The Case Against Adolescence, by Robert Epstein, Ph.D.
Submitted by Staff on Mon, 2007-07-02 15:33.
THE CASE AGAINST ADOLESCENCE
Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen
by Robert Epstein, Ph.D.
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Published by Quill Driver Books
and reprinted here with permission
ISBN: 188495670X
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CHAPTER 1:
THE CHAOS AND THE CAUSE
His thoughts are whacked, he's mad so he's talkin' back, talkin' black, brainwashed from rock and rap. He sags his pants, do-rags and stocking cap, his step-father hit him, so he socked him back.
—Eminem, "Sing for the Moment"
Overview. American teens have long been in chaos, suffering high rates of depression, suicide, crime, substance abuse, pregnancy, and other serious problems. Until about a century ago, however, the teenage years were relatively benign, and adolescence as we know it barely existed. Through most of human history, young people were integrated into adult society early on, but beginning in the late 1800s, new laws and cultural practices began to isolate teens from adults, imposing on them an increasingly large set of restrictions and artificially extending childhood well past puberty. New research suggests that teens today are subjected to more than ten times as many restrictions as are most adults, and adulthood is delayed until well into the twenties or thirties. It's likely that the turmoil we see among teens is an unintended result of the artificial extension of childhood.
In the late 1990s Americans had a gruesome wake-up call: Eight schoolyard shooting sprees took place in less than a year, resulting in seventeen dead and thirty wounded—all at the hands of males under eighteen. As a result, carrying a dull kitchen knife to school is now grounds for expulsion at many schools, and teens continue to plot or carry out elaborate attacks against their schools. Here are some other disturbing facts about America's troubled teens:
• Suicide is the third leading cause of death among teens, after accidents and homicides. According to a 2003 survey, 8.5 percent of high school students had attempted suicide in the previous twelve months, and nearly 17 percent contemplated or planned suicide.
• For the vast majority of crimes, the peak age for arrest in the United States has long been eighteen for both whites and minorities. According to an extensive study published in 2004, eighteen is also the age at which Americans eighteen and over, and especially females, are the most depressed.
• For the first time in history, we are now seeing a substantial increase in crimes committed by young females, especially some violent crimes. Between 1995 and 2004, for example, assaults by young males decreased slightly (following national trends), whereas assaults by young females increased by 25 percent.
• Before new security systems were installed in recent years, nearly a million students in the United States brought guns to school each year. Between a quarter and a third of young people who enter our school systems never graduate from high school, and for blacks and Hispanics, the proportion is closer to one-half.
• In 2001 more than 60 percent of high school students who were surveyed reported that drugs were kept, used, or sold at their schools. In 2002 hospital emergency rooms treated 97,029 teens suffering from adverse drug experiences—mainly overdoses of illegal drugs—up from 82,904 in 1999.
• Although declining, the birth rate among teens in the United States—about forty-nine births for every thousand teenage women—is still the highest by far in the industrialized world. The teen birth rate in both France and Italy is about nine per thousand.
• A 2006 report by the FBI attributes the recent spike in violent crimes in major cities nationwide to the activities of minors as young as ten.
How can we understand the school-yard tragedies at places like Littleton, Jonesboro, and, more recently, Red Lake, Minnesota? What's causing so many young females to become violent? And why are so many of America's young people depressed, angry, high, or out of control?
There are the obvious reasons: the easy availability of guns in the United States, fatherless homes and the abandonment of traditional values, rap music that extols violence, guts exploding on video games, the testosterone-driven aggression surges of post-pubescent males, and the fact that more and more young females are getting involved with gangs. But there's another factor—a more subtle one—that's rarely examined. It's a factor that might help us understand many of the horrific problems of adolescence in America—the high suicide rate, the high crime rate, the violence, the frequency of teenage pregnancies, the drugs, the ennui, and the anger. For the first time in human history, we have artificially extended childhood well past puberty. Simply stated, we are not letting our young people grow up.
Through most of human history, our ancestors began to produce children shortly after puberty, just as the members of all nonhuman species do to this day. Whether we like the idea or not, our young ancestors must have been capable of providing for their offspring, defending their families from predators, cooperating with others, and in most other respects functioning fully as adults. If they couldn't function as adults, their young could not have survived, which would have meant the swift demise of the human race. The fact that we're still here suggests that most young people are probably far more capable than we think they are. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of—and buried—the potential of our teens. When and why did this happen, and what were the consequences?
