Word: teens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...TEEN pregnancy, teen contraception, teen delinquency. With the increasing prominence of these issues, you'd think that teenagers in recent years were getting into trouble like never before...
Funny thing is, they are getting into trouble like never before. The reason is pretty simple. People are teen-agers for longer than they used to be. In the past century, the gap between puberty and marriage has expanded enormously. "Teen-agerness" is not confined to the ages 13 through 19 anymore, but to the expanding period when the desires of adults coexist with the responsibilities of children...
Until 1960, the declines in the ages of puberty and marriage roughly mirrored one another; the length of the teen years did not increase. From 1850 to 1950, the average age of the onset of puberty declined steadily, from 16 to 13, for girls. Pubescence among boys has consistently begun about a year later...
WHAT all this amounts to is that teen-agers are, well, "teen" for much longer than before. That state, the gap between puberty and marriage, used to be about 6 years for women, 9 for men. Now, those figures are closer to 10 and 12. Today's teen-agers have to spend 3 or 4 more biological years than their grandparents in the nebulous limbo between childhood and adulthood...
Somehow, this obvious biological explanation for the explosion of teen problems has escaped the purview of social critics. Religious moralists would have us believe that the problems of pre-marital sex, teen pregnancy, etc. stem from the ills of 20th century society and the breakdown of American morality. Some even confuse cause and effect, emphasizing the pernicious influence of rock music (this means you, Tipper...