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.

Nor do these same youths fail to take notice of news stories that tell of a rising incidence of teenage pregnancy, or of suicide pacts that have not only been made, but carried out. Sometimes, in the midst of such conversations, I wear on my face a casualness I don't really feel as I hear a 15- or 16-year-old talking about sexual matters with a kind of knowledge and detachment that would have been unthinkable for me when I was growing up. It still strikes me as a singular commentary on what has happened in this country during the last 25 years.

The following, for instance, are the comments of a white youth of 16, a high school sophomore who lives in what might be called a working-class town near Boston, talking about her present-day life, its ups and downs: "I think a lot of people who write about teenagers exaggerate. They make us sound like freaks, or they describe us as without morals. They say rock music is full of violence; and to listen to them, we're doing nothing but making love -- morning, noon, midnight.

"I don't 'sleep around'; my friends don't either. When I become committed to someone, I stay with him. I don't think it's right to let people 'take' you -- strangers, people you've only met a few times. It's wrong as can be, because you lose respect for yourself, and you don't really know the other person. He's someone who's attracted to you, that's all he is. For me, sex is part of love; it's a positive thing.

"Yes [I had asked], I know some people who don't control themselves. It's due to drinking and drugs with them, or it's because something is wrong upstairs [in their minds] -- those are the two reasons. But they [grown-ups] should understand that [is the case]."

She was not by any neighborhood definition (that of her parents, her minister, her teachers, her friends, or her friends' mothers and fathers) a troubled or wayward youth. In fact, after listening for months and months to her and others like her, I have found myself carried along by her persuasiveness until later, back in my study with my notes and tapes, I sit and read and listen, and not least, remember my own adolescence and that of my friends. How differently we grew up, how dissimilar our assumptions and ways.

She and her boyfriend are quite sophisticated about sex and make no effort to hide their sophistication. She was on the pill for a while, found it disagreeable, and stopped. He uses condoms now. They talk openly, not of engagement or marriage but of future "relationships"; and meanwhile, she goes to a Methodist church, he to a Catholic church.

They have certainly heard of AIDS, but that is a disease for others. They are not drug users, not gay or bisexual, and not given to casual sex. Still "all the publicity connected to AIDS," as she once put it, has made her "more conscious" of sex -- meaning its possible risks at least for others. "Who knows," she once speculated, "even my boyfriend or me could get into trouble, since it [AIDS] is spreading all over, and it takes only one mistake."

AFTER SUCH EXCHANGES I feel like retiring into a Norman Rockwell picture of the 1950s or maybe one of Frank Capra's film celebrations of American innocence. Still, I manage to give myself a lecture on the dangers of retrospective romanticism, and I keep in mind all the terrible violence and injustice of past eras, including the unwanted pregnancies, "back-street" abortions, and gangs of young thugs who robbed and imposed their mean-spirited, lawless habits on others. In this way I hope to obtain what detached observers often urge on all of us, a "perspective on things."

Moreover, it is important to keep listening to this young woman and to others of her generation, to pay heed to some of the values she and others her age constantly espouse, and to take notice of the virtues they really do try to uphold. In a candid and somewhat combative moment, her boyfriend made such a point unequivocally: "I get tired of reading about 'us' and 'them' -- the people who say they know what teenagers are like: the 'experts,' and the politicians, and those people up in the pulpit, saying we're no damn good. I wish they'd look at their own -- at people their age.

"Did we invent war and crookedness and corruption? All this sleaze today -- look where it's coming from. The ones who will tell you about those noisy teenagers and their music and their sex and their drugs, they're the ones you see in the papers, with all their lies and crimes being reported. [There are] a lot of hypocrites around."

He was emphatically not an advocate of some "counterculture," nor did he have a "drug problem," though he drinks beer now and then and has experimented with pot. I occasionally find some of his social and cultural criticism devastating, perhaps because, for a moment, I've forgotten what J.D. Salinger rendered so compellingly, unforgettably: the marvelous capacity some young people have (even ones mostly apolitical) for righteous indignation -- often directed at windbag politicians, professors, and preachers.

In Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, surely a book out of an earlier generation, Holden Caufield was constantly spotting and scorning the corrupt. dissembling, pretentious, sanctimonious cant of his so-called elders. He saw through their phoniness -- including their eager willingness to denounce young people for all their newfound sins, as if any generation is all that pioneering when it comes to sin. When I listen to the jeremiads I hear from young people today -- and they are worked into the lyrics of some of the rock music they like -- I realize that this long-standing capacity of youth for relentlessly taking the measure of those who have preceded them has by no means disappeared.

