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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

• Percentage of American teenagers who report that their schoolwork makes them anxious: 82; Who report that their love life does: 57.
• Percentage of teenagers who lose their virginity in their own or their partner’s home: 54; In a parked car: 12.
• Percentage of teenagers’ favorite songs that they say are about sex, violence, satanism, or drugs: 7; Percentage they say are about love: 26.
• Percentage of U.S. teenagers who say they have engaged in oral sex: 55; Percentage who consider the practice “gross”: 55.
• Average self-esteem of a U.S. teenager, as measured by sociologists on a scale of 0 to 10: 7.6; Average self-esteem of a Baghdad teenager: 7.9.

These are only 5 pieces of information, though. You can see the rest here.

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 Teenager making 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 Well makes 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.

The child is nothing but a representation. If I were to say that children are harmed by sex, for instance, there is no specification of what children I am referring to, what type of harm is inflicted, to what degree the harm is inflicted, to what degree the harm can be reversed, and what type of sexual advance was administered. If these questions can not be answered, then what we are dealing with is a phantom child, a non-living spirit, a representation with no presence anywhere outside the mind, and an activity that also could be considered representational. What popular consciousness does is it replaces the real living and breathing child with a phantom representation, and asserts that some acts are necessarily harmful to it and that others are not. How can harm be inflicted on a phantom child? When we consider such statements as necessary truths, we show a great care for phantom children that we are depriving real living breathing children.

The rest is just a simple story. You see, I had been stumbling through the web, when I came across a video:

While I understand that it does take talent to play a musical instrument, and they’re playing quite well, I really didn’t care. Being bored though, I still watched it. For some reason I thought to myself, “What would somebody say if I showed this to them?” And although I don’t know why exactly, my mind switched to agism: “Yeah, they’re good at playing, but what of it? They’re just smart for their ages.”

So, I let that sit around in my head for a second. It was something very interesting to have come from myself, but also understand the “phantoms” concept better: nobody would disagree with me if I said they played the song well, but somehow the agism would have to reinforce itself: like in a blanket statement, or the above dismissive statement.

Adam Fletcher says that “the interaction of [...] three elements- [youth] voice, involvement and engagement- combine to form a healthy, effective and sustainable experience for all young people to become more powerful with us.” I can think of three things that could get this going a little bit quicker that take place with adults:

1. Get parents to realize their children and teenagers as people more than young/infantile humans.
2. Get adults to interact with real young people.
3. When people are told “You can be whatever you want to be”, they should believe it — not leaving it in the back of their mind as some sort of entitlement, and then completely forgetting it as an adult taking a crappy and unfulfilling job just for the financial security.

Your thoughts?

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.

Or consider the other side of the spectrum: my mother is a spanish teacher, and even though she specifically has a texting time in the day — at night, a few hours before she goes to bed —  she manages to get all the grading for her classes done. If it applies for teenagers, why shouldn’t it for adults? It doesn’t, otherwise that would be unfair, and the bias of agism wouldn’t be able to sustain itself anymore if we could just look through it like that; it always has to be something else.

I like this one even better:

Research shows teens send an average of 1,742 text messages per month. And many say they do a lot of their texting in school, even during class. Experts are calling it “extreme texting.” But is it a problem? Many teens say it doesn’t get in the way of their schoolwork or even family time.

What experts? What phenomenon is happening even? Exactly. They just sneak it in the middle, as if to subliminally get you to believe, but don’t. I mean, really: what experts could there possibly be for how many texts I send in a month?

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 prone to depression and divorce as adults” from The Guardian.

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.

Researchers looked at the health and social problems of more than 3,500 adults whose behaviour had been rated by their teachers when they were aged 13 and 15. Between the ages of 36 and 53 they were asked again about their mental health and social and economic status.

The 40-year study showed that participants with severe or mild behaviour problems in adolescence were more likely to leave school with no qualifications and go on to suffer a number of difficulties throughout their adulthood, including depression, anxiety, divorce and financial concerns.

It’s very unfortunate to hear this, because I can think of a lot of problem students at my school. What makes me worry more is this:

[Professor Ian Colman of Alberta University] said: “Given the long-term costs to society, and the distressing impact on the adolescents themselves, our results might have considerable implications for public health policy.”

Behavioural problems in schools affect about 7% of 9- to 15-year-olds and have been increasing for the past 30 years.

Previous studies have shown that individuals with severe conduct problems place a significant burden on society in terms of crime, as well as through additional needs in education, health and welfare.

