Middle school is hard. Children leave the structure and relative safety of elementary school, and armed with a brand new set of hormones and "feelings,"get thrust into a school where the hall talk has moved from Pokémon to bra sizes and sex. Yes, sex. I get that. I thought I was prepared for it.

Then the middle school took my daughter and threw her in a world of sadness and despair, and I had to act fast. ...

On the first day of school, my daughter went willingly, happy for a new environment and I held my breath. I did not have to hold it for long. I got a call within an hour telling me that the principal wanted to talk to me. Here it comes, I thought. I was right; Cheyenne had made sure to tell everyone she was pagan and gay. And then something remarkable happened. They supported me and Cheyenne. Yes, they asked that she not announce to everyone (literally, because she does that) but they were not going to kick her out and would do everything to protect her from other students. The principal and teachers have become her greatest source of strength and inspiration.

It has not all been smooth sailing. She is once again on the outside of the class, since most of the children come from conservative backgrounds. Other girls will even tell her it is wrong to be gay. I do not know for sure, but I suspect the principal must have gotten one or two phone calls from other parents insisting that they expel my child. After all, many of them send their kids to Catholic school to get them away from the very influences espoused in my daughter. She is still a mediocre student, and is a constant thorn in her religious teacher’s side as she challenges every tenant of faith.

But Cheyenne has persevered and thrived.

Labels: adolescence, Catholic Church, culture, homosexuality, schools

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"What was he thinking?" It's the familiar cry of bewildered parents trying to understand why their teenagers act the way they do.

How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Why does the girl who knows all about birth control find herself pregnant by a boy she doesn't even like? What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?

Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. A leading theory points to changes in energy balance as children eat more and move less.

At the same time, first with the industrial revolution and then even more dramatically with the information revolution, children have come to take on adult roles later and later. Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare knew that the emotionally intense combination of teenage sexuality and peer-induced risk could be tragic—witness "Romeo and Juliet." But, on the other hand, if not for fate, 13-year-old Juliet would have become a wife and mother within a year or two.

Our Juliets (as parents longing for grandchildren will recognize with a sigh) may experience the tumult of love for 20 years before they settle down into motherhood. And our Romeos may be poetic lunatics under the influence of Queen Mab until they are well into graduate school.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", adolescence, age at first marriage, childhood, children, culture, parenting, schools, work/family policy

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In a moment of passionate texting, they decided it was time...to share their passwords.

A thoughtful New York Times article published yesterday speaks to an eerie new trend: In the digital era, teenagers in love want to share their most intimate secrets, ideas and, of course, their Facebook accounts. ...

A 2011 Pew Internet and American Life Project study revealed that 30% of all teen Internet users shared a password with a friend or significant other. Of that percentage, 38% of girls shared a password with a friend or significant other versus only 23% of boys.

Labels: adolescence, boys, culture, girls, relationships

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A new government study suggests a lot of teenage girls are clueless about their chances of getting pregnant.

In a survey of thousands of teenage mothers who had unintended pregnancies, about a third said they didn't use birth control because they didn't believe they could pregnant. ...

The researchers interviewed nearly 5,000 teenage girls in 19 states who gave birth after unplanned pregnancies in 2004 through 2008. The survey was done through mailed questionnaires with telephone follow-up.

About half of the girls in the survey said they were not using any birth control when they got pregnant. That's higher than surveys of teens in general, which have found that fewer than 20 percent said they didn't use contraception the last time they had sex. ...

Only 13 percent said they didn't use birth control because they had trouble getting it.

Another finding: Nearly a quarter of the teen moms said they did not use contraception because their partner did not want them to. That suggests that sex education must include not only information about anatomy and birth control, but also about how to deal with situations in which a girl feels pressured to do something she doesn't want to, Gavin said.

The findings are sobering, Albert said. But it's important to remember that the overall teen birth rate has been falling for some time, and recently hit its lowest mark in about 70 years.

Labels: adolescence, contraception, culture, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, sex, teenage pregnancy

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During his first-period broadcast Monday, the Norwood High athletic director Brian McDonough congratulated Will Higgins for breaking the meet record in the 50-yard freestyle the previous day at the Massachusetts South Division fall swimming and diving championships.

McDonough chose not to mention that it was a girls swimming championship.

“I didn’t want to get into that,” he said.

Anthony Rodriguez, another boy on the Norwood girls team, heard a grace note in McDonough’s omission.

“If people hear that you set a record, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s awesome,’ ” Rodriguez said. “But if they knew you were competing against girls, they wouldn’t have as much respect for you.”