DRAMATICALLY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON TEENS
Paul Koretz is a man with a mission. A Democratic assemblyman from Hollywood, he recently sponsored a bill in the California state legislature to raise the legal smoking age from eighteen to twenty-one. At the same time that a legislative committee was considering the bill, tens of thousands of American eighteen-year- olds were carrying heavy weapons and putting themselves in the line of fire in Iraq. Under the circumstances, some committee members thought it seemed hypocritical of them to think about denying eighteen, nineteen, and twenty-year-olds the right to risk damaging their health by smoking.
The committee stalled the legislation, but, spurred by California's powerful medical lobby, legislators had considered similar legislation before, and they'll probably consider the same bill again in the future. Meanwhile, eighteen is still the cutoff age for smoking in California and many other states, presumably because a millisecond past midnight on the day we turn eighteen, we make a quantum leap in our ability to make sound judgments about the merits and demerits of smoking.
But do all eighteen-year-olds really exercise better judgment than all seventeen-year-olds? Do such legal prohibitions actually work? Do they have any negative consequences? And were seventeen-year-olds (not to mention five-year-olds and ten-year-olds) always prohibited from smoking?
Schoolyard Scuffle
A few years ago, when Edward Brand was superintendent of the Sweetwater Union High School District (located in San Diego County, serving about thirty-three thousand students in grades seven to twelve), he published a provocative essay proposing a simple way of improving secondary education in America.
Brand aptly noted that it's difficult to teach everything one needs to know about the modern world in just twelve years of schooling. That might have worked a hundred years ago, he said, but the world was largely agrarian back then. Some have said that the solution is to extend the school day, or at least to extend the school year, but that, Brand said, won't work. "[These] approaches raise the danger of learning burnout: Many students are easily overloaded by too much information for too long.
He didn't address the fact that our education system actually teaches many students very little—that twelve years of schooling in American schools (thirteen, with kindergarten) leaves many students unable to read or perform long division. According to a recent report, 47 percent of incoming freshman at California State University had to enroll in remedial English and 54 percent in remedial math. Nationwide, only about 22 percent of high school graduates are considered qualified to take many basic college courses, and performance levels have been flat for at least the last decade.
Brand also failed to note that most of our high school students think school is a waste of time. These omissions aside, he certainly identified a legitimate problem.
His proposal was to add not just "a few more minutes to the school day or a few more days each year" but to extend secondary school "by years"—specifically, to add grades thirteen and fourteen to the school curriculum:
Imagine what students could achieve in that time. From mastering a foreign language, to getting another year of science and English under their belts, students would have greater opportunities to develop the foundation of knowledge requisite for the new millennium.... Extended schooling would mean more time for courses in fine arts, computers, and electives where students could explore special interests and career-related subjects.... Learning from a place of maturity would be another benefit. At age eighteen and nineteen, students are more likely to take their studies more seriously.
More recently, Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, lamenting the fact that 30 percent of our young people never finish high school, has called for extending the mandatory school age to twenty-one.
Contrast the proposals of Brand and Weaver with the dark and disturbing views of another prominent educator, John Taylor Gatto. Gatto, an extraordinary jack-of-all-trades, earned his main living as a teacher in the New York City school system, where he taught for more than thirty years. Gatto was named New York City Teacher of the Year three times, in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1990 and 1991. That year, announcing his intentions in an Op Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Gatto quit being a teacher, saying he could no longer stand "hurting children."
Gatto pulled no punches, insisting among other things that:
Government schooling... kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and teaching disrespect for home and parents....
David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: ...when both are 13, you can't tell which one learned first.... But in school I label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and when to stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education" fodder. She'll be locked in her place forever....
I can't teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know.
Following the publication of this bombshell and Gatto's subsequent resignation, he was invited to give hundreds of talks worldwide in which "hungry" audiences reveled in the truth he seemed to be revealing. He also published several provocative books proposing radical changes in the education system—all of which has led to exactly nothing. Our schools, caught in a tangled web of unions, politicians, and regulations, are a tough nut to crack. Even when it looks like change is coming, it often turns out to be illusory. As Yale educator Seymour Sarason said in his classic text, Culture of the School and the Problem of Change, when it comes to the American education system, "Plus a change, plus c'est la mme chose" ("The more things change, the more they stay the same").
