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I'll list a number of issues that could affect your coverage of adolescence
and adolescents, but let's start with two intertwined issues that are over-riding:
Most coverage is negative and most is focused on youth problems.
A typical story I read the other day was headlined "Report Cites Threats
to Children in New Millennium," (there goes the hope that the next
1,000 years will be different), and proceeded to list the usual suspects,
from poverty to absentee parents to inadequate schools, drug use, and teen
pregnancy. But these are indeed real problems, so what is the harm in calling
attention to the fact that they are still going to be with us? For starters,
most youth don't experience most of those problems. Second, overall, and
especially among particular groups of youth, we have seen some of the usual
"youth" problems we list decrease significantly in the last 10
years or so. Many of these problems are not getting worse, they're getting
better, but the average American likely does not know that. The media have
given substantial coverage to the nationwide reduction in crime, although
youth are not usually given much credit in contributing to that decline,
except for the fact that there are fewer of them. But there are relatively
few stories on what might be called, "what's right with American youth."
The other problem with focusing on problems is that youth in general end
up portrayed inaccurately, as out of control, selfish, alienated, even dangerous.
Look at the saturation TV and newspaper coverage that we were once again
subjected to in the last couple of days, as the tapes the Columbine High
murderers made were clumsily released. This morning, a story in the Times
got all the worst images of youth captured in one phrase when it blared
"Student Killers' Tapes Filled With Rage.". Lately such stories
usually have a line buried in there that says schools statistically are
one of the safest places for kids, but what impression does the average
reader or viewer likely walk away with? Raging student killers.
Fewer and fewer households actually contain any children or adolescents
these days, and a greater and greater proportion of the population has only
limited first-hand knowledge of young people. The result is that this kind
of media coverage can play a greater role in shaping many adults' image
of young people. This possibility is supported by findings from Search
Institute's 1997 statewide poll of a representative sample of more than
900 Colorado adults: A majority of all adults felt media coverage of
youth was overly negative, but 64% of adults who were more involved with
youth thought so, compared with 54% who were less involved. Similar differences
were found between women and men (women spend more time with youth), and
between long-time residents (who presumably know their community better)
and newcomers. Consistently, the more these adults knew youth in their community,
the less accurate typical media coverage of youth seemed to be. These trends
have serious effects when it comes to Americans taking responsibility for
the well-being of young people. The research group Public Agenda reported
in its national poll a couple of years ago that the more focus is given
to huge, impossibly complex social problems among children and youth, the
less the typical community resident feels able to do anything about the
situation.
So with that as prologue, here in no particular order is
my list of some themes whose increased coverage might help bring about a
more accurate balance in adults' understanding of young people, and that
might, over time, even re-activate civic engagement with and action on behalf
of youth.
What's right with American youth. A few examples:
Since 1985-1990, greater proportions than ever before are graduating from
high school, with African-American graduation rates nearly equal to whites
(Latinos have not shared in this success, but among African-American youth,
improvement in educational achievement is a success story); there is a smaller
proportion who have ever had sexual intercourse, and among those who are,
there is more consistent use of more effective contraception, with the result
that there are lower rates of adolescent pregnancy among whites and especially
among African-American youth; a majority of youth, who are supposedly self-centered
and selfish, volunteer in their communities more than adults do-they seem
hungry for the chance to contribute; large majorities of youth, who are
supposedly alienated from their families, want more time with them, turn
to their parents first for advice on things that really matter, and say
they have to tell parents where they're going.
Preventing problems among youth doesn't mean we're preparing
them for success. Not many stories address the question, so
what if all of these problems were prevented? Then what? Are young people
then prepared to be and/or become productive workers, loving parents, happy
and faithful spouses, and involved citizens? Overwhelming majorities of
today's adolescents expect to attend college and have professional jobs,
according to the 5-year Alfred P. Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development
(Barbara Schneider, University of Chicago), but only a minority have an
idea of how to effectively pursue those dreams. In a Gallup poll a few years
ago, most young people said neither their school guidance counselors nor
their parents had actually talked with them about education and their future.