Higgins, a senior, and Rodriguez, a sophomore, are among roughly two dozen boys competing on girls teams in Massachusetts because their schools do not have boys swimming programs. They are able to do so because of the open access amendment to the state constitution, which was voted into law in the 1970s and mandates that boys and girls must be afforded equal access to athletics.

Boys have been members of girls swim teams since the 1980s, but until recently they were mostly a sideshow. It has only been in the last year or two that boys have swum well enough to draw attention — and people’s ire. The epicenter of the debate is the 50-yard freestyle, an event in which strength can trump talent or technique.

At the Division I state championships on Saturday at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there are eight boys in the 28-swimmer field in the 50 freestyle. Although Norwood’s Higgins was ruled academically ineligible Friday and will not compete at the state meet, two of the top four seeds in the 50 freestyle are boys, giving rise to the possibility that a boy could be the girls state champion. ...

Paul Wetzel, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, said the state’s swimming committee would meet after the season, and among the topics on the table would be Higgins’s record swim.

Labels: adolescence, boys, culture, gender, gender differences, girls, schools

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A teacher bounced from an international American high school after having an affair with a 17-year-old student is winning critical acclaim—for his novel about a teacher who has an affair with his student, reports Jezebel. Reviewers from the New York Times to novelists are gushing about Alexander Maksick's book, You Deserve Nothing. But students at the American School of Paris, including one who calls him a "sick bastard," complain that almost all the events of the book are real. The disgusted victim says Maksick used personal information she told him in confidence, notes Jezebel's Elissa Strauss.

Labels: adolescence, culture

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In what looks to be the latest tragedy related to bullying, a 10-year-old apparently committed suicide after she complained of constant teasing at her Illinois elementary school Ashlynn Conner’s death has given us yet another reason to combat bullying. Not that anyone needed one.

Culturally, almost all of us have come to understand that bullying is unacceptable. Unlike a few decades ago (or less), when harsh schoolyard treatment was overlooked, most states now ban bullying and schools have adopted anti-bullying programs.

Obviously, it remains a problem. Part of the reason may be that the language that bans bullying tends to be vague and open for interpretation. That’s often by design. Though we can all agree that bullying is wrong, we can’t agree on exactly what it is.

Does it include hazing?

Yesterday, The Post’s Michael Alison Chandler wrote about the mixed success administrators at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School have had in trying to control a school tradition that’s become an annual hazing ritual. Where officials were increasingly concerned “Color Day” had become an excuse to demean and mistreat younger students, some students have argued that it’s merely a fun rite of passage.

Does it include sexual harassment?

A recent American Association of University Women sexual harassment study ( I wrote about it in an earlier post here) found that almost half of middle and high school respondents reported being victims of sexual harassment. But commentator Katie Roiphe wrote in the New York Times this past weekend that much of what the survey deemed sexual harassment should be considered a normal part of adolescence.

Does it include hateful speech?

Bullying became a partisan issue in Michigan in the past week. An anti-bullying bill there was altered by a Republican legislator to allow an exception for “sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction.”

Gay and Muslim groups immediately protested the new language. Even Stephen Colbert mocked the inserted language lampooning by declaring, “Bullying is just fine, as long as you get a permission slip from God.”

Labels: adolescence, children, culture, freedom of speech, religion, religious liberty, schools, sexual harassment

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Want a successful marriage? Make sure you have sex when you're ready.

According to a new study, women who are sexually active early in their adolescence--specifically, before age 16--are more likely to divorce.

Researchers at the University of Iowa used the responses of 3,793 women who are married or have been married at some point in their lives from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth to examine the relationship between the age at which they had their first sexual experience, and the success of their first marriage.

At first glance, the findings seemed alarming: multiple outlets (including this one), reported that up to 47 percent of women who lost their virginity during their teen years divorced within 10 years of getting married--implying that women who lose their virginity during adolescence will inevitably face conflict in their later adult relationships.

In fact, while the age at which sex first occurred was significant in determining women’s likelihood to divorce, more important was whether that sex qualified as “wanted." That's because the earlier women had their first sexual experience, the less frequently the sex was actually wanted. In short, the study's conclusions were less about the correlation between when a girl loses her virginity and her risk of divorce than it was about how the nature of the first sexual experience affects later romantic relationships.

While some of the initial reports about the study alluded to this point, they often did not explore it completely, so we decided to go to the source--lead researcher Anthony Paik--to shed more light on this surprisingly complicated study. ...

