A month ago I went to a bar in Madison with my mother and uncle while we were in town to see Hair, during which I poured my heart out about youth rights over loud energetic jazz and college students talking. We discussed a number of things, the biggest topics being education because my mother is a high school spanish teacher and my uncle is an english professor. My uncle was very engaged because he once taught classes on youth culture and could understand more of what I was talking due to him knowing more about it. To engage my mother, I brought up the Amethyst Initiative–we watched a segment about it on 60 Minutes together–and we went from there.
I once told my mother during the watching of the previously mentioned segment that she couldn’t necessarily stop me from drinking if I had picked it up. I also said, this time jumping back to the bar with my uncle, that if a kid starts drinking or having sex or whatever, that if they started their parents couldn’t necessarily stop them from doing it either: they’d just find a new way to keep it underground, and that worried me. But how he responded gave a very interesting insight on how people mature in this kind of a society.
You see, this topic prompted a discussion of how teenagers get drugs, –whether they go to a medicine cabinet in their own house or they take a weirder route, like wetting tampons with alcohol and shoving them up their asses–and my uncle then began to say that these behaviors — underage drinking, sex, and risky behavior in general — showed that maturity to many youths was now associated with self-destruction rather than responsibility. I praised him very audibly at the time, and still think about it to this day.
Primarily, I think it’s a very telling explanation of how young people can be portrayed to be so stupid by society. Most people see youths drinking, getting involved in having sex with each other or someone older, or even just staying out a bit late and they think they’re just destroying themselves, society, or are just plain old up to no good. To the young people actually doing these acts, they’re just rebelling, often having fun in the process. The huge problem with this rebellion, mostly in the case of drinking, is that it can become a problem, and the only reason it would is due to lack of parental involvement. But because they’re doing it anyway, despite what the law says, what society says, and, most importantly, what their own parents say, they are just thought of as stupid, punished, and left at that.
In that punishment they may be taken away from alcohol for a while, but they’ll still find more and keep drinking anyway. They live until they are at an older age where drinking is legal for them now, but they’ve never really been informed about their drinking, besides that it is a destructive activity no matter how they do it. Drinking is a destructive behavior, so it is somewhat believable, but definitely not in moderation. Still, they’re now drinking because they’re addicted anyway and can’t stop themselves. Let’s say they die somewhere outside of their home, say in a bathroom at a bar, and when the media catches wind of it they have a field day about how disturbing it is. Then the media interviews people close to this person and learn that this person has always had a drinking problem, and from such a young age of all things! It is a assured that there will be a note in the article about how legislation is getting tougher on underage drinking and how great it is that we have such protections for our future policemen and politicians. How wonderful contemporary western society is!
But they don’t see the real story! They don’t see that the only thing that had to happen was for this person’s parents to teach them simple responsibility and they could’ve drank for the rest of their lives and nobody would ever see a problem in this person. Still, it just can’t be that way for mainstream society. It’s much easier to stick to how things are and work with that rather than trying something new and seeing if it works; it’s easier to hate than to love.
Here are some concepts that I’ve felt existed but needed to be written about. Feel free to use them, that’s what they’re here for:
Negative agism: used often in reference to primitive biases, where youths have no protections from anything for any reason and they are directly quieted by society.
Positive agism: used mainly for modern biases, where young people have, in most cases, too many protections or entitlements, and, while they may be able to voice their opinion, they are indirectly quieted by society with a phrase like “come back when you’re old enough to vote” or other excuses.
I think we could all get a little use out of these terms. Your thoughts?
I’ve just finished taking two days’ worth of standardized testing at school, so I’m tired. I have a post in progress, but right now I’d just like to sit and not think or write. I went to Hair recently, and it started with the hippies in the audience smoking weed, handing out flowers, and hanging out. This is what one told me after he gave my mother a flower and a hug: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
As long as adults hold fiscal and legal power over youth, it couldn’t be truer.
I spent today watching Oprah for the sex talk a guest doctor helped give to a woman’s 10 year-old daughter. The mother was incredibly nervous–and even teared up–simply because she didn’t want to “say the wrong thing to [her] daughter.” And very reasonable, because the way children are raised they can become very frightened of something seemingly threatening. In this case, however, it went very well.
They brought the daughter in, and she led the discussion by her questions. She started out with “What is sex?” and they worked their way to periods and then general female anatomy. They didn’t really talk about masturbation so much, but the doctor mentioned that there are nerve-endings in the vagina, which makes a pleasurable sensation when touched. The only reason it was mentioned was just in case she had, the doctor didn’t want her to feel odd about it. Everyone thought it was over the top when she suggested that girls try little external vibrators to experiment with themselves, but even with that I can’t feel anything she said was wrong, misleading, or inaccurate.