To Gatto, government-run schools do little more than warehouse young people, stifling creativity, initiative, a love of learning, and the rugged individualism that built America in its early years. In The Underground History of American Education, published in 2001, he also complained, quite explicitly, about the artificial extension of childhood:
During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was... adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people didn't stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. The intention was ultimately to draw all work into the school net. By the 1950s it wasn't unusual to find graduate students well into their thirties, running errands, waiting to start their lives.
Who is right? Is mandatory public schooling so valuable in the modern world that, as Brand says, young people need to get a lot more of it, or is it, as Gatto says, a root of great weakness in our society? Where did mandatory schooling come from in the first place? Were young people always required to attend full days of school up to age sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, as they are today? If not, how, if at all, did they get the education they needed to function? Are there any rational alternatives to full-time mandatory public schooling in today's complex world? I'll offer answers to the various questions I've posed as we go along, and some, I think, will surprise you.
TREATING TEENS LIKE CHILDREN
Are American teens really infantilized? Diane Dumas and I approached this issue recently by asking a hundred teens between thirteen and seventeen in seven locations around the United States (three in California, one in Florida, one in Tennessee, one in Texas, and one in Georgia) to complete a checklist of forty-two restrictions that adults—or at least adults who aren't incarcerated or in the military—virtually never face but that very young children face frequently. (See box, Measuring Infantilization in Teens.) The higher the score, the more restrictions one faces. If you're over eighteen, when was the last time you were given a "time out" or sent to your room? When were you last forced to undergo medical treatment against your will? When did someone last confiscate your personal property or search your bedroom? When were you last spanked as a punishment for misbehaving?
Not recently, I suspect. But our respondents scored surprisingly high on this scale. On average, they had "regularly or routinely" experienced more than twenty-six of these restrictions since they were thirteen, and seventy-four of the teens scored between twenty-two and forty (meaning that the distribution of scores was skewed toward the high numbers). Four of the respondents said they had regularly or routinely experienced forty out of the forty-two restrictions. Again, keep in mind that adults over eighteen (outside of institutional settings or the military) should, in a perfect world, tend to score near zero on this scale.
To find out how adults score on the infantilization scale, I administered it recently to twenty-five noninstitutionalized adults in the San Diego area, twenty-four United States Marines on active duty (at Camp Pendleton in Southern California), and thirty-two incarcerated felons (at a county prison in the San Diego area). One would think that military personnel—obligated to follow orders without question—and prisoners—stripped of most of their rights by the criminal justice system—would be far more encumbered than noninstitutionalized teens.
But that's not what I found. Noninstitutionalized adults indeed scored near zero on the scale (2.3 out of a possible 42), but teens outscored prisoners and soldiers by a large margin (26.6 for teens vs. 14.6 for prisoners and 10.9 for soldiers). Even with these small samples, the differences in these scores were, from a statistical standpoint, highly significant. In other words, teens appear to be subjected to about twice as many restrictions as are prisoners and soldiers and to more than ten times as many restrictions as are everyday adults.
So teens really do undergo a wide variety of very specific restrictions, and there are even movements afoot to increase those restrictions. Teens aren't just imagining this, and sometimes they get angry about it. Why? Because their bodies and brains are screaming, "I'm an adult," just as evolution intended, while parents and other authority figures are replying, "No, you're still a child. Now take out the garbage before I ground you."
TEENS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
To put those restrictions in perspective, try to envision what a teen's life was like two hundred years ago. The Industrial Revolution was barely off the ground (the steam engine was invented in England in 1763), and life was largely agricultural. Young people worked side by side with their parents as soon as they were able, as they still do in many countries around the world, and, shortly after puberty, boys often left the family to learn a trade. Couples married and had children young, which made sense considering that the average life span for males was only 38.3 years in 1850.
Were there any rules or laws that prevented young people from smoking, drinking, working, riding a horse, or driving a buggy? Were there any restrictions at all on the behavior of teens? And did "adolescence," defined by pioneering psychologist G. Stanley Hall in 1904 as a period of "storm and stress," even exist?
Consider a few landmark dates in human social history:
• In 1788 England's Parliament passed landmark legislation prohibiting children under eight from working as chimney sweeps, but the law was routinely ignored, and it remained common for decades for four-year-olds to perform this unpleasant and sometimes dangerous job.