HP: How is “unwanted” sex defined?

AP: The survey [results are culled from] the CDC’s 2002 Survey of Family Growth. It has a couple of questions that ask for the context of first intercourse—that it “caused mixed feelings,” that it “wasn’t completely wanted,” or that it “was completely wanted.” It’s not clear from the survey what the womens' experience was specifically. ...

HP: Why would unwanted sexual experiences be associated with divorce?

AP: There are two arguments: one is that it’s a PTSD process, which is a psychological model of a post-traumatic stress syndrome process [stemming from] childhood sex abuse. This model emphasizes that these experiences, particularly with adults, are traumatic, [and] lead to high levels of sexualization [which] makes individuals susceptible to relationship difficulties.

In the second argument, unwanted sexual experiences lead to early sexualization, which is associated with subsequent life-course events that are key divorce determinants, such as having more sex partners, premarital conceptions, and premarital births.

Labels: adolescence, culture, divorce, girls, Marriage, mental health, out-of-wedlock births, sex, sexual assault

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There might be a new argument to try when convincing your teen to wait to have sex. According to the a study conducted by the University of Iowa, women who lost their virginity in their young teens are more likely to divorce.

The study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, surveyed the responses of 3,793 women and found that 31 percent who lost their virginity as teens divorced within five years, and 47 percent divorced within 10 years. On the flip side, the divorce rate for women who had waited to have sex was only 15 percent at the five year mark, and 27 percent by the time 10 years rolled around.

But the study also found that a first sexual experience before the age of 16 -- wanted or not -- was still strongly associated with divorce.

Of course early sexual experiences can have lasting effects on relationships later in life. So it's not surprising that with 42 percent of participants claiming their first sexual experience before the age of 18 wasn't completely wanted, that it could affect them in their adult life.

Labels: abstinence, adolescence, culture, divorce, girls, Marriage, premarital sex, sex, sexual assault, virginity, women

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Gaby Rodriguez would worry whenever anyone asked to touch her baby bump.

It wasn't because she felt shy or embarrassed. It was because the bulge -- fashioned from wire mesh and cotton quilt batting -- didn't actually contain a baby.

For the past 61/2 months -- the bulk of her senior year at Toppenish High School -- the 17-year-old A-student faked her own pregnancy.

Only a handful of people -- her mother, boyfriend and principal among them -- knew Gaby was pretending to be pregnant for her senior project, a culminating assignment required for graduation.

Her teachers and fellow students, except for her best friend, didn't realize they were part of a social experiment.

Neither did six of her seven siblings -- including four older brothers -- her boyfriend's parents, and his five younger brothers and sisters.

"At times, I just wanted to take it off and be done," she says. "I didn't want to go through this anymore."

But Gaby didn't give up the charade until Wednesday morning, when she revealed her secret during an emotional, all-school assembly.

The topic of her presentation: "Stereotypes, rumors and statistics."

"Teenagers tend to live in the shadows of these elements," she says.

Before taking off her fake baby belly in front of the entire student body, Gaby told her audience, "Many things were said about me. Many things traveled all the way back to me."

Then, she asked several students and teachers to read statements from 3x5 cards, quotes people actually said about her during the course of her experiment.

Labels: adolescence, culture, motherhood, pregnancy, premarital sex, race, schools, teenage pregnancy

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Ascension Press is sponsoring an essay contest for high school students. We want to hear from you on how the Theology of the Body has impacted your view of yourself as a young man or young woman in today's culture.

TOPIC: Essays should be between 1000 and 1500 words. They should explore the following topic:

How has the Theology of the Body impacted the way I see myself as a young man/ young woman in today's culture? ...

The Grand Prize is $1500 each for the male and female winners plus a $500 Ascension Press Gift Card each for the winners' school* or parish/church.

Labels: adolescence, Catholic Church, Christianity, culture, gender, men, religion, sex, women

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...If his fellow students and school administrators had been trained to recognize his deepening depression, Ms. Munley believes her son could have been saved. The signs were there, she said. On the ladder of suicide risk indicators, Robert's descent into self-ruin touched on nearly every rung.

At age 7, Robert witnessed the violent break-up of his parents' marriage over the Christmas holidays. When he returned from vacation, his kindergarten teacher noticed disturbing changes. The sweet, outgoing little boy who easily made friends suddenly became sullen, short-tempered and violent.

Ms. Munley chalked the changes up to the divorce and figured Robert would adjust with time. Two and a half years later, she began dating Robert's eventual stepfather and became pregnant. The boy resented the new rival for his mother's attention and began acting out.

