Teenage Wasteland

Critics on the left and right falsely portray kids as passive victims of mass media.

Carl F. Horowitz from the February 2004 issue

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None of the contributors overtly calls for censorship. They frame their goal as balancing First Amendment values with protection of children. Yet this pose seems disingenuous, nowhere more so than in the book's concluding piece by Newton and Nell Minow. It was the former, as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under John F. Kennedy, who described network television as "a vast wasteland."

Surveying today's wasteland, now pockmarked with the likes of Jackass and World Wrestling Entertainment, he advocates enhanced federal regulatory authority over broadcast and cable TV, increased V-chip use, and campaigns (including lawsuits) by media watchdog groups to force networks to devote more programming to "the public interest." He and his daughter applaud the Parents Television Council's efforts to shame and boycott offending networks and advertisers. "It's time to give the censorship charge a rest," they write, "and force the people who produce outrageously violent and sexually explicit material to admit that it is not about freedom; it is about money, and as long as they think they can make some, they will continue to produce it."

Despite its undercurrents of authoritarianism, Kid Stuff does offer some pleasant surprises. The contributors generally avoid projecting malevolent motives (beyond a desire for profit) onto the entertainment industry. A few authors, especially Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin and University of Toledo psychologist Jeanne Funk, make an honest effort to explain the market forces that shape media culture, understanding the futility of completely shielding children from it. "A child, even a vulnerable child," Funk writes, "is not just a sponge that unthinkingly soaks up media messages. Research on media literacy suggests that talking to children about their media experiences can alter the impact of media violence."

Even that formulation assumes that media violence is a bad influence, albeit one that can be countered by moral immunization. In Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes, and Make-Believe Violence (2002), Gerard Jones had the temerity to suggest that media violence, far from traumatizing kids, might be therapeutic. The idea of violent entertainment as a positive influence gains support from the comments of a New Jersey teenager who objected to a post-Columbine Harper's article criticizing violent video games. "As a 'geek,' I can tell you that none of us play video games to learn how (or why) to shoot people," he said. "For us, video games do not cause violence; they prevent it. We see games as a perfectly safe release from a physically violent reaction to the daily abuse leveled at us." The culture warriors who contributed to Kid Stuff should have spent some time talking to consumers like him.

Alissa Quart, a freelance journalist who has written for The Nation, did just that. In Branded, she observes that if mass media are convincing youth to do anything, it's not to kill or copulate but to shop. Quart's analysis bears a strong imprint of leftist media critics such as Thomas Frank and Mark Crispin Miller. There are intimations here and there of capitalism as a cabal, but the book rings true in too many places to be dismissed as an ideological rant. The thirtyish Quart went out and spoke to "tweens" (7- to-14-year-olds) and teens -- lots of them. Although a bit too old to pass as a native, à la Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed, she knows their vernacular and their anxieties.

Quart argues that during the past decade or so America's youth, egged on by their parents, have become wedded to consumption as personal identity: You are what you buy. In their desperate pursuit of peer acceptance, she avers, young people more than ever are suckers for mass advertising's pitches for the right (read: expensive) brands. Teenagers, Quart notes, spent $155 billion in discretionary income in 2000. Knowing where the money is, many companies hire youths as market trend spotters; the magazine Teen People alone has deputized some 10,000 kids in this capacity.

The retailing, publishing, film, and sports industries are increasingly focused on getting young people to associate consumption of hip brands with social acceptance. Greater affluence combined with the need for acceptance has led to rapid rises in plastic surgery, breast enlargement, steroid use, and anorexia, all manifestations of what Quart calls "self-branding."

The book's chapter on higher education, which describes the cutthroat competition to get into a small number of elite institutions, best illustrates where Quart hits, and misses, the mark. Childhood, she argues, is becoming one long entrance exam. Not any college or university will do; all that preparation will be a waste if a son or daughter is destined for no better than a good state university or even a highly ranked but semi-obscure private four-year college such as Grinnell, Bowdoin, or Oberlin. When $30,000 to $40,000 a year in tuition, fees, and room and board is on the line, only the Ivies, and a few other prestige universities such as Stanford, Northwestern, and Duke, will suffice.

Parents may be even more obsessed than their kids with the status conferred by the right college. A prominent college tutor/counselor describes her clients' attitude this way to Quart: "My kid has to get into Harvard or Princeton or I will kill myself." Children, taking their cue, see higher education as a logo identity. They select extracurricular activities (often inflated or invented) with an eye toward pleasing admissions officers. A child these days doesn't take French or cello lessons out of enjoyment; he takes them because years later they will look good on a college application. Tom Cruise's strategy to get into Princeton in Risky Business seems honest by comparison.

Quart's dissection of status anxieties is brilliant, but her focus is restricted to academic overachievers bred by upper-income parents. One suspects that her hand wringing is akin to traditionalists' laments about the "epidemic" of childlessness that in fact characterizes a relatively small stratum of higher-income professional couples in their 30s. Moreover, Quart doesn't admit that, up to a point, getting kids to compete is necessary. The demand for the most desirable slots in any endeavor inevitably exceeds the supply. Parents naturally want the best for their children, whether in the form of a wardrobe, an education, or a wedding. If they (and their children) are spending more money on these things than ever before, maybe it's because they have more to spend.

In a sense, Quart is a descendant of a tradition begun in the mid-19th century by Marx and Engels on the left and Matthew Arnold on the right, the soi-disant voice in the moral wilderness excoriating the base appetites of an emerging commercial culture. But in another sense she's a realist. Far more attuned to markets than such contemporary critics of crassness as Benjamin Barber and Wendell Berry, she writes with empathy and insight about the dark side of the branding game, the taunts and rejection directed at those who consume the "wrong" things.

Students marked by classmates as dorks and losers may resort to vengeance of the sort seen in Littleton, Colorado, and elsewhere. And let's admit it: There is something decadent about people whose conversation and behavior revolve almost entirely around acquiring material things and other badges of status, all the while pitying the poor souls down the pecking order. Such people, of course, rarely will admit being slaves to fashion. Bill Buckley remarked many years ago that even George Babbitt didn't approve of Babbittry; he merely practiced it.

Youth themselves must take the initiative to get off the consumption treadmill, Quart argues. "Do It Yourself" culture, that public square populated by punks, Goths, hippies, and other castoffs, is her ideal way to air grievances and conduct transactions, with activities ranging from music file sharing to high school plays to thrift store shopping. Where the Kid Stuff authors generally prefer to rein in untutored youthful desire through a combination of media self-policing, closer parental supervision, and government oversight, Quart would decommodify desire by creating anti-branding platoons. Although she certainly would object to such a characterization, deep down she's a left-libertarian, blasting away at Edison Schools while defending homeschooling.

Both of these books suggest that young people need better emotional equipment to deal with the opposite tugs of individuality and belonging. Teenagers, like everyone else, want to be themselves but dread being left out. Most lack the maturity to resolve this tension on their own, especially when they're experiencing sexual desire (and rejection) for the first time. That's why parents should provide more guidance, beginning with their own firsthand observation that youth is fleeting.