• Nearly a century later, in 1878, legislation in England raised the minimum work age to ten for factories and workshops. In addition, employers in those settings now had to restrict the employment of young people between ten and fourteen to consecutive half-days or alternate full days.
• By 1900 more than two million young people between ten and fifteen were working full-time in the United States—a huge number, considering that the total population was only seventy-six million. In 1916, the United States Congress—for reasons we'll explore later—passed a law prohibiting young people under fourteen from working in nonagricultural trades, but two years later the United States Supreme Court struck down that law on technical grounds.
• Between 1883 and 1890, roughly twenty-five states passed laws prohibiting the sale of tobacco to young people under certain ages: fourteen in Maryland, eighteen in South Carolina, and sixteen in most other states. Before the 1880s, it appears that no such restrictions existed. In any case, such laws were largely ineffective.
• The first comprehensive law in the United States that explicitly prevented young people from drinking alcohol wasn't passed until the end of Prohibition, in 1933. It allowed states to pick a minimum drinking age of eighteen or twenty-one. Before the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1919, which prohibited all alcohol consumption, young people in many states were generally free to drink without restriction, subject mainly to the particular wishes of their parents. According to legal scholar James F. Mosher, in the late eighteenth century "adolescents saw drinking as a part of adult life and with adult encouragement openly experimented with adult drinking norms. Boys as young as twelve were often seen entering public taverns to drink."
With today's mind-set, we can't help but interpret such laws in a positive light. Clearly, most people would say, these laws must have been passed because (a) young people were being abused, and these laws were needed to protect them, and (b) young people were incapable—or, to be precise, most or all young people were incapable—of handling the rights and responsibilities that these laws took away. But, as you'll see, the truth is not so simple.
Whatever the origins of these various restrictions and whatever the motives behind them, it's clear that the many ways in which we limit the behavior of teens today came about relatively recently in human history—mainly within the last hundred years. Some of these restrictions might have made sense at one time and in certain contexts, but in a very different world, they make no sense at all.
In Chapter Two, we'll look more closely at the sequence of events that embody the artificial extension of childhood, at the motives behind some of those events, and at the multiple consequences of those events—some of which were both unintended and harmful.
HUMAN RESOURCES AT RISK
"Adolescent" is defined in modern society as a person in turmoil, and the toll that turmoil takes on our teens, our families, and our society is enormous. That's one reason we need to reexamine the nature and plight of adolescence, but there's another, less glamorous, but perhaps even more important reason: young people are capable of making great contributions to society, but they currently have virtually no way of being heard. As we'll see in future chapters, in times past young people often accomplished great things; it's tough for them to do so in today's America.
When we restrict the rights and activities of young people—say, the more than twenty million people in the United States between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, or the more than one billion teens that exist worldwide (more than one-sixth of the world's population)—in some sense we throw them away, just as much of the world still discards women, the elderly, and various minorities.
Not long ago mainstream American males firmly believed that blacks were idiots who needed to be treated like children, that women were inherently weak and delicate and could not function outside the home, and that the elderly were feebleminded—incapable of vitality or of making significant contributions to society. Gradually—with painfully small steps—we've put aside these preconceptions, accepting in various degrees four fundamental new ideas, which I call the "Enabling Premises."
Enabling Premise Number One: Individuals Are Unique
We've become increasingly sensitive to the fact that every person is unique and that any particular individual might not fit the stereotypes that sometimes accompany his or her age, gender, religion, or ethnic background.
When I was in graduate school, one of my undergraduate advisees was a young black man who had grown up on the streets of Boston. He was taking a seminar I was teaching on intelligence, and he was disturbed to learn that on a widely used IQ test, blacks, on average, scored lower than whites. I explained to him that although it's true that the average scores differed, it was also true that the range of scores was identical for blacks and whites; that is, both blacks and whites scored at both the bottom and the top of the IQ range. So an individual black or white could have any IQ at all. He wasn't reassured, unfortunately.
Stereotypes—sometimes based on averages and sometimes on nothing at all—are powerful things. But society seems to recognize, more and more, that the individual is indeed unique and that statistics and gossip are no substitute for the facts.
Enabling Premise Number Two: People Are Competent
We've moved away from a preoccupation with "traits" (like IQ and impulsiveness and introversion) in favor of a "competencies" view of human ability.