"His actions became more aggressive, especially toward his siblings," Ms. Munley says. "At one point, he tried to choke his brother with a belt and put tacks in his bed.

"He was in a constant rebellious state. He put on weight, going from a slim size to a husky. He played video games constantly and did not participate in any sports."

Robert's stepfather demanded that the boy see a therapist, who said the problems were a product of normal sibling rivalry. Ms. Munley enrolled Robert in a karate class, hoping it would teach him respect and self-discipline, but his behavior grew steadily worse. Her son and husband were always at odds, and verbal abuse was common in the home.

She took Robert to another therapist. And another. And another. Each offered the same diagnosis: sibling rivalry. Finally, a psychiatrist suggested medication. Robert refused to take it. ...

She took Robert to his family doctor and asked for a depression screening. After speaking with Robert privately, the doctor said the screening was unnecessary.

Soon after, Robert and his girlfriend broke up. He went to Lowe's and bought duct tape and a hose and drove to a spot in Scott Twp. where they sometimes went to be alone. He ran the hose from the exhaust into the window and left the car running. A couple driving by spotted the car and called 911. Robert was taken to Community Medical Center and revived.

The attempt landed him in First Hospital Wyoming Valley in Wilkes-Barre for inpatient psychiatric therapy. He pleaded to come home, insisted he had made a mistake, nothing more, and had no intention of trying to harm himself again. After two weeks, the doctors agreed and he was released.

Soon after, Robert reconnected with his girlfriend but his relationship with his mother deteriorated. He got rid of his pet mouse, saying he didn't want it anymore. Ms. Munley would later learn that Robert also began to withdraw from friends at school.

When Robert said he was going to live with his father, Ms. Munley told him she would rather he stay with her, but would not stop him. It was the last time she saw Robert alive.

Labels: adolescence, divorce, schools

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Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This "pre-adulthood" has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it's time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn't bring out the best in men.

Between his lack of responsibilities and an entertainment media devoted to his every pleasure, today's young man has no reason to grow up, says author Kay Hymowitz. She discusses her book, "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys." ...

But for all its familiarity, pre-adulthood represents a momentous sociological development. It's no exaggeration to say that having large numbers of single young men and women living independently, while also having enough disposable income to avoid ever messing up their kitchens, is something entirely new in human experience. Yes, at other points in Western history young people have waited well into their 20s to marry, and yes, office girls and bachelor lawyers have been working and finding amusement in cities for more than a century. But their numbers and their money supply were always relatively small. Today's pre-adults are a different matter. They are a major demographic event.

What also makes pre-adulthood something new is its radical reversal of the sexual hierarchy. Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to 34, 34% of women now have a bachelor's degree but just 27% of men), and they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. These strengths carry women through their 20s, when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and making strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their brothers and boyfriends.

Still, for these women, one key question won't go away: Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap neatly crystallized by the director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked Up." The story's hero is 23-year-old Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), who has a drunken fling with Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl) and gets her pregnant. Ben lives in a Los Angeles crash pad with a group of grubby friends who spend their days playing videogames, smoking pot and unsuccessfully planning to launch a porn website. Allison, by contrast, is on her way up as a television reporter and lives in a neatly kept apartment with what appear to be clean sheets and towels. Once she decides to have the baby, she figures out what needs to be done and does it. Ben can only stumble his way toward being a responsible grownup.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", adolescence, class, culture, economics, gender, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, universities, women

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After a standout season in which he went 35-4, Joel Northrup had every reason to dream of winning an Iowa wrestling championship this year, but he gave it all up before his first state tournament match Thursday.

Northrup, a home-schooled sophomore who competes for Linn-Mar High School, said his religious beliefs wouldn't allow him to wrestle Cassy Herkelman, a pony-tailed freshman from Cedar Falls who is one of the first two girls to qualify for the tournament in its 85-year history.

Northrup issued a statement through his school expressing his "tremendous" respect for what Herkelman and Ottumwa sophomore Megan Black achieved this season, but he said didn't feel he had a choice.

"Wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times," Northrup said in a statement released by his high school. "As a matter of conscience and my faith I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner. It is unfortunate that I have been placed in a situation not seen in most other high school sports in Iowa."

His father, Jamie Northrup, told The Associated Press later Thursday that his son struggled with the decision. ...

Northrup's father, Jamie Northrup, is a minister in the Believers in Grace Fellowship, an independent Pentecostal church in Marion that believes young men and women shouldn't touch in a "familiar way," said Bill Randles, the church's pastor.

