Word: teens
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...this, it seems, is where we differ: where changes in a few measures of teen problems (over a very short period of years) appear to be favorable over the time period you're concerned with, I'm having trouble seeing those changes as "improvements." Meanwhile, other measures (say, of attempted suicide by teens) have seen no improvement over that same period, and still other measures (of academic performance in high school, use of inhalants, illegal and legal use of prescription drugs, and so on) have gotten worse...
...issue is what benchmark we want to use. You want to look at teens-more medicated and more restricted than ever-post-Columbine. I want to look at American teens versus teens in history and teens in other countries around the world. Given those benchmarks, teen turmoil is still an enormous and costly problem in the U.S., and it's entirely unnecessary-a creation of a culture that infantilizes teens unnecessarily and completely isolates them from adults. Past puberty, teens are no longer children; rather than monitoring and medicating them, we need to give them meaningful incentives and opportunities...
...true, I'm not reflexively opposed to psychiatric medications for teens. My perspective on all drugs is fairly libertarian. If prescription medications help teens kill themselves less often or not be as violent, I don't think they're a bad thing. In many cases, I know psychiatric meds are prescribed unnecessarily. But I don't think all the drugs in the world can explain the vast improvements we've seen in psychosocial metrics for teens since the 1980s. I'm not exactly sure why teen life is getting better, but I actually think teens are more empowered than ever...
...MPAA needs the teen market. Tougher than most other national ratings boards on sexual images in movies, it's far more lenient when it comes to violence. In many countries, Saw was forbidden to those under 18. In the U.S., your 17-year-old could go and chaperone his younger siblings. The argument may be that sexuality is real and disturbs kids more than pretend maiming. But these ratings teach that sex is forbidden and killing is cool. They also tell the world that America is a place where violence rules...
Probably since the second generation of humanity, it has been a widely accepted bit of folk wisdom that kids are worse off than their forebears. Our ancestors surely thought the kids just didn't rip the hides from big game with the same skill as Grandpa. Now we think teens are wastrels who get high on OxyContin and rouse themselves only to shoot up a school or update their MySpace profiles. But there's strong evidence that U.S. adolescents are actually getting smarter--or at least making better decisions. Could the teen brain be evolving...