Growing Up Becomes More Threat Than Adventure

Admittedly, glimpses of people seen on television may not offer compelling insights into their lives. But even with that qualifier, the images stick in my mind of the procession of teen-agers called to the witness stand during the ongoing prom night murder trial.

What I’ve seen and will remember from the screen are the steady stream of teen-agers with empty expressions, dulled responses and morose bearings.

Even when taking into account that they’re testifying in a murder trial, their demeanor is troubling, for they resemble (at least to my eyes) soulless people who originally had no more compunction about lying to police about what happened that night than they did about staying all night in a motel where friends carted guns in and out like chips and dip.

My brain tells me that maybe this group was an anomaly, but then I picked up the newspaper Friday morning and read about armed teens attacking other students at Westminster High School and teens affiliated with a racist gang sentenced for beating up an Asian kid in Fullerton.

And then the capper: another article in the Friday paper saying that an estimated 1 million American teens attempted suicide during a recent 12-month period.

What’s wrong with our teen-agers?

With offices in Laguna Niguel and Anaheim, Richard Landis often works well into the evenings. It’s not unusual, he said, to be working at 11 p.m.

Landis is a clinical psychologist who specializes in what he calls “adolescents at risk,” meaning those with suicidal tendencies and severe depression.

I described my armchair analyst’s depiction of the teens I’d seen on TV. It was not an unfamiliar scene to him.

The greatest increase in his practice, he said, is with 14- to 16-year-olds, “who are feeling more lost,” and high school seniors, “who are absolutely terrified at looking at going into the outside world.”

Those of us who survived our teens sometimes wonder how we did it. As the cinema’s “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman said glumly a generation ago that he was “concerned about my future,” so we know the Angst over the post-teen years is not a recent phenomenon. As such, we oldsters sometimes we have a temptation to dismiss teen-agers’ problems as just part of the chore of growing up.

But my sense of things is that that distress runs deeper today, an opinion that Landis said is borne out in his practice.

“After the ‘60s and ‘70s and moving a little bit into the ‘80s, the way we looked at the world was more fun, more optimistic, more the American dream,” Landis said. “Now kids are being raised with parents who are kind of scared. Things cost more, the probability of owning a home is decreasing, they’re hearing their parents talk more about financial worries because of the recession, and therefore, the idea of growing up and being on your own no longer sounds like an adventure. It sounds like being thrown off a pier, and you can see the sharks swimming in a circle around you.”

I suggested that lots of teens today seem totally disaffected. “We used to talk in the ‘60s how we didn’t have the nuclear family anymore or the extended family anymore, that we didn’t have the roots we once did,” Landis said. “Today it’s even worse. The feeling of alienation is even stronger.

“Since now it’s normal to come from a broken family--there are more broken families than there are intact families--there is less feeling of permanency, there seems to be less spiritual roots, if you will.”

Adding to that sense of no real family belonging, Landis said, is that even parents in intact families spend a lot of time worrying about such survival issues as economics. As a result, parents either “are spending less time with their kids and working more or spending more time hiding from themselves” because of the pressures of making ends meet.

“If a parent is showing that growing up is a good thing to happen, then kids look forward to it. If you’re struggling, deprived, suffering and worrying,” Landis said, your children aren’t likely to be too enthralled with life.

When the gang culture is factored into the equation, the situation gets even grimmer, said Landis, whose practice is mostly middle to upper-middle class.

“When you’re working with kids who don’t have the expectation of living past 16, and definitely not past 18,” he said, “the decisions they make are usually based on the assumption that they’re not going to live awhile anyway, so (they say), ‘What the heck if I lose a year or two, it’s not that significant.’ So there’s more risk-taking, more of living for the moment and not looking to the future, because they see no future.”

It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and say that someone has to look into these kids’ eyes and tell them that they can have a future that means something. Sadly, this is a society with a fractured family and social structure, and there’s not always someone around to do it.

The only thing we all know for sure is that we can’t raise a generation of unfeeling youngsters who think that the future is someplace they don’t want to go.