"We believe in the elevation and respect of woman and we don't think that wrestling a woman is the right thing to do. Body slamming and takedowns, that full contact sport is not how to do that."

Labels: adolescence, culture, gender, religion

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Hollywood’s romantic comedies aren’t just innocuous cinematic tripe. They’re actually warping children’s minds (pdf), according to new research from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The films, including Notting Hill and You’ve Got Mail are skewed portrayals of relationships with “both highly idealistic and undesirable qualities,” the researchers write, where romantic problems or transgressions “have no real negative long-term impact on relationship functioning.” The films tend to focus on the early stages of relationships, but the characters displayed emotions that generally develop over time, including deep feelings of love and emotional support. Adolescents sometimes use these films as models for their own relationships, which could lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment.

Labels: adolescence, culture, relationships

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Fifteen-year-old Meagan Campbell likes to hug. A lot. “I consider myself a hugger. It’s hi and goodbye. You’d feel like you’d been left hanging if you didn’t get a hug.”

At Citadel, her old high school in Halifax, hugs were administered at the start of the day in the locker room and again at the end. Girls are generally more demonstrative than boys, who passively accept a clinch. Hugs are generally reserved for close female friends. ...

Teenage hugginess is epidemic, and (outside of Canada) schools have taken notice, with some in the United States and Britain banning all public displays of affection between students. Kids protest, especially since administrators offer murky rationales: that extended embraces are a gateway to make-outs and sex in the halls, or that they choke corridors and distract in class.

Only staid handshakes were spared at a small New England high school that outlawed all physical touching between students this month. News of the policy went viral after a 17-year-old student at the school complained anonymously to FreeRangeKids.com, a parenting website.

The girl hoped to protest the rule, which was intended to “thin out the kissing couples who clog up the halls,” as she understood it. “Interpersonal touch is not inherently sexual, and to treat it as such is to make it so,” she wrote in a petition, adding, “… micromanaging merely infantilizes us.” ...

For other administrators, the fear is sexual. “Schools have to draw the line and hugs are probably an easy place to draw the line at because if you don’t draw the line there, where is the line going to be?” Utah’s Chris Williams told the Standard Examiner. The Davis School District spokesman said there were exceptions to the PDA ban, including hugs after a winning basketball shot.

Other schools were more exacting: A Texas school ban stipulated holding hands, while another in Virginia expanded the prohibition to include high-fives.

Labels: adolescence, culture, heteronormativity, schools, sex

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In my short time as a teacher in Connecticut, I have muddled through President Bush’s No Child Left Behind act, which tied federal funding of schools to various reforms, and through President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, which does much the same thing, though with different benchmarks. Thanks to the feds, urban schools like mine—already entitled to substantial federal largesse under Title I, which provides funds to public schools with large low-income populations—are swimming in money. At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don’t want for books—or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non–Title I schools can’t afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.

Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children—all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.

My first encounter with teen pregnancy was a girl named Nicole, a pretty 15-year-old who had rings on every finger and great looped earrings and a red pen with fluffy pink feathers and a heart that lit up when she wrote with it. Hearts seemed to be on everything—in her signature, on her binder; there was often a little plastic heart barrette in her hair, which she had dyed in bright hues recalling a Siamese fighting fish. She was enrolled in two of my classes: English and journalism.

My main gripe with Nicole was that she fell asleep in class. Each morning—bang!—her head hit the desk. Waking her was like waking a badger. Nicole’s unmarried mother, it turned out, worked nights, so Nicole would slip out with friends every evening, sometimes staying out until 3 am, and then show up in class exhausted, surly, and hungry.

After a dozen calls home, her mother finally got back to me. Your daughter is staying out late, I reported. The voice at the other end of the phone sounded abashed and bone-weary. “I know, I know, I’m sorry,” she repeated over and over. “I’ll talk to her. I’m sorry.” ...

My students often become curious about my personal life. The question most frequently asked is, “Do you have kids?”

“Two,” I say.

The next question is always heartbreaking.

“Do they live with you?”

Labels: adolescence, children, class, culture, Fathers, fathers and daughters, Marriage, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, schools, teenage pregnancy

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Last August, the New York Times Magazine inspired a national moment of navel-gazing when it ran a cover story on a new phase of human development coming to a young person near you: “emerging adulthood.” Previously known as the years between eighteen and twenty-five, or casually as young adulthood, this time is now no mere period of being in school and then embarking on an occupational and family path:

The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

New demographic fashions call for scholarly counterparts, and Clark University psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett has answered that call, naming this trend “emerging adulthood,” a psychologically fraught time of transition, marked by what he has categorized as “identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and ... a sense of possibilities.”