I’d like to think it’s not just simply there being more and more needy students, but that as agism continues to worsen and compulsive schooling continues to become more difficult, more young people are falling apart.

Unfortunately, this is their solution:

“Teachers want to follow through with colleagues, often on problems which arise from pupils’ dysfunctional home lives, as a priority but time pressures often get in the way. Teachers need that time.

“Schools would also be greatly helped if they had dedicated funding for sufficient trained counsellors. They would be greatly supported if the unrelated and distracting pressures of tests targets and tables were alleviated.”

Less teacher influence on the students–which will, to the students anyway, make them seem even more irrelevant to their lives–and get better councellors. Full speed ahead, otherwise.

Nothing much else to this except a statement of the obvious:

Prof Diana Kuh, director of the MRC’s National Survey of Health and Development, which has tracked people from birth in 1946 until today, said: “It’s not all doom and gloom.

“It’s true that those groups do have more difficulties than the more well behaved group throughout life but that doesn’t mean for a minute that anyone who misbehaved at school will end up having a difficult life – just that the probability is higher.

“None of this is deterministic. Some people will carry on having problems, some will not, which is why early intervention is important but also help for people throughout life.”

[...]

Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “This report is a boost to the already significant work carried out in schools and local authorities to support these young people and an important reminder of the vital place of multi-agency working and early diagnosis of problems, both in terms of that individual’s life chances and the impact, social and economic, on the broader society.”

There are so many more better things we could do than just adding patches to an even bigger problem.

• “Teenagers should be tried as adults” from The Tennessean.

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!

Just to let you know, teenagers aren‘t committing more crime. In 2006, people aged 12-20 committed only 27.3% of crime in the U.S., and people under 12 contributed only 0.9%, –making the total percent 28.2%– which is not a lot.

Kids aren’t perfect; so what if they’re only in elementary school? People of all ages still make mistakes.

With popular songs that say things like “You’re under 18, you won’t be doing any time,” we need to set an example that yes, because we mature (at least as far as violent exposure) faster in these current conditions, that criminals have to do real time, not a few months in a cushy therapy house.

It simply isn’t fair for those of us who obey the laws to keep paying for crimes being committed by repeat offenders, or to pay for their nice relaxed hospital stays simply because of biological age.

And this is a problem of agism: criminal behavior in the young has been, redundantly, criminalized. Sentences are made shorter and young people don’t get a real punishment, because society believes they deserve a “second chance,” but the methods that are used instead don’t really work. So the only reason we do this is simply a bias, not because we actually believe that people deserve a second chance.

It’s become clear than biological age has no meaning when it comes to escalating degrees of violent crime, and it needs to be dealt with during these formative years, in my humble opinion.

Perhaps it won’t stop crime, but at least these kids will be doing real penance that they can’t laugh at.

No young person is laughing at crime, but it is true that biological age has no meaning. At least we can agree on that.

• “Teenagers ‘turn to alcohol and drugs to cope with school stress’” from The Telegraph, written by Kate Devlin.

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.

Which is a pretty big number, and I don’t think even adults use drugs that often just for dealing with stress.

The second part is this:

“Over a quarter of these pupils reported suffering from high levels of school related stress.

“Our results illustrate how important it is to educate teenagers on the best ways to manage this stress, and highlight the dangers of using cigarettes, alcohol and drugs to cope.

“The study also shows there is a need for secondary schools to tackle pupils’ school based problems, including time management, work-life balance and teacher-pupil relationships.”

You see, that second statement makes it seem like the dangers of drugs on ones health apply only to young people, which is completely untrue. The third statement implies that teenagers are at fault because they’re naïve when it comes to organizational skills or relationships, but, contrary to popular belief, it’s still untrue.

If anything, the current view of effective education equalling compulsive schooling could be to blame. If someone wants to learn something, they seek it out, so why should that make a difference when picking a career? If a young person wants a certain career, they will learn everything they can about it, because young people really do want to do work at heart.

Unfortunately, the public will continue to see this as teenagers just behaving poorly or being weak, not how it really is.

• “Teenagers come to aid of beaten woman in Calgary” from The Edmonton Sun, written by Nadia Moharib.

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.

• 

  Heather Norris. Image from The New York Times.

  “A Rise in Efforts to Spot Abuse in Youth Dating” from The New York Times, written by Elizabeth Olson.

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.

The word of the day is good, I guess. If only teenagers could receive total equality by not having seperate services, though! Still, it’s not bad news.

“We are identifying teen dating abuse and violence more than ever,” said Dr. Elizabeth Miller, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Davis, who began doing research on abuse in teenage dating relationships nearly a decade ago.