Social scientists Jim Connell and Larry Aber, writing for The Aspen Institute,
concisely summarized what young people need to learn as learning to be productive,
to connect, and to navigate. Instead of more stories on how many youth aren't
doing these things, we could use more stories on how many youth are.
The importance of building positives or assets in young people's
lives. Our research at Search Institute with, collectively,
more than one million 6th-12th graders over the last decade shows that the
more of 40 "developmental assets" young people experience, the
less high-risk behavior they engage in, and the more they thrive in positive
ways. The developmental assets are grouped into eight categories: Support,
Empowerment, Boundaries and Expectations, Constructive Use of Time, Commitment
to Learning, Positive Values, Social Competencies, and Positive Identity.
The differences between asset-rich and asset-poor youth are not just arithmetic,
but geometric: For example, only 3% of youth with 31-40 of the assets engage
in problem alcohol use (drinking 3 or more times in last 30 days, or binge
drinking in last 2 weeks), but more than 50% of youth with just 0-10 assets
have problems with alcohol use. These relationships hold across gender,
age, racial/ethnic group, and place of residence. More stories on these
assets helps counter the feeling that "nothing can be done."
The movement to build healthy communities for kids.
At least hundreds, maybe thousands of communities across country; are mobilizing
to build positives in young people's lives (Search Institute in Minneapolis,
and Public/Private Ventures in Philadelphia have more information and contacts).
These movements are based on emphasizing the positives young people need,
and on informal everyday acts of relationship among adults and youth even
more than on formal programs: Adults getting to know the names of more youth
in their neighborhood, and then smiling at and talking with them, inviting
youth to help solve neighborhood problems and make a contribution, calling
up parents to tell them about something their teenager has done right. In
this growing number of communities, there are countless stories of the power
of the positive asset development framework to overcome helplessness and
get residents more involved in the lives of young people.
It really does take a village. If we can get past
the "village" rhetoric long enough to examine the research, we
see evidence for the importance of two things that suggest it really does
take a village: The connections among the adults in a young person's life,
and the consistency of values and expectations communicated by adults. Writing
in the early 1990s for the Carnegie Corporation of New York, researcher
Richard Price and colleagues noted that how parents, teachers, clergy, neighbors
in a child's life all know and communicate with each other, as the adults
in that child's life, may be as important an influence as how each of those
adults relates directly with a given child. Their relationships with each
other seem to create a "web of influence" that protects young
people from risk. Ralph Sampson and colleagues at the University of Chicago
more recently looked at collective action in a different way: If neighbors
say they are willing to do something when they see youth hanging out on
the corner instead of being in school, that neighborhood has both a perceived
and actual lower rate of crime. Other studies have shown that young people
who hear the same messages from different adults in their lives, whether
about postponing first sexual intercourse or about working hard at school,
are more likely than others hearing "dissonant" values or expectations
to actually achieve those goals.
The relation among youth problems and youth successes.
More stories showing the connections in kids' lives: A wealth of research
shows that if you scratch the surface of an adolescent cigarette smoker,
the odds are you'll find someone doing poorly at school; scratch the surface
of one who volunteers, the odds are you'll find someone more connected to
family and school, and less engaged in high-risk behaviors. The lesson from
these studies is that attacking seemingly isolated youth problems makes
only limited sense; more comprehensive approaches that get at common roots
of problems and successes work more effectively.
The social norms around relating to children and youth.