Extrapolating primarily from the statistics on the increasing age of marriage and childbearing in the United States and refusing to lament them, Arnett argues forcefully that emerging adulthood is a positive development. Free from external constraints (and often supported financially by their parents), twentysomethings have the opportunity to try an array of temporary jobs, relationships, educational paths, and residences to find which of these are most to their preference. In winnowing down the options, they are also able to “find themselves,” a discovery that will serve them well as adults, assuming they ever decide to become adults. Armed with the self-knowledge gained from a decade of working at Starbucks, joining the Peace Corps, and sharing a basement studio in Brooklyn with four other emerging adults, those at the end of emerging adulthood will better make the family and career decisions they had been putting off, resulting in a future of greater life satisfaction and stability. ...

Henig flirts with circumstantial explanations for the rise of emerging adulthood: Perhaps we can attribute it to a weak economy, or to a mismatch between the available jobs and the educational qualifications of recent graduates, or to social pressures to delay marriage. But she finally rejects these causes, since they would all make emerging adulthood a necessity rather than a matter of freedom and self-realization. If the twentysomethings who are living with their parents and meandering in and out of work and relationships are not trying to find themselves but really trying to find increasingly elusive jobs, then there is nothing to celebrate.

In practical, hard-nosed terms, freedom from necessity is good because it buys time, and time results in better decisions: “Maybe if kids take longer to choose their mates and their careers, they’ll make fewer mistakes and live happier lives.” This seems to be intended as the most persuasive argument in favor of welcoming emerging adulthood as a developmental phase. No doubt many adults wish in hindsight that their youth had lasted longer, but it’s not actually clear from such nostalgia that a longer youth would have resulted in a happier or wiser adulthood, assuming they ever decided to try out adulthood. Since time itself is not guidance in matters of marriage or vocation (especially if both are delayed because they are either unavailable or no longer worthwhile in principle), today’s emerging adults may just be taking longer to make the same mistakes. Unless we believe that the longer one takes to make a decision, the better it will be — such that the person who delays marriage until the age of 90 is most likely to choose the best spouse — we must look to some other standard to determine the wisdom of such decisions.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", adolescence, culture, economics, Marriage

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What if one day you went to work and there was a meeting to discuss whether the project you were working on crossed the line into child pornography? You’d probably think you had ended up in the wrong room.

And you’d be right.

Last week, my colleague Brian Stelter reported that on Tuesday, the day after the pilot episode of “Skins” was shown on MTV, executives at the cable channel were frantically meeting to discuss whether the salacious teenage drama starring actors as young as 15 might violate federal child pornography statutes.

Senior executives are now considering additional editing for coming episodes, but that’s a little like trying to lock the door after a naked 17-year-old has already busted out and gone running down the street, which is precisely what one of the characters does in Episode 3 — with a pill-enhanced erection, no less.

No one at MTV, which is owned by Viacom, set out to make child pornography, but make no mistake: the series is meant to provoke. “Skins” — a title that derives from the rolling papers that are used to make the blunts that go with the vodka that washes down the pills that accompany the hookups — is mostly about explicitly teenage characters doing explicit things. In a cluttered programming era, controversy is oxygen, so MTV was undoubtedly happy with the tsk-tsking the show incited in advance.

But objectifying teenage pathology, along with teenage bodies, is a complicated business — and the business that MTV is in. ...

When I went home on Wednesday and checked the DVR log, the pilot was there, waiting for inspection by my 14-year-old daughter, who confirmed that yes, everybody at school was talking about it.

Labels: adolescence, culture, pornography, premarital sex

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The new results from the National Survey of Sexual Health are now out. Done in the spring of 2009, the survey reports on the sexual behaviors of 5,865 American adolescents and adults ages 14 to 94. Researchers at Indiana University's Center for Sexual Health Promotion found ....
* While about 7% of adult women and 8% of men identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, the proportion of individuals in the U.S. who have had same-gender sexual interactions at some point in their lives is higher.
* At any given point in time, most U.S. adolescents are not engaging in partnered sexual behavior. While 40% of 17 year-old males reported vaginal intercourse in the past year, only 27% reported the same in the past 90 days.

Labels: adolescence, contraception, culture, homosexuality, men, sex, women

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