Teen-Demon Tracts

Why baby-boomer parents fear their children.

Chris Lehmann from the February 2002 issue

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, $24

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 boomer parenting practices and musical tastes.)

Even a cursory glance over this self-enabling landscape registers how oddly incidental actual childhood experience proves to be in the new parenting. Two new manuals purport to engage different aspects of adolescence, but nevertheless remain mired in the same warm, sticky, and unmovable center of boomer self-adulation. In Terri Apter's The Myth of Maturity, the very definition of adolescence is pressed into the service of this all-consuming mandate. Apter, a Cambridge social psychologist, seeks to persuade us that the tragedy of our age is that young adults are in deep denial about their incorrigible arrestedness. Amid the many trials of their maiden adulthood, she avers, they feel perversely compelled to refute the proper sovereignty of boomer parents in their lives.

Apter makes a half-hearted attempt to illustrate some decline in the condition of young adults, but she falls woefully short of the mark. She absurdly contrasts contemporary rates of eating disorders, drug use, and alcoholism among 18- to-24-year-olds to rates reported in 1940, when neither these domains of public health research nor the general culture of therapy were anywhere near as developed as they are today. Hard-pressed to verify allegedly alarming suicide rates, Apter resorts to a still sneakier bit of legerdemain: She grimly announces that the number of young adult suicides has risen fourfold over the past 20 years -- but upon consulting the pertinent footnote, we learn that the data for this claim comes from a parliamentary report in Apter's native England, and hence has little discernible bearing on the largely American research group from which she draws her anecdotal tales of woe.

That research group, too, is a work of staggering, if deftly packaged, self-involvement. The core of Apter's research is culled from a set of interviews she conducted with 32 young people -- who came, another footnote informs us, from an "opportunity sample" made up "from the younger brothers and sisters who participated in my 1990 study Altered Loves...and the daughters and sons of women who participated in my study of midlife women." It may take a village to raise a child, but it evidently takes but 32 subjects left over from earlier projects to define a generation.

The bulk of Apter's book marshals together interviews, alternating between the testimony of this score-and-a-half of anguished "thresholders" (if you haven't gathered this already, Apter is a master of euphemistic coinages) and their tragically conflicted parents, who are seeking to express their soulful, encompassing concern, but are unsure whether their fumbling offspring are ready to feel the love. Much of the book reads like a transcript from some woozy, cross-generational segment of MTV's The Real World. As with that mother of all reality shows, The Myth of Maturity can be voyeuristically diverting, until you're suddenly pulled up short by some fresh bid to further infantalize the hapless struggling young adult in question -- the sociological equivalent of seeing the new housemate from Brigham Young University puking in the kitchen sink. "New research shows that the brain itself often keeps its adolescent characteristics until the age of twenty-six," Apter announces at one point with near-palpable glee. She then assures her smartly turned-out army of invading parents, "This means that some young people are not prepared, physiologically, to take on adult responsibilities, involving self-control and self-management."

This, it turns out, is the common trajectory of contemporary kid-baiting: Take an extreme outbreak of pathology (e.g., the infamous 1999 massacre at Columbine High School) or a speculative, ambiguous factoid (as in this neurology aside, which fails to specify either what the brain's "adolescent characteristics" may be or how, if at all, such physiology translates into actual behavior), and generalize wildly. One can all but picture Apter placing an outsized bib, or a prototype of an adult-scale kiddy leash, into the grateful hands of her ill-understood, filially deprived readers, with a rousing "Go get 'em!" for good measure.