Dr. Miller cited a survey last year of children ages 11 to 14 by Liz Claiborne Inc., a clothing retailer that finances teenage dating research, in which a quarter of the 1,000 respondents said they had been called names, harassed or ridiculed by their romantic partner by phone call or text message, often between midnight and 5 a.m., when their parents are sleeping.

Such behavior often falls under the radar of parents, teachers and counselors because adolescents are too embarrassed to admit they are being mistreated.

[...]

The foundation, based in Princeton, N.J., decided to fund preventive efforts based on research, including from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. In the C.D.C.’s 2007 survey of 15,000 adolescents, 10 percent reported physical abuse like being hit or slapped by a romantic partner. Nearly 8 percent of teenagers in the survey said they were forced to have sexual intercourse.

Dating abuse victims, the center found, are more likely to engage in binge drinking, suicide attempts, physical fights and sexual activity. And the rates of drug, alcohol and tobacco use are more than twice as high in abused girls as in other girls the same age.

It’s so great to know that things like this happening aren’t totally underground! And yet, there had to be one obligatorily agist comment mentioned:

“Few adolescents understand what a healthy relationship looks like,” Dr. Miller said.

Adolescents often mistake the excessive attention of boys as an expression of love, she said.

The first part doesn’t have evidence to even back up the claim, and the second part is a mistake almost everybody would make about a romantic partner before realizing they might be obsessive — not special to teenagers. Especially when you bring up an anecdote like this:

Kayla Brown, 18, was among them. At first, her high school boyfriend made a great impression last year when he “called my mother to introduce himself,” said Ms. Brown, a senior at an Indianapolis charter school.

Then he began “calling me every hour to see where I was and what I was doing,” she said. Finally, during an argument he slammed a chair into a cafeteria table and raised his fist.

Until that argument, who else would have mistaken the calling for being clingy?

Well, it all happens one step at a time.

• “While I’m away, readers give the advice” from The Washington Post.

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. Messages (and photos) on Facebook, MySpace, e-mail, iChat and cellphones are not private. They are easily retrieved, by those who are not particularly technologically savvy and by those who may not have your children’s best interests at heart. Online messages may easily be viewed by people other than the intended recipient. These messages can live forever in cyberspace. School administrators routinely scroll through messages on found and confiscated cellphones.

While the lessons mentioned here are good, their target of teenagers is unnecessarily specious. If somebody says something wrong or does something wrong online, it affects a teenager and an adult in the same way, no difference.

I tell my children that I will review their computer and cellphone communications routinely, as may school administrators, coaches, employers, potential employers, college admissions officers and law enforcement officials. If my kids don’t want me to read it, then they shouldn’t type it. If they don’t want their grandmother to see it, then they shouldn’t write it. Or, if they don’t want 46 million people to see a message, they shouldn’t post it on a Web site.

The only person who is going to know that your child wrote would be you, because you see everything they do. If you didn’t, those 46 million people could think it was their neighbor writing those messages for all they know. That’s the benefit of internet communication: pseudononymy.

There is no such thing as respecting electronic boundaries. The newspaper is filled with stories of people who went to jail because they failed to realize that electronic communications are almost impossible to erase completely. These days, the smoking gun in litigation is invariably a deleted e-mail recovered from a computer.

But your children aren’t necessarily planning on doing something illegal anytime soon, are they? And if you’re suspected of criminal behavior then “electronic boundaries” will be nonexistent because there may be evidence on your computer. Computers are just another communication method; evidence for a crime can still be collected through lots of other means.

It’s not spying. It’s raising your children to act responsibly in our electronic world. Teach children not to expect privacy on the computer or their cellphones. It’s an almost impossible task, given teenagers’ inability to foresee the long-term consequences of current actions.

Spying: to observe secretively or furtively with hostile intent; to discover or find out by observation or scrutiny; to observe (a person, place, enemy, etc.) secretively or furtively with hostile intent. Yeah, I think it matches the definition just fine. A lot of agist practices like this are done with the false intent of being proper child rearing or having their best interests at heart, but is this really how a person behaves toward another? I don’t think so.

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!)

• “Don’t carry knives: dead teen’s father” from The Age.

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.

• “Pregnant teens slip thru cracks – report” from NY Daily News, written by Meredith Kolodner.

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.

Tsk tsk tsk.

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.

I’m starting to regret not speaking up.

• “Are you afraid of teenagers?” from The Times, written by Hugo Rifkind and Kevin Maher.

“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?