Mudita Journal

InstaPundit on Teenagers

January 22, 2004 · Filed under: Intellectual
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This morning Glenn Reynolds reminds us about one of his older FoxNews commentaries, which I believe has some remarkably insightful, and productive, suggestions for addressing teen sex and the many other problems faced by today’s teenagers:

Unfortunately, the most common response we see to reports of teen-age sex is to further infantilize teens. This serves the interests of nanny-state advocates who want to infantilize everyone, and of those who believe that coercion is the only path to virtue. When this approach fails, as it is sure to do, that will justify still more coercion. (Abstinence programs, the U.S. News story reports, make teens more anxious to retain “technical” virginity, but often via riskier practices like anal sex.)

I recommend a different approach: If we want teen-agers to be more adult, in their virtues as well as their vices, we should try treating them more like adults. Teen-agers should be encouraged to hold jobs in addition to going to school. (Or instead of since high school is not for everyone.)

It may seem odd to argue that dropping out and getting a job might be a good thing for some teen-agers, given the high value we are supposed to attach to education. But education only matters when people are being educated, and for all too many students high school isn’t really about education anyway.

Much of high school is wasted time: School meets only about 180 days a year, with a lot of class time wasted on going over the same ground from one year to the next. Teen-agers with a powerful desire to be adults should be allowed to follow an accelerated program, with earlier graduation (and perhaps other privileges) as a reward. Many teen-agers would take advantage of this, rather than spending extra years in what’s little more than a pre-adult holding tank.

Today’s high-schoolers do work, but in general they’re far less responsible for their own support, and far more separated from adult responsibilities and achievements, than people their age have ever been. Where once it was possible to gain status through actual accomplishment, now the chief status accessory is a boyfriend or girlfriend. Shorn of opportunities to exercise adult virtues, teens work with what they’ve got.

Consider this analogy: Unmotivated teen-agers who are idling away their time in school, protected from the real world and supported by their parents, are more like welfare recipients than they are like responsible citizens. However, since the implementation of welfare reform has forced a degree of personal responsibility, illegitimacy rates are way down, and so are many other social pathologies associated with welfare dependency. Maybe what teen-agers need is some “welfare reform.”

Perhaps if teen-agers were encouraged to take on adult responsibilities and win status and recognition in constructive ways, they’d probably start acting more like citizens, and less like a leisure class, with all the vices that have historically attended leisure classes.

There’s more good stuff, so I recommend reading the original article in its entirity.

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  • Marsha Enright

    Thanks for showing me this article. I couldn’t agree more!

  • Robert Campbell

    Excellent article! I was reminded, on reading it, how Bill O’Reilly routinely refers to 16-year-olds as “children.”

  • http://binarycircumstance.typepad.com/bc_blog/2004/03/treating_teenag.html Chip Gibbons

    Great post! Reminds me of things that Murray Rothbard said in his “Libertarian Manifesto.”

    I didn’t realize that Glenn Reynolds was so smart. I’ll have to read him more often.

    School has less to do with education than it does with providing free babysitting for working parents and lots of job security for union teachers and school administrators.

  • John Marttila

    This is indeed an interesting article in that it correctly identifies symptoms associated with many teen problems. The diagnosis is unfortuantely over simplified. The author places blame for these problems on schools even after he points out that schools only see kids about 180 days a year. So who has control over those kids during the other 185 days of the year and the 8-9 hours kids are not in school on school days? The answer: Parents.

    Parents have far more control over children than schools and through the late 20th century parents had a significant role in changing how children are treated. For some reason parents have decided to treat teens like full adults when it is in kids selfish interest by giving them “rights”, “choices”, and “freedoms”, but then they treat teens like innocent kids when it comes to responsibilities, entitlements and excuses for their actions. School teachers have fought this trend for a generation as the resulting classroom management problems have increasingly taken away from quality education time.

    I’m not arguing that the schools are exempt from blame. I am just pointing out that there is a troublesome cultural phenomenon which the schools are reflecting and they have become the easiest target for blame from people who want to over simplify problems with children.

    We also need to remember that teens ARE kids and their brains are far from done developing to a point where they think like true adults. Brain research has shown that human brains are not done developing until around the age of 25. Sure, parents should give these kids more adult like responsibilities and a high school education is only good for most kids, not all (it is unfortunate that there is a decreasing number of schools with strong “career centers” for vocational studies).

    When it comes to problems like teen sex, blaming schools is like blaming the judicial system for crime. They certainly have an influence, but the laws and family values are written elsewhere.

    The kids who are least likely to have problems in areas like teen sex are those who have parents that are involved with their lives, parents that set up clear rules, parents that follow through with consequences for breaking those rules, and yes, parents that give their teen children responsibilities and jobs that will keep them too busy to get into trouble while teaching them useful skills for adulthood.

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