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It’s another spring evening at the Mall of America, where the Glitz
store is in full bloom with taffeta and tulle. Pastel Cinderella
dresses glimmer under the fluorescent lights, and the skirts bursting
from these sleeveless bodices are so lush, they make the satin wedding
gown I wore fourteen years ago seem downright drab. I touch the
bejeweled outer layer of a particularly lovely dress, and then I see
its $298 price tag, which further confirms the dowdiness of my own
once-upon-a-time princess costume (now stored dutifully in a cardboard
box in the basement, for posterity).
In any case, I’m not here for a dress, but for the teenagers who buzz around me, circling the racks and ducking in and out of dressing rooms with their selections. I’ve already spent countless hours in legitimate, moderated teen chat rooms, marveling at the banter among twelve- to fifteen-year-old boys and girls. Most recently they’ve been asking each other for advice about whether or not to have sex, what to do if your dad thinks you’re a ’ho, how to get a girl back, combating lust, and whether boys prefer shaved pubic hair on girls. Now I’m hoping to break out of the close, sweaty space of these anonymous chats and talk to some local teens face to face. I see a friendly looking girl at the rack with the jeweled skirt and I make my move.
Melissa, it turns out, is a junior from Lafayette, Minnesota (population 529), and she’s here shopping for the prom. She doesn’t have a date yet, but she plans to go either way, because, as she explains, prom is a very big deal. “I guess girls like to get all dolled up, it makes us feel important,” she told me shyly, averting her gaze. When I asked if she thought there would be drinking and drugs and sex at the prom, she looked a bit wounded. “No, I don’t think we really have that kind of thing,” she said.
Of the fifteen or so kids in my highly unscientific sampling at the mall that night, Melissa, the shy girl sporting a mouthful of braces and little or no make-up on her almost clear skin, was the only one who expressed such reassuring naivete.
If the lilac buds outside my window pop open today, then others were blooming yesterday along roadsides approximately seventeen miles south of here, and still more will be doing so tomorrow seventeen miles northward. Spring rolls along at a pleasantly predictable pace year after year, global warming or no. As it arrives, it greens the lawns, buds the trees, and transforms winter’s faded trash into dirty pinwheels to blow in the wind. Spring also heralds prom night, a cultural relic that UrbanDictionary.com now defines as an “unusual American custom in which otherwise Puritanical just-say-no parents support, tolerate, approve of, or feign ignorance and/or disapproval of teenage public drunkenness, destruction of hotel property, and lewd behavior.”
Today’s proms are not at all the crepe paper-and-punch affairs of times past. As the premiere social events of the teen season and the last hurrah of adolescence, today’s over-the-top, limo- and hotel-enhanced, booze- and sex-soaked proms might even be viewed as emblematic of the way everything about American adolescence has changed. And adolescence has changed, in that it now lasts for all of about twenty minutes—or twenty years, depending on how you look at it. We simultaneously want to accelerate childhood into adulthood, and spend our adulthood resisting the trappings of age and idolizing and emulating youth.
American adolescence is both the shortest and the longest it has ever been at any point in history, which isn’t saying all that much, since the term “teenager” with all its associated connotations was only first coined in 1942—prior to which the notion of an extended passage between childhood and adulthood had yet to be embraced in ideological or practical terms.
Modern adolescence has been defined as lasting until anywhere between age nineteen and thirty-four (the latter being the age of adulthood, as pinpointed by the $3.4 million “Transitions to Adulthood” project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation). Known as the Peter Pan syndrome, the trend of extended adolescence is represented by a growing number of twenty-somethings who depend on their parents well past the point of legal adulthood. According to the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, the number of young adults in their twenties living at home with their parents increased by fifty percent between 1970 and 1990. Today, sixty-three percent of college students say they plan to live with their parents after graduation.
Meanwhile, when does adolescence start? Scientists have noticed that this physiological phase begins as much as a year earlier with each passing generation. And younger adolescents’ exposure to sex, drugs, alcohol, and independence from parental authority is becoming more widespread and intense. Increasingly younger children are taking up the outer vestments of teendom. Meanwhile, the physical signs of puberty are also creeping down to affect eight-, seven-, even six-year-old girls (and the newest research suggests the age of puberty is also falling for boys). A century ago, the average age for a girl’s first period, or menarche, was about seventeen. Menarche now hits girls between twelve and thirteen. Alcohol, drugs, and sex are now typical, rather than exceptional, components of modern adolescence. Social research also shows the most influential forces in the lives of many teens shifting from family to peer culture, including the media, at younger and younger ages. This is not restricted to urban settings. Suburban high school students have sex, drink, smoke, use illegal drugs, and engage in delinquent behavior as often as urban public high school kids. This is according to senior researchers at the Manhattan Institute, who drew their findings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health—one of the most comprehensive and rigorous studies of American high school students. Regardless of where they live, students also engage in these behaviors much more often than most people realize.