Traits are fixed and stable throughout one's life, and although it's true we have some relatively enduring tendencies, we also are capable of enormous learning and flexibility. Beginning a half century ago, pioneering researchers such as the late David McLelland began to develop tools that size people up in a humane and rational way:
instruments that measure an individual's "competencies"—real and potential abilities to behave in various ways. Once you dissect some area, such as leadership, into competencies, you can both measure and train those competencies.
Today it's common for major business and all branches of the military to measure and train leadership competencies. Rather than simply labeling someone as a "natural born leader"—and throwing away everyone else—we've gotten increasingly adept at improving the leadership skills of almost anyone, and the competencies approach is proving itself in many areas, including stress-management, motivation, relationships, parenting, and even creativity. The competencies perspective is about as positive and humane as you can get; the trait perspective, by comparison, is wasteful and demeaning.
Enabling Premise Number Three: People Have Unrealized Potential
We've come to realize that where someone is now—his or her current set of competencies, if you will—doesn't necessarily tell us how far he or she might be able to go.
With appropriate training and experience, one can continue to grow and develop in significant ways throughout one's life. Drug addicts and alcoholics often recover; criminals often reform; and in today's fast-paced society, technophobes inevitably find themselves carrying MP3 players, cell phones, and PDAs, and people are increasingly likely to make radical career changes at some point.
Although IQ—a measure of logical reasoning ability—stays relatively stable over the course of one's life,1 we tend to put more emphasis these days on a potpourri of "intelligences," including so-called "emotional intelligence," most of which turn out to be trainable competencies. We're more open to asking what a person's potential is, rather than sizing him or her up based merely on current performance.
Enabling Premise Number Four: Labels Are Dangerous
Finally, we've become increasingly wary of labels—not just epithets but any labels that imply limits on how a person might perform or what a person might become. In the mental health field, for example, many mental health professionals have become increasingly critical of the "DSM"—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the standard compendium of labels for mental health problems. Although therapists are forced to use these labels in order to get insurance reimbursements, many have become dissatisfied with this diagnostic system, because it invariably simplifies complex problems; it's difficult to fit an individual's unique signature into a little box without misrepresenting that person or at least omitting important details. As the famous Rosenhan study showed decades ago, labels like "schizophrenic" are sometimes used recklessly by poorly trained professionals.2 Modern political correctness also discourages labeling, zealously forcing us to abandon disparaging labels (like "retarded") in favor of kinder, more optimistic designations (a "developmentally disabled" individual, a person with "special needs"). Diversity training in schools and businesses also discourages labeling, reminding us to avoid putting people in boxes.
Implications for Teens
We've been learning to apply these premises to various minorities, to women, and, lately, to the elderly. Applied to teens, the Enabling Premises have clear implications: Teens need to be judged (a) as individuals, not as a group, (b) based on their competencies, not on their age, (c) based on their potential for learning and growth, not merely on their current characteristics, and (d) without disparaging labels like "adolescent," which imply limits or flaws.
CONVERGING EVIDENCE
Although the Theory of Evolution is called a "theory," most scientists these days consider it a fact. In the 1930s a "Grand Synthesis" of information from a half dozen fields—paleontology, archeology, geology, and so on—all pointed with enormous consistency to the same idea: that species on earth evolved over millions of years through a process of natural selection. If one or more disciplines had turned up contradictory evidence, the theory would have been on weaker ground. Converging evidence from multiple sources is pretty convincing.
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As I hope you'll discover in this volume, the theses I'm putting forth—that adolescence is a historical anomaly, that we infantilize our young people unnecessarily and extremely, that many or most teens are capable of functioning as adults in a number of ways, and that infantilization has serious negative consequences for our society—are also supported by converging evidence from multiple fields.
History
The historical record is every bit as revealing as the geological record. There is simply no question that teens throughout history were integrated into adult society much earlier than they are today and that the tumultuous period that defines adolescence today probably never existed until recent times. See Chapter Two.
Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Studies
To this day, teens in many cultures around the world, especially in preindustrial nations, grow up much sooner than they do in the United States, apparently without ever experiencing the turmoil of adolescence. Margaret Mead's classic book, Coming of Age in Samoa, described a peaceful society in which adolescence as we know it appeared not to exist. Although subsequent researchers have questioned some of Mead's claims, there is overwhelming contemporary evidence from other cultures that supports the idea that adolescence is not a necessary stage of development. See Chapter Three.
