may hold for young people.

But none of these good points should deflect us from looking at particular parts of our population. We did/do it for "minorities," women, some of do it for prison populations, elders, etc. As much as these things evoke wonderful questions, we should not stop examining what our culture is doing to our young.

So I'm sort of backtracking myself a bit here, too.

I would like to interrogate something I feel has become something of an assumption in the examination of the "Boomer" reaction to young people today.

Very few people were Todd Gitlin. Most young people, even radicals of the 1960s and 70s, cleaved more closely to the Forest Gump characterization: clueless and sometimes around something that was "happening." Far more young people, from Berkeley to Columbia, were conservative in most respects than is commonly discussed. This includes attitudes toward the war, racial integration, sexual politics, and what have you.

Thus, Mike's justified indignation at today's adults may not be entitled to a full measure of inter-generational accountability. Not to say that the "radical" Boomers are much better today than Right wing Boomers when it comes to public policy toward youth. Indeed, as Mike has often pointed out to me, it's frequently hard to tell them apart. But the expectation that Boomers ought to know better, because they were rebels, may not quite fit historically.

Mike Males
With respect to Anthony's observations, that's what drives me more nuts than anything is the left wing in this country that is the most anti-youth. The rightists think the problem is a relatively small number bad kids it wants to cane, imprison, and fry (the kiddie Three Strikes). The left is now saying no—ALL kids are brain-warped and will kill us if they don't kill themselves first unless we force them ALL into corrective programs. The liberal notion of stuffing all kids in panoptic after-school programs, so that adolescence becomes the delivery of the youth to the school, which then delivers the youth to the adult-supervised program, which then delivers the youth back to the parent--is more crazed than the conservatives who want to lock up a few kids for life. (I'm all for voluntary after-school activities, but program advocates' use of fear of teen crime and drugs to promote them reveals a larger, repressive goal.) It is the liberals and left who are perpetuating a normalized hatred of youth ("adult hostility toward adolescents is usually disguised as caring" –Edgar Friedenburg, 1959) we normally associate with a reactionary mentality.

In that respect, I think the New York cop's comment about holding parents legally

responsible is an anomaly--I rarely see calls to hold parents culpable for their kids (no one even mentioned prosecuting the Columbine parents, despite general bafflement as to how they could not have known), or perhaps the cop was talking only about lower-class moms. The reason for downplaying parents, I think, is that larger institutions such as psychiatric hospitals, juvenile prisons, and a huge array of programs have plans to manage kids in which the parent's agency is reduced to monitoring and referring--that is, the household-level recruiter of kids to send to the professionals.

I think Richard is right in that parents who are conscientious and serious about child-raising do feel an incredible, isolating burden. For example, suppose you want to teach your teen at a fairly young age to handle alcohol moderately and responsibly, to know his or her reactions to alcohol and how to protect himself or herself before getting into the bar and party scene. This is not controversial in France or Mexico, but in the USA, you can easily get your kid taken away by the State for that. What American parents are encouraged (in fact, coerced) to do is to wash their hands of the alcohol issue and to turn their kids over to the police or just-say-no programs if they catch them drinking. In the same fashion, parents are forced to ignore their teens' individualities and to defer to curfews, driving

laws, abstinence programs, and state-directed one-size-fits-all child-raising mandates for every other major developmental issue. For those who think I'm overstating how far we've gone down the regimental road, remember this: Bill Clinton's justice folks recommended daytime and nighttime curfews for everyone under 18—which (where in effect) ban all youths from being in public more than a couple of hours a day most days of the year. And, as far as I can tell, most communities support these youth-control extremisms.

Participant
There is a tendency, I think, by both advocates and opponents of youth rights to create insular groups, children and adults, who never mix or change. This isn't so, and if a concern for the happiness and well-being of youth isn't strong enough for one to support youth rights, then a concern for the happiness and well-being of all human society should be.

Most adults tend to forget the bad experiences of their childhood, or accept them as normal. These bad experiences still exist, and they have a profound impact on the lives of these adults. The loss of adult civil liberties is a common lament from individuals on this board, but have you really stopped to think why the public clamors for increased security at the expense of liberty? It is because they were conditioned to accept it while young.

Just for a moment consider what must happen to a person who is raised in an environment where it is illegal to be outside for 15 hours out of every day, where one spends 13 years forced into an institution whose true purpose is not to educate, but to control, manipulate, and categorize good future workers. Consider an environment where a rigid hierarchy is accepted and welcomed. There are those on top (parents, teachers, police) who control those on the bottom (youth) "for their own good."

Is it any wonder at all that this mindset of being controlled and limited carries through to adulthood?

If we wish to have free adults, we must first have free youth. There is no other way.

John Taylor Gatto, in his well documented book, Underground History of American Education, shows that the individuals who created our current system of compulsory education over a hundred years ago did not do it with the intent to educate children, but to create adults who were easily controlled by government and corporations. The things Gatto reveals are straight out of George Orwell. This is real, this is true; this is going on right under our noses.

The effects of a regimented and regulated world in which young people live does not leave them upon turning 18, or 21, or 25. It stays with them for life. How could it not? They are not called our "formative years" for nothing. If we form ourselves in a world of repression, what kind of person will we form into?

If we value freedom at all, if we want to live in a world of respect, trust, compassion, and liberty then we MUST confer these traits to youth, and we must roll back the institutionalization and repression of youth.

A person raised with no expectation of privacy has no problems with the Patriot Act or TIPS.

A person raised to accept being stereotyped and scapegoated has no problems with the stereotyping or scapegoating of ethnic or racial groups.

A person raised under alcohol prohibition has no problems accepting the prohibition of other substances.

A person raised in schools where free thinking is discouraged and rule following is praised has no problem with working their life away in dead-end, menial, paper-pushing jobs.

A person who has had violence done to them "for their own good" has no problems accepting wars committed against foreign nations "for their own good".

A person raised to accept an environment where the few exert their will capriciously over the many will not object to a society built along a similar principle.

If we are near the end of this discussion I urge everyone to consider the long term implications of denying youth rights. This problem is bigger than how late Billy can stay out on Friday night. This problem affects all that we do and all that we are. The repression of youth paves the way for the repression of us all. We must fight the former to stop the later.

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