The American press is saturated with stories about the “crisis of adolescence,” with new headlines literally every day. And then, every so often, someone cries foul, protesting all the fuss: “Shut up, already. They’re teenagers! Teenagers have always been reckless and there never were any good old days, so get over it!”
It’s an appealing sentiment, in a way. If we accept it at face value, we can let out a guilty little sigh and go back to business as usual, convinced that things are not, after all, so bad out there—and certainly not so much worse then when we were kids. This denial ought to hold up for as long as it takes to read the facts from a recent slew of news stories: The U.S. has the highest rates of teen pregnancy and births (and abortions) in the western industrialized world. Half of all fourteen-year-olds have been to a party with alcohol. Self-harm (cutting) is increasing among children as young as six. More than 79,000 teens under eighteen received cosmetic surgery in 2001, and 3,682 of those got fake breasts—up from 392 in 1994. Almost half of fourteen-year-olds report current drinking behavior; about a quarter report heavy drinking and marijuana use. Girls as young as twelve are reporting pressure to have sex. Twenty percent of twelve- to fourteen-year-olds have had sex. The percentage of sexually active eighteen-year-olds has risen steadily from twenty-three percent in 1959 to eighty percent in 1999. Sixty-six percent of all high school seniors have had sex. Half of all young people report experience with oral sex—which they, like Bill Clinton, don’t define as “sex.” American kids spend twenty-eight hours per week watching television. Childhood obesity has hit an all-time high. About three quarters of teens believe that the actions of other teens are influenced by the sexual behavior seen on television. Sixty-five percent of the sexually transmitted diseases diagnosed this year will be among people under twenty-five. A statewide study shows that ten percent of adolescent males in Minnesota have chlamydia. Teens are five times more likely to get herpes today than in 1970, and because most teens think oral sex is safe, record numbers of teens are contracting a strain of mouth herpes that was once associated only with genitals.
The story spins out as far as you can follow it and beyond, and in the end it should force us to wonder if, after all this, the kids are all right.
In any case, I’m not here for a dress, but for the teenagers who buzz around me, circling the racks and ducking in and out of dressing rooms with their selections. I’ve already spent countless hours in legitimate, moderated teen chat rooms, marveling at the banter among twelve- to fifteen-year-old boys and girls. Most recently they’ve been asking each other for advice about whether or not to have sex, what to do if your dad thinks you’re a ’ho, how to get a girl back, combating lust, and whether boys prefer shaved pubic hair on girls. Now I’m hoping to break out of the close, sweaty space of these anonymous chats and talk to some local teens face to face. I see a friendly looking girl at the rack with the jeweled skirt and I make my move.
Melissa, it turns out, is a junior from Lafayette, Minnesota (population 529), and she’s here shopping for the prom. She doesn’t have a date yet, but she plans to go either way, because, as she explains, prom is a very big deal. “I guess girls like to get all dolled up, it makes us feel important,” she told me shyly, averting her gaze. When I asked if she thought there would be drinking and drugs and sex at the prom, she looked a bit wounded. “No, I don’t think we really have that kind of thing,” she said.
Of the fifteen or so kids in my highly unscientific sampling at the mall that night, Melissa, the shy girl sporting a mouthful of braces and little or no make-up on her almost clear skin, was the only one who expressed such reassuring naivete.
If the lilac buds outside my window pop open today, then others were blooming yesterday along roadsides approximately seventeen miles south of here, and still more will be doing so tomorrow seventeen miles northward. Spring rolls along at a pleasantly predictable pace year after year, global warming or no. As it arrives, it greens the lawns, buds the trees, and transforms winter’s faded trash into dirty pinwheels to blow in the wind. Spring also heralds prom night, a cultural relic that UrbanDictionary.com now defines as an “unusual American custom in which otherwise Puritanical just-say-no parents support, tolerate, approve of, or feign ignorance and/or disapproval of teenage public drunkenness, destruction of hotel property, and lewd behavior.”