Rehabilitation
Programs like the original Boys Town (but not its current manifestation) were able to help troubled youths by putting them in charge of their lives. Boys Town was a real town, run from top to bottom by the troubled young men who came to live there. Contemporary programs like Outward Bound also work on this premise—that one of the most effective ways to straighten people out is to inoculate them with a significant dose of responsibility and authority. In Chapter Four, we'll look at a number of programs of this sort and, in some cases, the dramatic changes they produce in young people.
Psychology
Studies show that our cognitive abilities are fairly sophisticated—more-or-less fully developed, in fact—around the time of puberty. Jean Piaget, the eminent Swiss psychologist, said we achieve "formal operational" thinking—or at least that some of us do—by age twelve or so and that there isn't anywhere to go after that. What's more, according to Piaget, many people never become capable of this kind of thinking, no matter how old they are. But aren't some teens shoddy thinkers? Of course, but so are many adults, and by infantilizing teens, we probably retard intellectual development in some individuals. More on this later, especially in Chapter Seven.
A CHORUS OF CRITICS
I'm not the first person to have noticed and been disturbed about the ways in which our perspective on young people has changed over the last century. I've already mentioned John Gatto's dismay, but he turns out to be one of many.
Holt, Farson, and Liedloff
The late John Holt, an accomplished teacher as well as a pioneer in the modern home schooling movement, condemned the "sentimental prison" we've built around children in his 1974 book Escape from Childhood. Holt had been inspired in part by the radical social thinker Ivan Illich. In a polemical book called Deschooling Society, published in 1973, Illich strongly condemned organized schooling as harmful to children.
In Escape from Childhood, Holt went much further than Illich, arguing that children "of whatever age" should be granted a number of "rights," including:
• The right to vote
• The right to work
• The right to own property
• The right to travel
• The right to choose one's guardian
• The right to a guaranteed income
• The right to legal and financial responsibility
• The right to control one's learning
• The right to use drugs
• The right to drive
• The right to control one's sex life.
Also in 1974, psychologist Richard Farson published a book that was quite similar to Holt's called Birthrights: A Bill of Rights for Children, in which he listed ten rights that children should be given, including the right to "freedom from physical punishment" and the right to "responsive environmental design" (meaning chairs, tools, and such, should be manufactured in small sizes).
Holt, now a cult figure in the home schooling movement, complained of a "Great Divide" that had been created in recent times to separate children from adults. "What is both new and bad about modern childhood," said Holt, "is that children are so cut off from the adult world."
A similar theme is developed in yet another 1970s book, The Continuum Concept, by Jean Liedloff—also a cult figure today. After living with a primitive South American tribe for an extended period, Liedloff concluded that our own children need to be integrated into adult society from an early age and that it's a mistake for us to isolate and shelter them.
Historians and Social Scientists
Many historians of childhood—Philippe Aris, J. H. Plumb, Hugh Cunningham, Marc Kleijwegt, and others—have also pointed out that young people today are sheltered far more than they were before the industrial age. And various anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars, such as Pierre Dasen of the Universit? de Genve, the French psychiatrist Patrice Huerre, and the Indian scholar T. S. Saraswathi, have long suggested that adolescence as we know it in the West doesn't exist in most preindustrial nations, where young people are typically integrated into adult society soon after puberty.
Huerre, a therapist and expert on teen violence, is especially passionate about these issues. In France in the 1990s, with colleagues Martine Pagan-Reymond and Jean-Michel Reymond, Huerre argued forcefully that adolescence in France was a recent and very dangerous cultural invention.3
A 2004 book published in the United Kingdom by English psychiatrist Philip Graham raises similar concerns. Drawing on his more than twenty-five years of experience as a clinician working with teens in a children's hospital setting, Graham cites the "disastrous consequences" that result when we "infantilize and disempower" teens. When teens are miserable, says Graham, "it is the powerless predicament in which they find themselves that is often responsible." His recommendation? "[We] should stop infantilizing young people and allow them to reclaim the independence to which their competence entitles them."
WHY THIS BOOK?
