Yearly Carnegie Report Focuses on Teen-Agers

Society is failing to meet the needs of large numbers of adolescents, the president of the Carnegie Corp. has declared in his annual essay, and the result is a high proportion of “developmental casualties” among American teen-agers.

Writing in a 13-page brochure, “Preparing for Life: The Critical Transition of Adolescence,” Dr. David A. Hamburg urges “strong societal measures to help adolescents cope more successfully with a world being transformed by rapid scientific and technological advances.”

Issued Wednesday, the report is distributed to about 35,000 members of the media, faculty members at the college and secondary school levels, elected officials, corporate executives, “opinion leaders” and spokesmen for advocacy groups.

Drugs, Smoking, Suicide

Hamburg, the 62-year-old former chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, writes that nationally, one in four American students fails to graduate from high school. One in 10 girls, he reports, becomes pregnant during adolescence. Illicit drug use and cigarette smoking among U.S. youths is greater than anywhere else, Hamburg notes, adding that alcohol is the leading cause of death and injury to young people. He worries that while still small in number, suicides are increasing among teen-agers.

“Add all these developmental casualties together, and we see that a substantial fraction of the age cohort is visibly damaged,” Hamburg said. “Adolescent boys are at particular risk, having twice the death rate of adolescent girls.”

In an interview, Hamburg said he considered using the presidential essay to write about how to avoid nuclear war, but chose instead to return to the topic of adolescence. Under Hamburg’s leadership in 1986, the Carnegie Corp. organized a Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development.

“It just seemed to me that adolescent problems were coming into a focus,” Hamburg said. He cited the 1986 drug-related death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, 22, and the “rush of adolescent suicide” as contributing factors to a public awareness about the issues of adolescence.

“What I really wanted to say is that if we put our minds to it, we really can do something useful about these problems,” Hamburg said.

‘Useful Intervention’

Thus the bulk of Hamburg’s essay, the annual forum for the Carnegie Corp.’s president to expound on any subject he chooses, focuses on “useful intervention” in adolescent problems.

Noting the “constructive influences that kids can have on each other,” he stresses, for example, “peer-mediated approaches to prevention.” Hamburg writes also about “training for life skills,” and helping young people to learn about themselves.

“In the future,” he said, “there may be considerable value in linking the science curriculum, preventive health care in the schools and service by young people in the community.”