Where are you going, where have you been?
In the wake of a string of pretty gruesome local news regarding gun violence, children, and adolescents, I have been writing an article about international volunteers and their contributions to youth development in Central America.* My literature review has focused a lot on the positive youth development framework which outlines the supports young people need to be successful, matching each of these supports to a state-level policy or program initiative. Of the 40 positive youth development needs, “safe places” is sticking out currently, as is “constructive use of time”, “physical and psychological safety” and “integration of family, school and community efforts”.
Specifically, these items are sticking out because they are so incredibly, persistently, frustratingly absent from the lives of many young people. Take “safe places”, for instance. The pools in each of the housing project complexes where I can be found four days a week teaching swim lessons (to children under 12) are overrun with teenagers, and it appears to me that the management keeps inventing new rules designed to limit the teenagers’ access to the pool as much as possible. And why? Well, teenagers are annoying. They don’t follow rules, they harass the lifeguard and other swimmers, they get frisky with each other underwater. Parks, malls, coffeehouses, and virtually every other public space where teenagers can safely hang out with each other, being annoying together, are the same: the less teenagers use them, the happier people are. But I wonder, where the hell are teenagers supposed to go if these spaces keep restricting them, or are closed off to them altogether? They’re too old for day camps and after-school programs; they’re too young for clubs and bars. During the school year, at least some time is filled with school, sports and band practice, but the summers are wide open. Without “constructive use of time”, teenagers get bored, get rowdy, pick fights–and sometimes, the outcome of all this is splattered across the evening news when a neighborhood kid gets shot. From an addictions standpoint, adolescence is a particularly vulnerable time to develop a lifelong and pervasive substance abuse problem. (Have you ever heard of someone who decided to start using crack at age 30? Neither have I.) And what if you are gay? Shit just keeps getting more and more complicated, and the risk factors spike higher. This makes “constructive use of time”, “safe spaces” and “integration of family, school and community efforts” vitally important, and a grave oversight in our society’s care for those short but critical years of 13-18.
Too often, adults treat teenagers like slightly pimplier versions of themselves, mentally and emotionally capable of everything adults are, treading water until the state grants them legal status and they start pulling their own weight. The problem is that teenagers are not mentally and emotionally capable adults. Unlike children, the brain of an adolescent has a fully developed “go” system, a little slice of the old brain responsible for the reward/reinforcement pathway. This part of the brain is associated with basic urges: food, sex, pleasure–in essence, the continuation of the self and the species. Adults come equipped with a “stop” system sometime after their 24th (some say earlier, some say later) birthday, a mechanism that helps put the brakes on the instincts to eat pizza for breakfast, nail everything that moves, and dive off a 40-foot cliff at the Johnson Shut-ins. One of the reasons why I suspect everyone finds teenagers so annoying, so troublesome, is the fact that they’re an anomaly: they look almost like us, but they act like damn fools. It turns out there’s a solid biological reason for this: just as one can’t expect a toddler to tie his/her own shoes, one can’t expect a teenager to sit quietly by the side of the pool. They are not overgrown children or proto-adults–they are adolescents. A better understanding of the developmental stages of adolescence, and the ways in which adults can support these stages, could make everyone’s life easier.
One place to start is simply by creating spaces for teenagers to go. Many cities already have teen clubs or drop-in centers, and I think these are a great idea so long as they are inclusive and teen-run. But there should be more–spaces for teenagers shouldn’t just be limited to the mall or the county park, where they’re likely to be hanging out, unsupervised and unstructured (”constructive use of time”), bored and getting into trouble. I’m not saying that everyone needs to have their adolescent under direct supervision 24 hours out of the day, but a lot more attention and effort needs to be put into programming for teenagers; a lot more care, actually. We can’t expect positive behavior from people unless they are given a positive environment in which to develop.
*Not my idea. One of my other identities is Someone Else’s Research Gopher/Indentured Servant/Scapegoat If Article Is Not Accepted To Prestigious Journal.
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