If a parade of distinguished scholars has already noticed and sometimes even expressed concern about the artificial extension of childhood, why hasn't anyone paid attention, and why, if anything, has the turmoil of adolescence increased? Why, for goodness sake, are there people out there trying to extend childhood even further? And why have I bothered to write this book?
I've asked myself questions of this sort many times over the nine years I've been investigating this matter. Here are the answers I have so far.
First, societal thinking sometimes gets stuck. When, for several generations, people have looked at an issue a certain way, it's almost impossible for them to see things differently. We now take it for granted, for example, that child labor laws and laws requiring mandatory education are both good and necessary, even though today's world is radically different than the one that gave rise to these laws. Maybe the case against the artificial extension of childhood needs to be made repeatedly—and more forcefully—for the message to sink in. I'll examine this issue head-on toward the end of the book.
Second, some previous writers—Holt and Farson, especially—had political agendas that may have undermined their ability to promote real change. The problems created by the artificial extension of childhood should be of concern to a broad spectrum of people—left-wing, moderate, and conservative, religious and nonreligious—not just to those on the fringes. My presentation will, I hope, stimulate the thinking of a wide range of serious people—including some serious teens.
Third, some writers, like Gatto, talk about the artificial extension of childhood without taking on the burden of convincing readers that it really exists, or mention the infantilization of teens in a narrow context (Liedloff, Kliejwegt, Cunningham, and others). This volume presents the case comprehensively.
And finally, until now no one has, to my knowledge, (a) quantified the extent to which our young people are infantilized, (b) demonstrated a link between infantilization and the turmoil we see in our young people, or (c) directly compared the competencies of young people with those of adults. This volume presents original and compelling data in all three of these areas (Chapters One, Five, and Six).
Recently Tom Smith, a polling expert at the University of Chicago, published the results of a poll of fourteen hundred adults who were asked, among other things, when adulthood now begins in the United States. At eighteen, perhaps, when teens can vote and own property and enroll in the military without parental permission? How about at twenty-one, when young people can buy alcohol? The answer was twenty-six, signifying, said Smith, that the public has come to accept an "extended adolescence." The artificial extension of childhood, it seems, is getting worse.
Q: Childhood is a wonderful time of life—a time for fun and exploration, when all of our needs are met and nothing is expected from us in return. Aren't we doing our teens a favor by extending childhood?
A: Driven by evolutionary imperatives established thousands of years ago, the main need a teenager has is to become productive and independent. After puberty, if we pretend our teens are still children, we will be unable to meet their most fundamental needs, and we will cause some teens great distress. When a young person says "I am not a child," we need to listen carefully.
Endnotes have been omitted, but bottom-of-page notes are included here:
1 This applies only to IQ scores and not to intelligence itself. Intelligence actually changes dramatically and predictably over the course of one's life. More about this in Chapter Seven.
2 In the early 1970s, David L. Rosenhan of Stanford University sent eight normal people to various psychiatric facilities complaining of hearing voices but showing no active symptoms of mental illness. Even so, all were admitted and labeled as mentally ill, and even upon discharge some were labeled schizophrenic "in remission."
3 In a volume first published in 1990 and then issued in a new edition in 1997, Huerre and colleagues insisted that adolescence was a "heavy burden" that has been "socially constructed and then managed by people other than adolescents—and too often for the benefit of others. " The book is called l'Adolescence n'existe pas ("Adolescence Doesn't Exist"), which presumably reflects what the authors wish were true, not what really is. It begins with an intriguing quote from novelist Marcel Proust which suggests that it's really adulthood that doesn't exist—that adulthood is just extended adolescence: "C'est avec des adolescents qui durent un assez grand nombre d'anne?s que la vie fait ses vieillards" ("It is with adolescents who last for a rather long time that life produces its old people").
CHAPTER 1 SIDEBARS:
YOUNG PEOPLE IN ACTION
Sixteen-Year-Old "Children"
From a recent newspaper: Two San Diego high school teachers were placed on paid leave recently for showing their sixteen-year-old students the infamous videotape of the recent beheading of American Nick Berg by Muslim extremists. Parents complained that the school should have asked for their permission before showing their "impressionable children" this disturbing tape. Some students defended the teachers, saying that the material was "relevant to learning about war." But school superintendent Terry Ryan said that teachers don't have "academic freedom to cause unfettered emotional and psychological damage to children." Teachers have been ordered not to show the tape, and the school district has adjusted its Internet filters "to block Berg's name and the words 'beheading' and 'beheaded.'" California's Education Code prohibits the teaching of "harmful matter without redeeming social importance." Teaching teens—only a year or two away from the age of military service—about the brutality of terrorism serves no such purpose, according to school officials.