During a point in the discussion with the audience, Gail specifically said that teenagers know too much about sex and such, so she has no problem giving them only a little bit of information. The audience clapped, but it isn’t a good response to have for such a topic because not telling them such information only leads to isolation. The very idea of making it punishable should they tell you they have sex or masturbate is already what makes such a gap in the parent-child relationship so big, with 61% of girls uncomfortable talking about sex with their mothers.
They really are right when they say that communication is the big issue, but they’re wrong in trying to push the blame on teenagers, like when selected expert Terri Apter, PhD, said in the previously linked article, “This is a difficult conversation, and our daughters don’t make it easy for us” when the easiest change is for mothers to stop thinking less of their children because they have a developing sexuality.
To learn more about the segment on Oprah, you can look through here for more.
Something odd I’ve noticed–and others, I’m sure–is that there is barbed wire around the track field’s fence at my school. There isn’t anything important on the field that isn’t either too heavy to move or attached to the ground. Anything that is used there is actually locked up in the school, probably in the offices of each individual coach. The barbed wire leans into the field, not out from it. If someone were to get in, it would make it that much easier, but if you wanted to get out it would actually make it more difficult. It’s strange, but I’ve never really understood it.
I’ve also never understood the red barricade on the glass doors near the auditorium. It’s chained with a padlock to one of the doors, but all you have to do is lift it and you can leave the school. The door on the outside doesn’t have any handles, however: they have been removed some time ago, most likely by force. So once someone is out the doors, they’d have to knock and hope someone is nearby to hear them and open up, or go around to the main office doors. You still can’t go in the office doors because you want to, though: you have to ring them on this little speaker built into the door, and tell them what you’re doing at the school to be let in.
Even more nonunderstandable are the school’s bathrooms. This only applies to the boys’ bathrooms, but none of them have stalls with doors. Apparently, the boys can’t be trusted with the stall doors, because they might be smoking weed or masturbating inside them. They tried putting curtains up as a substitute, but someone lit fire to one. So they took them down and that was that. It reminds me of what I heard in An American GULAG: new students can’t be trusted, and they must stick by their assigned buddy — even if they must go to the bathroom. All these seem to stick to a certain theme. Not just a lack of privacy, but sort of like a feeling of being watched, of being known, like “we know how your kind operate, so don’t resist.”
With The Secret Life of the American Teenagermaking waves on ABC Family, it has inspired many to talk about teenage pregnancy and sexual activity. Although I’ve never been able to catch it on TV, it’s remarkable how it questions what “family” is despite the fact that teenage pregnancy is something that happens with many families — it’s not exactly uncommon. Tara Parker-Pope of Wellmakes it seem like 47.8% is a pretty small number, but it’s almost the majority (and apparently most teenagers were having sex in the ’90s). Not like it really matters or anything, if someone wants to have sex and aren’t of the current legal age, I wouldn’t surely wouldn’t be the one to speak up and stop that person.
It’s like a conversation I had with my parents during 60 Minute’s take on the Amethyst Initiative’s national debate on the drinking age. Although it was intended for drinking under the age, it still applies for all youth rights issues: it’s not a matter of whether or not they wanted me doing it, but whether or not I am and how they’re going to teach me about it. This point was expressed very well by Meade in his post “Dumbing Down with Leapfrog,” that parents should be more involved with their kin, not gadgets or third parties. When we stop letting the middle man raise our kids, we’ll find getting to maturity, not “growing up”, less of a just getting there type of a goal but a fun journey.
Even teenage sex isn’t as bad as the public thinks it. It may be illegal, but it’s due to uneducated thinking, not morality. You see, most often when teenagers have sex under age, it’s experimental, like many other young people’s actions. The reason oral sex is so popular is because it doesn’t impregnate heterosexual couples having it, and it’s a simple way to give a partner pleasure without seeming to not be a virgin. Just imagine having sex for the first time legally when ones partner remarks that it was strangely easy to penetrate the other. In that case it isn’t really an issue of being or not being a virgin, but of being a “virgin.” It’s the same reason I agreed to oral when I had sex for the first time, just a few weeks ago: it’s just easier and it’s a lot less of a mess.
Also, congrats to Alfie Patten and Chantelle Steadman and their baby, Maisie!
Kids in sociology class came to our class Friday and asked us a series of random questions, one asking what students thought of teenage marriage. Out of 32 students, 83% were for it; the rest either against or didn’t vote.
