Word: teens
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...spinning the fullest comedy out of the frailest situation, he was the movies' version of playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The stay-at-home dad morphed into Mr. Mom; the annoying guy next to you became the Steve Martin-John Candy hit Planes, Trains and Automobiles. And as a portraitist of teen angst, he was a sunnier Salinger, a comedic S.E. Hinton. Anyway, Hughes was just what Hollywood needed and rarely got: somebody whose films weren't about teenagers but inside them. Almost never before had kids looking for wish fulfillment in the dark found movies that shed a little light...
...Hughes showed teenagers that light, with a rose-tinted glow. His Molly trilogy - Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, all starring actual teen Molly Ringwald - mined the emotional convulsions that make every kid feel he or she is the first lonely explorer on the dark side of the moon. In his mid-30s, Hughes got spookily in sync with the swooning narcissism of adolescence: that teachers are torturers; that parents are sweet but don't quite understand; that friends and lovers are two distinct species, one domestic, one alien; that I feel all these things...
Does any current teen out there know who John Hughes was? Anyone? Anyone? Adolescent fancies wax and wane at warp speed, but just for historical purposes, kids, you should know that in the 1980s Hughes was the intimate chronicler, confidant and cheerleader of a generation of young people. Writing scripts that could have come from inside their muddled hearts, monitoring their rampaging hormones, he built a smart shelf of adolescent zeitgeist films: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the movie etched in immortality by teacher Ben Stein's plaintive, froggy "Bueller? Anyone...
...Hughes generated successful movie-comedy franchises as fast as other people wrote postcards. First the National Lampoon's Vacation films, with Chevy Chase as the harried nincompoop dad on some disastrous trip with his family. Then the teen movies, not strictly a series but with more or less the same rep company of kids. And then the blockbuster Home Alone, about an 8-year-old boy (played by Macaulay Culkin) stranded solo at Christmas, and its two sequels. Note that the protagonists of these films kept getting younger; Hughes was writing his emotional autobiography backward, like a sitcom Benjamin Button...
Past research has also shown that peer exposure can worsen behavior. In a 1995 study conducted by Dishion involving 158 high-risk families in Oregon, researchers compared the impact on teens' behavior of four interventions: parenting groups focused on effective discipline, social-skills-training groups for teens, both the parent- and teen-focused group interventions, or no group treatment at all. Overall, the parent-focused group was most effective, leading to reductions in teen smoking and misbehavior at school. The teen-focused group, by contrast, significantly increased participants' rate of aggressive behavior and smoking; in the combination group, kids showed...