STILL I WORRY ABOUT some of the brutality and nihilism I see on the rock video-cassettes, on the television programs which young people watch. And too, I wonder how "they" manage to deal with the explicit sexuality which, after all, comes at them in so many directions: in magazines as well as on television, in the movies, in lyrics, in "the whole climate of opinion," (to use W.H. Auden's phrase) which obtains these days.

But those youths can occasionally help clarify my thinking and even bring me up short. This was the case a few months ago in a suburb outside Boston, when a young man of 16 spoke to me of his own life and that of his friends, but also of the lives of the rest of us in late 20th-century America: "Look, you keep asking about 'teenagers,' or 'young people,' and our 'problems.' Fine -- we have them. But I wish you'd stop and look at lots of people of your own age.

"A few kids take their lives, and everyone says teenagers are really in trouble -- look at those suicide cases, they're an epidemic. But hundreds, maybe thousands of people take their lives every year. My dad is a doctor, and he says more doctors take their lives than do lots of other kinds of people; and doctors get into bad drug habits more than others. Why? Should we all be asking what is wrong with those doctors? Is it the music they listen to? Their sex lives? If one teenager commits suicide, you pick up the paper and read we're all in trouble, and we're all headed down the tubes, because it's our terrible 'teenage culture,' they'll say, and our wild sex habits, they'll add."

He went on, pouring scorn at great length on the facile generalizations he had read or heard expressed on television. I was interested in the point he stressed most, and most often: "A lot of the time, I'm not a 'teenager.' I'm studying, or I'm playing football or baseball or tennis, or I'm holding down a part-time job, or I'm eating or sleeping. Or maybe I'm driving my dad's car, with him beside me.

"I mean, I'm doing what anyone is doing. And when I'm watching a movie or reading a magazine with pictures of nude women in it or watching a television show -- hey, there are lots of 'grown-ups,' 10 or 20 years beyond being 'teenagers,' doing the same thing and slugging themselves, I mean, practicing substance abuse, even if they grew up on Frank Sinatra or the Beatles (early rock, 'nice' rock!), and even if there wasn't as much 'sexual freedom' as there is now for young people."

In fact, he once acknowledged, with apparent shame, that he wasn't all that "active" sexually. Nor were many of his friends. They are children of not only well-to-do families but strong and stable ones. These young people have serious academic and athletic interests, actively pursued. They are not strangers to rock music, nor have they been unwilling to experiment with alcohol or pot. A few have whiffed cocaine, and reported similar inclinations in parents or older brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors (in their 20s or 30s).

I hear these teenagers discuss AIDS, argue about the rightness or wrongness of abortion, debate the virtues of "The Clash," "The Boss" (Springsteen), "The Grateful Dead," "Huey Lewis and the News," the seemingly endless arrivals and departures of singers, players of instruments, and lyricists with their messages. And I also hear such youths discuss their perceptions of the perceptions others have with respect to them.

The longer I listen (and the more widely I pursue my interviews, so that I talk with youths from all kinds of backgrounds), the more risky the generalizations seem -- those I make, and those others have provided. Are today's youths especially self-preoccupied, or self-indulgent, or sexually promiscuous, or drug-endangered, or depressed by exposure to the media, or suicide prone, or the victims of a culture saturated with sensuality and violence? Is AIDS having a great impact on the thinking of our young people, and are they also much influenced by today's changing sexual customs, as they have become increasingly a part of high school and even junior high school life?

When I hear such questions asked, I remember what Anna Freud, who virtually founded the field of child psychoanalysis, once said to a group of doctors. She wanted them never to let go of their clinical bearings: "Remember, each of our patients is different, and those differences matter a lot -- and should be remembered when we make our more inclusive remarks."

She was warning against the danger of the collective statement, the sweeping or unqualified formulation which may tempt us (including those of us with a moralistic bent), but which may do scant justice to the complexity of things, the ambiguity of a particular psychological or generational reality. For all the talk of problems such as teenage pregnancy and drug abuse -- real problems, no question -- let us not forget that a substantial number of today's adolescents live drug-free and essentially chaste lives; their sexuality under firmer control, perhaps, than is the case with some who hector them from various platforms.

NOT RARELY, I DO indeed meet up with quite troubled young people -- some of them already parents at 14 or 16, or struggling with drug habits, or seemingly headed nowhere fast. Some have arrest records. Some are restless, moody, not only intoxicated with booze or coke, but at the mercy of an impulsivity that overwhelms them, finding expression in a promiscuous sexuality, an inability to tolerate closeness with others, and, not far below the surface of their thinking and dreaming life, a burning rage that "life" has treated them so.