You read the title: it’s pretty self explanitory. The commercial is still pretty new, and I’ve only just now gotten around to posting about it. Just watch and be wowed:
It’s such a great example, and no self-filtering involved whatsoever! It’s so bad it’s good!
Meade wrote about them here, but only now have I totally gotten the effect of “phantoms” in a social bias. I’ll start with a quote from the post, which explains what “phantom” means, and then explain the minor epiphany:
For children, there is no objective good. Often when people talk about protecting the innocence of children they assume there is one measurable standard of care that necessarily benefits them. This is in terms of popular consciousness, because any professional will attest to the fact that for children there are possibly endless forms of adult intervention that serve to benefit the individual child. Popular consciousness tends to deride certain interventions with children as necessarily harmful or helpful regardless of their observable effects. Acts that are considered helpful and those that are considered harmful are only schematic categories. The only undeniable proof of their categorical representation ought to be externally visible on real life children—not phantoms.
ABC has a story about “Extreme Texting”, but its really a nonissue. It is constantly enforced through the article that it doesn’t interfere with the texter’s life, but they still like to insinuate it, like this:
Despite their possible near addiction to their electronic companions, extreme-texting teenagers often say the phones do not get in the way of their lives — they are just a part of it.
Kimberly Garcia, 15, sends more than 28,000 texts every month and once racked up a $700 texting tab before her parents got her an unlimited plan. She’s got no plans to slow down.
“I don’t think it’s extreme because, I mean, everybody does it,” she told “GMA.”
For Preston McVey, 17, who texts a relative scant 24,000 texts a month, texting does not interrupt his life. It just exists alongside it.
“I wouldn’t say it interferes that much,” he said. “I mean, it didn’t stop me from doing anything. I don’t take time out to text. I’ll text while I’m doing other things.”
It is a lot, but think about it: how many things do you say to a person in a conversation? A text is about 160 characters, so imagine how much time you waste gabbing to people face-to-face. I’d bet it would out-do texting times ten, at least. Continue Reading »
I don’t have any comments for the content of this article, but all I’d really like you to read is the headline. It is a very tiny snapshot of agist attitude in adults: one minute they can be very kind, but the next something a young person says to them gets them very frustrated. In the situation it can be anything that sets them off — even a simple mistake — but it does happen.
The headline: “‘Sexting’: Harmless Fun Or Child Pornography?” Savor it.
I was very happy while reading this article: everything was dealt with properly. There was no question that the app was unfair and they got rid of it very quickly, but it’s a total shame that it isn’t even that annoying (I use the mosquito tone to wake up every morning, anyway). I mean, just read some of this:
Alyn Smith MEP has campaigned against the Mosquito – which uses ultrasonic frequencies to disperse youths. It is now banned by several Scottish councils. He is angry that Apple let this “stupid bloody program” be sold by its store.
He said: “Why on earth would Apple alienate so much of their market? It’s a stupid decision on their part. They are usually pretty clever with their marketing and youth appeal. For them to sign off on something like this is shooting themselves in the foot.”
He added: “I look forward to a total EU-wide ban on this program, as well as the Mosquito, and to discussions on more productive ways of dealing with anti-social youths.”
Kathleen Marshall, Scotland’s Children’s Commissioner, disagrees. She promised action on the program and said: “The UN committee on the rights of the child has expressed concern about the use of the Mosquito devices on which this product is based. It is shocking that a product can be marketed with the aim of annoying or torturing’ teenagers.”
The firm’s claim that the device has some educational use were pooh-poohed by the Scottish Youth Parliament.
Steven Kidd, its development officer, said: “Whilst we’re sure many teens consider school to be torture, we doubt that there could be any educational use of the application. We hope that Apple will recognise “Teen Torture” as another cynical attempt to demonise law-abiding young people and move quickly to remove the item from its online store.”
Adults can also hear it, too, but just a minority. It’s too bad all the effort went to something so incredibly minor.
Because of our weird schedule at school, we had finals right before our two week winter break, and then we had two weeks after that of the remaining semester. To fill this time — in english class, anyway — we read The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
After a few jokes about the frequent film piracy habits of our teacher’s husband, and her saying “I told him that if I ever come home and see an FBI van outside the house, I don’t know you and I’ve never met you in my life” we read the story over the course of a few class periods, stopping every now and then to discuss events in the story.