Today’s proms are not at all the crepe paper-and-punch affairs of times past. As the premiere social events of the teen season and the last hurrah of adolescence, today’s over-the-top, limo- and hotel-enhanced, booze- and sex-soaked proms might even be viewed as emblematic of the way everything about American adolescence has changed. And adolescence has changed, in that it now lasts for all of about twenty minutes—or twenty years, depending on how you look at it. We simultaneously want to accelerate childhood into adulthood, and spend our adulthood resisting the trappings of age and idolizing and emulating youth.
American adolescence is both the shortest and the longest it has ever been at any point in history, which isn’t saying all that much, since the term “teenager” with all its associated connotations was only first coined in 1942—prior to which the notion of an extended passage between childhood and adulthood had yet to be embraced in ideological or practical terms.
Modern adolescence has been defined as lasting until anywhere between age nineteen and thirty-four (the latter being the age of adulthood, as pinpointed by the $3.4 million “Transitions to Adulthood” project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation). Known as the Peter Pan syndrome, the trend of extended adolescence is represented by a growing number of twenty-somethings who depend on their parents well past the point of legal adulthood. According to the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, the number of young adults in their twenties living at home with their parents increased by fifty percent between 1970 and 1990. Today, sixty-three percent of college students say they plan to live with their parents after graduation.
Meanwhile, when does adolescence start? Scientists have noticed that this physiological phase begins as much as a year earlier with each passing generation. And younger adolescents’ exposure to sex, drugs, alcohol, and independence from parental authority is becoming more widespread and intense. Increasingly younger children are taking up the outer vestments of teendom. Meanwhile, the physical signs of puberty are also creeping down to affect eight-, seven-, even six-year-old girls (and the newest research suggests the age of puberty is also falling for boys). A century ago, the average age for a girl’s first period, or menarche, was about seventeen. Menarche now hits girls between twelve and thirteen. Alcohol, drugs, and sex are now typical, rather than exceptional, components of modern adolescence. Social research also shows the most influential forces in the lives of many teens shifting from family to peer culture, including the media, at younger and younger ages. This is not restricted to urban settings. Suburban high school students have sex, drink, smoke, use illegal drugs, and engage in delinquent behavior as often as urban public high school kids. This is according to senior researchers at the Manhattan Institute, who drew their findings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health—one of the most comprehensive and rigorous studies of American high school students. Regardless of where they live, students also engage in these behaviors much more often than most people realize.
The American press is saturated with stories about the “crisis of adolescence,” with new headlines literally every day. And then, every so often, someone cries foul, protesting all the fuss: “Shut up, already. They’re teenagers! Teenagers have always been reckless and there never were any good old days, so get over it!”
It’s an appealing sentiment, in a way. If we accept it at face value, we can let out a guilty little sigh and go back to business as usual, convinced that things are not, after all, so bad out there—and certainly not so much worse then when we were kids. This denial ought to hold up for as long as it takes to read the facts from a recent slew of news stories: The U.S. has the highest rates of teen pregnancy and births (and abortions) in the western industrialized world. Half of all fourteen-year-olds have been to a party with alcohol. Self-harm (cutting) is increasing among children as young as six. More than 79,000 teens under eighteen received cosmetic surgery in 2001, and 3,682 of those got fake breasts—up from 392 in 1994. Almost half of fourteen-year-olds report current drinking behavior; about a quarter report heavy drinking and marijuana use. Girls as young as twelve are reporting pressure to have sex. Twenty percent of twelve- to fourteen-year-olds have had sex. The percentage of sexually active eighteen-year-olds has risen steadily from twenty-three percent in 1959 to eighty percent in 1999. Sixty-six percent of all high school seniors have had sex. Half of all young people report experience with oral sex—which they, like Bill Clinton, don’t define as “sex.” American kids spend twenty-eight hours per week watching television. Childhood obesity has hit an all-time high. About three quarters of teens believe that the actions of other teens are influenced by the sexual behavior seen on television. Sixty-five percent of the sexually transmitted diseases diagnosed this year will be among people under twenty-five. A statewide study shows that ten percent of adolescent males in Minnesota have chlamydia. Teens are five times more likely to get herpes today than in 1970, and because most teens think oral sex is safe, record numbers of teens are contracting a strain of mouth herpes that was once associated only with genitals.
The story spins out as far as you can follow it and beyond, and in the end it should force us to wonder if, after all this, the kids are all right.