Adolescence

EACH GENERATION has a way of laying claim to its own experience, and certainly one hears that truism realized among many of today's young people, who can be quick to point out what it is that distinctively characterizes growing up in the 1980s. As I listen to high school youths talk, or to boys and girls in junior high school look forward to the later years of adolescence, I am struck by how readily so many of them talk about sexual matters, and by the awareness they have of AIDS as a possible danger to hundreds of thousands of Americans.