I can’t say I didn’t like it, even though the story itself could have been a bit more eventful. I appreciate it most for its contrast, which is a great message against agism. The event of someone being born old implies that young people are not always what they seem to society, and that the elderly and adults are not necessarily wise or supreme. It also has the power to generate positive thought in people.
Take this comment I found quickly jotted down on one of the pages as a note: “Why does age matter? When do we stop wanting to seem older than we are?” Unfortunately, the note was most likely meaningless to the writer; a random scribbling just to abide the teacher by pretending to critically think. Still, I think I should at least respond to those questions: age doesn’t matter, and it is only when society collectively realizes this can we stop lying to ourselves about it.
Anybody else know of any youth rights friendly literature from the early 1900s and further before?
Tearaway teenagers identified by teachers as misbehaving at school are more likely to go on to experience difficulties in their adult lives, including depression and divorce, a major study has found. Continue Reading »
Should more teens be tried as adults? In this society, I have to say yes. It isn’t only teenagers that are committing more crime now, but even kids in elementary school.
A group of elementary school kids skip school constantly on my block, and have vandalized my house. These are only third- and fourth graders! Continue Reading »
An interesting stub in The Telegraph today, concerning teenagers using drugs. There are two places in it that I find interesting. The first is the statistics:
The study quizzed 172 15- and 16-year-olds preparing to sit their GCSEs about how they coped with the pressures of school.
Although many of them said they listened to music, watched TV, or played sport to reduce stress levels, 30 per cent said they drank alcohol, 16 per cent said they smoked and six per cent said that they used drugs. Continue Reading »
Still more good news coming your way: in Canada, two teenagers called 911 when they saw a woman being beaten:
“It’s pretty remarkable – I don’t know what other word to use – they were innocently coming home from tobogganing when they saw this unfold and I don’t think there was a moment they hesitated,” McCallum said.
She said the boy, who spotted the woman being attacked on Canyon Meadows Drive not only called on help but shouted at the assailant from some six metres away.
He gave a 911 official play-by-play of what was happening while reassuring the woman help was on the way, and telling the man to stop.
The man hasn’t been identified; however, the woman in the article survived by a small margin.
She was 17 when she met her boyfriend, and 20 when she died at his hands. In between, Heather Norris tried several times to leave the relationship, which was fraught with control and abuse, before she was killed — stabbed, dismembered and discarded in trash bags.
Her death in 2007 in Indianapolis is one of several stemming from abuse in teenage dating relationships that have spurred states and communities to search for new ways to impress on adolescents — and their parents and teachers — the warning signs of dangerous dating behavior and what actions are not acceptable or healthy.Continue Reading »
I still like doing my own writing, regardless of whether I can update regularly or not. To start:
The sooner children learn that electronic communications are not private, the better off they will be. Teenagers, and for that matter, many adults, seem to think that their electronic communications can remain private.Continue Reading »
I took a closer look at a post on Meade’s blog, Puerile Psyche, and decided to make this. Definitely not as good as it could have been, but I only have MS Paint.
I think it’s funny. What do you think? (Also, first person to say what they think it looks like is more immature than I am!)
The grieving parents of a boy fatally stabbed in a fight on a Sydney train have made an emotional appeal for kids not to carry knives, saying their son was too young to die.
Andrew Motuliki, 17, was stabbed in the chest with a large fishing knife allegedly after a fight broke out between two groups of teenagers on a train at Campsie station, in Sydney’s south-west, on Sunday afternoon.
I’m not going to try to minimalize the sadness of this boy dying, but it’s odd how adults tend to police young people unlike how they police themselves. This case is somewhat different–murder is obviously illegal young or not–but it still shares those same ideas. Few people would use this death as a nonviolence platform, but because the person that died was young, it now can be.
Mr Motuliki said Andrew, who played rugby union, had many friends and was loved by everyone.
“Seventeen years old, it was much too young for him to die,” he said.
“I would like to appeal to kids everywhere not to carry knives.
“They need to find out another way to solve their problems.”
Unfortunately, everyone dies too young, don’t they? As for the second bolded statement, adults also need to do this, but nobody says this because it’s implied: everybody should figure out how to solve their problems nonviolently, but adults have given up hope on themselves and insist on policing only one part of society and becoming desensitized to the rest. That’s a bigger shame than the death in this article.
A year and a half after the city closed schools for pregnant teens – vowing support to keep them in school – thousands are not enrolled and officials can’t track them, a report obtained by the Daily News reveals.
The report by the New York Civil Liberties Union found information about support services is hard to find, bureaucratic hurdles and poor staff training prevent teens from getting help, and many school-based day care centers are over capacity.
