Mike Males, c Youth Today, November 2003
“Young people have
become more like adults,” writes historian Joseph Kett in Adolescence in
America, while “adults have become more like young people.” The result is
an upside-down society that excuses grossly immature adult behaviors while
punitively demanding perfection from teenagers.
The results of this
backwards thinking are alarming for all ages. The deterioration middle-aged
adult behaviors has driven virtually every major American
social problem over
the last 25 years. The newest federal reports through 2002 show adults in the
35-64 age group now suffer a record three-fourths of hard-drug deaths and
emergencies. Obesity, HIV, addiction, criminal arrest, imprisonment, and family
disarray have exploded among middle-agers--the parents raising teens.
To avoid
confronting the unpleasant reality of just how bizarre and extreme American
grownups have become, authorities invoke what I call the “Adult Helplessness
Excuse,” which blames kids for creating lifelong social problems because
grownups are helplessly trapped in misbehaviors they started young.
Excusing adult
immaturity forms the essence of the slogan of Joseph Califano Jr.’s Center on
Addiction and Substance Abuse: “A child who reaches age 21 without smoking,
abusing alcohol or using drugs is virtually certain never to do so," Therefore, “crackdowns” and “prevention and
education efforts must be focused...on youth” because “underage drinkers are
likelier to become heavy adult drinkers.”
CASA’s superficial
doctrine--which is the basis of much of America’s ineffective prevention
policy--is meaningless. Abstinence in youth does not CAUSE abstinence in
adulthood. Rather, adult abstainers do so for the same reasons they did as
teens: religion, culture, family, individual values. CASA’s statement is like
saying: “A teenager given a Lexus is virtually certain never to get AIDS.”
True, but only because a larger factor (affluence) selecting who owns luxury
cars also protects against getting AIDS.
Worse, CASA’s
attitude reverses the meaning of youth and adult. It excuses adult misbehaviors
and demands that teenagers serve as society’s models of health and maturity.
CASA should be proclaiming the OPPOSITE: “A society whose adults do not abuse
tobacco, drugs, or alcohol is virtually certain not to raise children who do
so.”
Bad habits begin
with grownups. The 2000 National Household Survey finds that in states where
adults drink, smoke, attend alcohol rehab, and use drugs more, teens are strongly likely to do
likewise.
Consider binge
drinking (downing five or more drinks on one occasion). “More than five million
high schoolers binge drink at least once a month,” declares CASA. (Actually,
the 1999 Household Survey he cites reported 3.8 million 12-18-year-old binge
drinkers, but Califano is famous for exaggeration.) Binge drinking is the bane
of teens and young adults, chorus the University of Minnesota’s Cheryl Perry,
Harvard University’s Henry Wechsler, and Prevention Researcher groupthinkers.
Now, if Califano,
Perry, Wechsler, and colleagues consider 5.6 million teenage (age 12-19) binge
drinkers an “epidemic,” how would they label the same 2002 Household Survey’s
finding of 12.6 million monthly binge drinkers ages 30-39, 10.7 million ages
40-49, and nearly 10 million over age 50?
That’s right: there
are twice as many 40-age as teenage binge drinkers! Are lushly-funded,
media-quotable experts such as Califano, Wechsler, and Perry simply ignorant of
basic survey and health statistics? Or, do they wilfully ignore them?
Worse, 40 year-olds
drunkenly kill and injure more people in traffic crashes and die five times
more from alcohol overdoses than do 17 year-olds. Yet, CASA flatters parents as
merely taking “a drink to relax.”
CASA and Prevention
Researcher should be stressing the reverse: if parents and grandparents
binge-drink, is anyone surprised teens do, too?
The demotion of
American grownups and parents from role models, expected to discipline their
own behaviors in order to influence their kids positively, to mere monitors and
referrers for program and police interventions has been disastrous for both
adult and adolescent behaviors. Califano and his colleagues’ politically
convenient tactic of furiously excoriating debauched teenagers as normative
while soothingly excusing debauched adults as helpless captives of youthful
misbehavior have sabotaged effective health policy.
America needs true
grownups--not just adolescents forced to be adults because no one else will be.