Growing Gap Between Teens, Adults Creating a Cultural Divide

It was all anyone could talk about. Over coffee before school started Wednesday, teachers at the Griffith Middle School in East L.A. wondered when it was that kids took the phrase “question authority”--the well-worn motto that decorated their parents’ T-shirts and VW bumper stickers--and turned it into “confront authority.” Were parents and teachers asleep at the collective wheel when, in turn, some kids decided that confrontation had to be physical?

Jeff Sperber, a social studies teacher for more than 30 years, was one of the faculty members trying to make sense of the shootings on Tuesday of students in Littleton, Colo. “A lot of the kids, they no longer have respect for authority figures of any kind--not just teachers, but among themselves too,” Sperber said. “We don’t think that was always true.”

Around the country, students, parents, teachers and school administrators struggled to fathom what seems to be a growing gap between youth culture and the rest of society. Teenagers have always been defiant and have often been rebellious: That’s their job as adolescents, to launch themselves into autonomous adulthood. They have always had their own clothes, their own music, their own language, their own strange sleep schedule--what social scientists call “markers” to delineate a particular stage of life.

But something has changed. Some say many adults are little more than overgrown adolescents themselves and that they are too self-obsessed to know what’s happening with their own children. Others say grown-ups are too busy: working too many jobs and otherwise failing to connect with their kids. Now that they are in their second or third generation, single-parent households haven’t gotten any better. Teachers say they have never seen so many mothers and fathers who have no idea how to parent.

Teachers, for their part, often feel squeezed between parents who abrogate their duties and school systems that demand high test scores. If the parents and the teachers can’t fill the need for affiliation and guidance that teenagers by nature require, then gangs and cliques--”Trench Coat Mafia” or otherwise--are happy to step in. Outsiders who once were geeky loners now can band together.

And then what happens, right before the very eyes of grown-ups--but not necessarily within their range of vision--is that the culture gives kids permission to do things they have no business doing. “Use heavy drugs, punch their parents, engage in extremely destructive behaviors,” said Kevin Dwyre, a school psychologist for 31 years in Montgomery County, Md. “You end up with this sense of impulsivity, me-first, the hell with the rest of you, get out of my way.”

Modern society hurries kids, said Tufts University child development professor David Elkind, author of “All Grown Up and No Place to Go.” Once, not long ago, families were geared toward protecting children: providing them with adult guidance and direction, and with recreation geared to their developmental levels. But in the aftermath of the 1960s, when every other kind of social convention was attacked from within, a false sense of family egalitarianism took over, Elkind said.

Many kids became mini-adults. Clothes, movies, magazines: How can you stake out your teenage turf when your mother swipes your Spandex? Plenty of adults, said Elkind, celebrated this transformation by ignoring their wrinkles and acting as if they still had zits.

“At the turn of the century, we had the development of pediatrics. Now we have the veneration of geriatrics,” Elkind said. “Now the needs of children and adolescents are placed below the needs of adults. We have taken a lot away from kids, particularly from adolescents. We used to see them as immature, in need of adult guidance. Now we see them as sophisticated, ready for anything.”

As the lines have blurred between adolescence and adulthood, young people have had to work harder to rebel, said Jeffrey Arnett, author of “Metalheads: Heavy Metal, Music and Adolescent Alienation.” One result, as seen in the Colorado killers, has been a move to a darker, more alienated subculture marked by a fascination with violence, and accompanied by death metal music, songs that extol the glory of death.

“It’s really horrifying,” said Arnett, a visiting professor at the University of Maryland. “Some of it I think is really poisonous.” Youth culture has existed for hundreds of years, Arnett said, “but it’s hard for me to think of anything before the last 20 years that was oriented toward such violence.”

Arnett’s theory is that “if you’re a kid and you really want to be different, you have to go farther out these days to do so.”

But even when their kids show up in long, dark trench coats, “a lot of parents are in denial about a lot of things with their kids,” said Jennifer Clark, 15, of Los Angeles, who is being home-schooled and who wrote a recent article on violence for L.A. Youth, a citywide teen publication produced by high school students. “They look at their kids and they think, ‘Oh, they’re just going through a phase.’ ”

To John Coie, a professor of psychology at Duke University, the penchant for violence is the most alarming trait in today’s youth culture. “We haven’t had this previously in our culture,” he said, “where kids or teenagers bring guns to schools and start shooting indiscriminately.”

Blaming the media for society’s sins is handy, Coie said, and in fact for at least 10 years, movies and other forms of popular culture have made violence a part of children’s lives. Rage as an appropriate means of channeling anger or resentment “permeates our society,” he said. “You see it everywhere.”

Access to lethal weapons only adds to the equation. “Expressing anger or resentment wasn’t done with guns, and now it is,” Coie said. “It doesn’t take a very imaginative kid. In fact it requires an absence of imagination to do it that way.”

From Head Start to high school, said Dwyre, president-elect of the National Assn. of School Psychologists, “we need to be addressing the psychosocial needs of youth.” Anecdotal evidence confirms a growing gap between youth and adults, he said, particularly in terms of sharing information. More scientific studies show a powerful link between resiliency in adolescence and the presence of even one strong, caring adult: “a teacher, a parent, a recreation counselor, a neighbor--someone who gives positive regard to these kids.”

At Griffith Middle School, Sperber said that one of the big problems is that so many parents have “just abdicated everything to the kid.” Consequences have gone out the window, “and we find in quite a few families the kid actually makes adult decisions for the family. That’s new too.”

Sperber said he and his colleagues could have talked all day about what they might learn from the tragedy at Littleton. But the bell rang and they had to go to class. “I guess we all just need to try harder,” he said.