Out of all marginalized groups of teenagers, I think the pregnant have it worse. If they have their child during the school year, it is very hard for them to pass because of the work they miss. And, of course, if they wanted an abortion it would either be impossible, very improbable, or leave them even more hated. Then there’s systematic failures and horribly managed philanthropic enterprises, modern public schools being the former and the system discussed in the article being the latter.
About 40 school-based child care centers can serve 638 infants and toddlers, but students with kids aren’t guaranteed placements in those facilities.
[...]
Anderson said none will be closed this year, but could not guarantee their fate next year.
One day, after school, some friends and I were discussing the difference between beating a child and spanking a child. Unfortunately, it was the most awkward discussion, because I’m against it. Still, I didn’t feel like contributing, which I should have. But I did come up with a resolve that’s quotable:
When I grow up I don’t plan on hitting my kids. If you cannot reason with children, you shouldn’t be having them, anyway.
“On the bus we always get dirty looks,” says the 13-year-old boy outside the cinema in Haringey, North London. Then he snorts. “People would rather stand up than sit next to me.”
“I’ve had that,” agrees his friend. “I sat on this bench, yeah? And this woman got up and moved.” Behind them, a young mum is hovering with a pram. They are blocking the pavement and she wants to get past. So she waits, fretting.
This article is a total goldmine for quotes and such. It’s not a lie when they say things like this happen, and it happened even as they were being interviewed! I’ve had friends followed by adults in stores because they think my friends might steal something, classes have stopped occasionally just because the teacher thinks he or she heard a cell phone vibrate, and our school no longer allows bookbags at school because they are considered a safety concern. After weeks of complaining, the school newspaper wrote a story about the policies and the Dean of Students was quoted as saying “There have been no complaints.” So they’re protecting us from… us? Don’t worry, I have a million of them.
“If people come up and say you’re being a bit loud, we’ll keep it down,” shouts a girl. “But when people just go round giving us dirty looks…”
“We were sat over there,” shouts a boy. “A woman called the police. Five minutes later we were all moved.”
[...]
“None of us do bad stuff. Some people do bad stuff but we never do. Some people throw mud and stuff.”
“We don’t do it at them. We do it at each other.”
“But sometimes it hits one of them.”
“Like yesterday. When it hit her by accident. Everyone was throwing mud. Someone walked past and she was like shouting at us.”
“We’re safe here. We go down the hill, we might get mugged.”
It’s only when you start cruising around town looking for children (not something your correspondents have done before) that you start to realise how marginalised they are. They can’t go into pubs. They get kicked out of shopping centres. In the summer they can hang out in parks, but in winter it is a rare parent who would want all 20 of them in their front room. Thus they loiter, and not always with intent.
I like that they used to word “marginalized,” because it’s such an appropriate word for this. I’m from a small town, so people just don’t loiter, because there’s nowhere to loiter. Still, this sort of treatment is nothing new. If you host a party, there will eventually be a neighbor who calls the cops just so they can get the noise to stop.
The bolded part of this quote is pretty much the only part I can mention disagreeing with:
Nonetheless, while Rowe reckons that children and teenagers have always been prone to solipsism and aggression, she accepts that older generations may feel more disconnected from their young than ever before. “I’m 77,” she says. “I was a teenager before teenagers were invented. We had to dress like our mothers. We were middle-aged from about 12.”
And it’s not necessarily untrue, too. Young people might seem self-centered because that’s how they’re used to being treated; parents do everything that involves responsibility for their young. And the aggressiveness could often be attributed to the marginalization of young people. For example, if you ask a teenager a question, they may answer in a hostile or defensive manner simply because they’re so used to being asked tones that are condescending or interrogative–admittedly, I’ve done this before, too. Thus, the isolation from the “older generations“: they make us feel bad or disempowered, so we don’t talk with them just to avoid this happening.
It has a nice finale, too. Respect is a two way street:
What are we to make of this now, as Britain wrings its collective hands about Baby P, Shannon Matthews and yet another abused child, it seems, every other week? Perhaps we should conclude that Barnardo’s has a point: that our views of children are a mess and make little sense. As individuals they are something precious to be protected. As a group, a mob, they are something to be feared.
“A lot of adults are quite scared of children,” muses one of our mob in Muswell Hill. “But I don’t think we’re a very scary lot.”
“Yeah,” agrees another. “They should, like, think of the percentage of children that have actually done something wrong. You might as well say we should all be scared of adults, because a lot of adults commit crime. It doesn’t make sense.”
Bravo. They’ve got it all figured out. So why haven’t we?
