Should we abolish teenagers?

Back in May there was a fascinating article about teenagers in the LA Times (here) about “proposals that would bar California high school students from buying Gatorade on campus, ban metal bats from their baseball games and require them to wear helmets while skiing.” The article asked: are we “Protecting teens or expanding a 'nanny state'?"

It’s a good question. But it sets up a false choice between authoritarian legalistic options when education should be an option too. Laws should be a last resort.

If your teenager hits his head snowboarding it is usually very easy to persuade him to wear a helmet the next time (assuming you are ready to risk a first time). That’s education. But what do you do if teenagers insist on drinking a lot of sodas and the medical results won’t come in for a decade when it’s too late? The teenage years are all about defiance - they refuse to accept an adult telling them that too much Gatorade can be unhealthy. But the problem is that at-risk teens frequently are NOT hearing this from their parents. Indeed it’s the parents that need educating first.

The week after the article, a letter to the editor appeared that argued “Our teenagers are being subjected to 10 times as many restrictions as mainstream adults.” Because of those restrictions “annually, nearly 40% of them are being treated for episodes of major depression… Past puberty, teenagers are actually young adults – not children – but we are now prolonging childhood well into the 20s, with devastating results.”

If this is true, are the restrictions – including new laws - making things worse?

The letter was from Robert Epstein, who wrote a widely reviewed book entitled The Case against Adolescence. I highly recommend it if you agree that teens are currently being treated like children. Just to pick a couple of sections, he criticizes the crazy quilt of laws we call The Age of Consent here in California (it’s 18, sort of) and how the drinking age went up to 21. I cite these two because they are good markers of how childhood is being extended upwards and adulthood delayed. If you see nothing wrong with those ages then you won’t enjoy this book. You either believe in an educational approach (where teens learn from adults rather than their peers) or an authoritarian one (where the laws determine everything). Unfortunately, since adults are so often missing from teens’ lives, or those adults are unreliable and uninformed (the Gatorade thing), then the default position is the authoritarian legal one.

Still, where teenagers are concerned, educating parents is one solution and having school districts institute modest no-Gatorade policies (for example) is another, and both are more desirable than passing more restrictive laws.