The Prom Police
In Texas recently, a teacher was fired for inviting a student to the prom. That's defensible, perhaps, but in May 2006 at the Pearl River Central High School in Mississippi, eighteen-year-old senior Leah Lott was forbidden from bringing her boyfriend to the prom because he was over twenty. The boyfriend, Chris Raffo, a U.S. Marine who had been granted a leave to attend the prom, was twenty-one. And in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the dates of six high school students were denied prom entrance because "background checks" had revealed that they had misdemeanors on their records (like underage drinking). According to a recent article in Time magazine, more schools nationwide are now requiring pre-screening of prom dates and are becoming increasing selective about whom they'll admit —all in the name of protecting our vulnerable and incompetent young.
Alexander the Great
The Greek king Alexander III (356-323 B.C.E.), also known as Alexander the Great, had significant power by age sixteen. He founded his first colony at that age, calling it Alexandroupolis. At sixteen, he also suppressed a revolt in another colony when his father was away. At age twenty, he may also have played a role in his father's murder, which made Alexander king of Macedonia.
Queen and King of Clubs
Already champion jugglers when they were twelve and fifteen, respectively, California residents Olga and Vova Galchenko—now fifteen and eighteen—hold the world records for people juggling ten clubs (378 catches), eleven clubs (152 catches), and twelve clubs (52 catches). According to fellow performer Penn Jillette, "If you're talking about club passing, the two of them together are the best in the world. Not just the best in the world. The best there has ever been."
* * * * * * * *
MEASURING INFANTILIZATION IN TEENS
Since you were thirteen years old, have adults regularly or routinely restricted your activities in any of the following ways?
1. Sent you to your room?
2. Listened in on your phone calls?
3. Restricted your phone use?
4. Cut off your allowance?
5. Restricted your driving privileges?
6. Confiscated your personal property?
7. Grounded you?
8. Searched your room without your permission?
9. Violated your privacy?
10. Restricted your use of the Internet?
11. Restricted your television use?
12. Restricted your use of videos or CDs?
13. Prevented you from getting a tattoo or piercing?
14. Prohibited you from changing your hairstyle?
15. Restricted the way you can dress?
16. Prohibited you from associating with certain friends?
17. Spanked, paddled, or hit you?
18. Prohibited your friends from coming over?
19. Prohibited you from attending a dance, party, or club?
20. Prevented you from drinking alcohol?
21. Prevented you from smoking cigarettes?
22. Forced you to take medication?
23. Forced you to participate in a meal or social event?
24. Forced you to attend a summer camp or go on vacation?
25. Given you a time out?
26. Required you to take a shower or bath?
27. Restricted your sexual activity?
28. Tried to silence you?
29. Given you a curfew?
30. Required you to go to bed at a certain time?
31. Restricted your dating activities?
32. Forced you to attend school?
33. Required you to get certain grades?
34. Required you to get a job?
35. Forced you into psychotherapy?
36. Forced you to undergo medical treatment?
37. Forced you to go to church or synagogue?
38. Forced you to exercise or play sports?
39. Forced you play a musical instrument?
40. Required you to take dance or participate in other extracurricular activities?
41. Required you to take certain courses in school?
42. Restrained you physically or restricted your movements?
(Adapted from the Epstein-Dumas Test of Adultness)
_____________________________________________
An excerpt from the new book
THE CASE AGAINST ADOLESCENCE
Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen
by Robert Epstein, Ph.D.
Published by Quill Driver Books
and reprinted here with permission
ISBN: 188495670X
List Price: $24.95
LFB Price Only $18.95
You Save 24%!
The Case Against Adolescence is the winner of the July 2007 Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing
the Literature of Liberty. For more information about the Lysander
Spooner Awards, CLICK HERE.
To go to our full review, or to go to purchase the book, CLICK HERE.
The excerpt is the first chapter of the book, The Case Against Adolescence. Enjoy!
__________________________________________________
From The Case Against Adolescence by Robert Epstein, Ph.D.. Copyright © 2007 by Robert Epstein and reprinted here by permission of the publisher.
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