No small number of these young people have become what they are because they have lived in a certain kind of adult world where they have known and experienced abuse, addiction, bursts of temper, and abandonment, and the psychological litany goes on. We ought not to rush into sociological conclusions and judgments here and think of teenagers in some ghetto.

As John Cheever kept reminding us in his poignant, shrewd, clear-headed, yet fictional evocations of affluent suburban life, there's plenty of selfishness and callousness, plenty of deception and betrayal to be found among us relatively well-educated and privileged ones. Cheever's stories, actually, are filled with the "sorrows of gin" -- with self-centered, greedy, albeit "successful" and "powerful" parents who ignore and mightily injure their children. The children who populate his stories are a melancholy lot, thoroughly victimized in particular ways, well before our present time.

Cheever knew what happens when the self-absorbed and self-important reproduce their own kind. His stories, written years ahead of our "sexual revolution," abound with sexual hedonism and drinking. Those of us who properly worry about the moral collapse to be found in certain ghetto neighborhoods may occasionally lack Cheever's sharp vision and forget what the newspapers tell us daily -- about our Boeskys, Bakkers, and Poindexters, none of whom are drug addicts, teenagers, poor, black, or illiterate.

WHAT MATTERS for our young people, finally, is the quality of their home and school life -- the origins of the moral character we adults possess or lack. Young Americans in the late 1980s sort themselves out the way young people always have. Those who have been lucky not by dint of their parents' money or power, but their continuous affection and concern, their wish to uphold certain ethical principles and then to live them, rather than merely mouthing them -- such youths are well able to handle some of the nonsense and craziness this late part of the 20th century has managed to offer us all. "Remember," said Anna Freud in that same lecture mentioned before, "all of us -- adolescents included -- need to know how to ignore the world as well as respond to it, and those who can do that [the former] at certain critical moments are more fortunate than they need to know."

She was saying so very much then, as always, in her direct, lucid, tactful, and wise fashion. She was reminding us that some youths learn not only manners but those inner controls that help us take in stride, if not keep at length, some of life's tawdry possibilities. Such youths are strong enough morally and emotionally to say no, to set their sights beyond a persistent, even pervasive culture, with its all-too-widespread tolerance for pornography and violence, not to mention cheap commercialism. (Some of the commercials on television these days are as vulgar as the content of one or another soap opera or, alas, the content of the so-called children's programs which appear on Saturday morning.) But other youths are, indeed, vulnerable to cartoons and posters, to lyrics and television soaps, and to idiotic movies and lurid, agitated cable programs.

Which of our youths are in trouble? Which ones need our protection, our concerned action? I fear that there are the saved and the damned, yet again; and one can find either among black people and white people and, yes, rich people and poor people.

For those young people whose parents, honest and decent and caring, have been there, much of what must be judged the obscene in our national life can be resisted without too much difficulty, even though the dangers are all over-easily summoned by the flick of a switch or encountered on the street or in our schools, including plenty of our fancy ones, public and private. For other young people, however -- and their number is many, many thousand -- much of our culture is, in a sense, a second bad home, a second neglectful or malicious parent exerting dreary values and tastes on the already susceptible.

One teenager of relatively humble background said to me in contemplating not only his own immediate future, but that of some of his schoolmates: "I can take care of myself; I can handle some of this stuff [drug dealers near the school, the sexual pressures many of his classmates exerted on one another]. My mom is strong, and I've got her strength in me; and my dad is strong, and he watches out for me."

In contrast, for those without such adults in their lives, being a teenager can, as one youth put it to me recently, "turn into a long obstacle course." She is taking sex education and drug education courses in school. She knows about birth control methods, and each of her boyfriends, she tells me, has known all there is to know about condom usage. She (and they) have lately heard plenty about AIDS -- its channels of transmission and the necessary precautions to take.

Nevertheless, she is in jeopardy, by her own description, and she needs much more than information and exhortation, contraceptive devices, and dire televised warnings about sex and drugs. She needs emotional and moral support. She needs the attentive, continuing concern of others -- a community of caring individuals who will make up for what she lacked while growing up.

Such people -- teachers, coaches, counselors, the clergy, public health nurses -- properly motivated and themselves supported by local, state, and national governments, might make a difference in lives like hers. Or so she herself once more than implied when she said that she wished she could "find one strong, good person to lean on -- and the person wouldn't disappear."

Her personal story helps a stranger to understand her reasons for making such a remark. And one suspects there are others with similar stories, similar reasons to give echo to her sentiments.

Robert Coles was professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when this article appeared. He is the author of The Moral Life of Children and The Political Life of Children (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986).