Even among adults who think it does take a village to raise all children
and youth, there are unspoken rules and expectations that keep them from
doing more. They might worry about a family's right to privacy, or perhaps
feel ok about saying something if youth are breaking the law, but not so
sure about having a conversation with a neighbor teen about sexual or religious
values. Maybe they're afraid that taking too much an interest in a young
person would be considered suspicious, even evidence they might be a child
molester, or maybe they just might think the youth would ignore them or
laugh at their interest, and so hold back so as not to look foolish. Some
kinds of interactions may be considered ok among adults and children, but
not among adults and youth, and vice versa. There has not been much scholarly
work done on the specific application of social norms to adults relationships
with youth, so it is both an unmined area and one that has tremendous potential
to influence consumers to examine the influences in their own lives that
encourage and keep them from more involvement with adolescents.
How developmental assets like connectedness with school, family,
community, and consistency among adult expectations, benefit all youth,
but especially disadvantaged adolescents. In providing more
coverage of how youth experience these kinds of positive building blocks
in their lives, and the ways in which many communities are trying to provide
them, reporters will not be ignoring the most seriously disadvantaged youth.
In fact, numerous studies (which we summarize in the 1999 Search Institute
book, Developmental assets: A synthesis of the research on adolescent
development) show that focusing on the positives young people need can
have win-win results. All young people benefit from high levels of assets
in their lives, but vulnerable youth-those in poverty, those experiencing
violence, those left unsupervised too much-gain even more.
The importance of the social aspect of schooling.
In all the coverage of the standards movement and high stakes testing, there
has been scarce little reminder to readers, listeners, or viewers that young
people need both care and challenge to succeed in school. So much of what
comes out the other end of the school process -- the grades, the test scores
-- is not only a product of how ready students are when they come to school
(a topic that has been given a great deal of good coverage), but of what
goes on in school relationships once they get there, especially for middle
and high school students.
All the relationships matter, and cumulatively have a powerful effect on
student achievement: Students with students, students with teachers and
other staff, educators among themselves, everybody with parents and the
rest of the community. For example, students, especially boys, who have
social skills such as controlling emotional outbursts or being helpful to
others, get better grades. Girls' grades go down in middle school in part
because it's more important for them to belong, and smart and diligent students
tend to become the least popular students by 8th grade. Schools in which
teachers feel they have a professional community where they are respected
and allowed to use their judgment in choice and presentation of curriculum
have students who achieve at higher levels. Going deeper with fewer topics
but more connection thematically across the curriculum and to the world
outside school brings greater achievement, especially for under-achieving
students. Making sure students are connected to "extra"-curricular
after-school programs cuts down on the dropout rate (which is why these
days those programs are called "co"-curricular instead), and on
and on. The high stakes standards and testing movement pretty much misses
responding to almost all of these important dynamics.
Stories about myths concerning adolescence. This
is related to stories on "what's right with American youth, "
but I mean more general misunderstandings that could help balance Americans'
view of what young people are like, and what adolescence is like. Primary
among these myths would be that adolescence is a time of storm and stress
(thinking that turmoil is normal overlooks the fact that 80% of adolescents
get through that period with adequate mental health, about the same proportion
of adults who have adequate mental health, and means we might ignore an
adolescent with serious problems by thinking turmoil is just a phase). A
second myth is that all peer pressure is bad, since we usually just refer
to it as unqualified "peer pressure" (in our studies, one of the
most important contributors to avoiding high-risk behavior is the positive
influence of friends). A final example would be, all risk is bad. Obviously
there are a lot of values in conflict on this one, but normal adolescents
seem to need to engage in some risk. Total abstinence from risk is not necessarily
a good thing. You can look at risk as a combination of two components, risk
= developmental exploration + environmental danger. It is necessary for
young people to explore their values, talents, interests, and capacities,
but to do so as safely as possible. The developmental assets framework gives
some insight here. Kids with a lot of the assets don't avoid any experimentation
at all with alcohol or other drugs, or with sexual behavior; they do, however,
have dramatically fewer problems because of their experimentation.
What we know -- we don't need more needs assessments.
Social science is hardly exact-- if we can explain more than 50% of some
adolescent outcome, we hold a news conference. But we still know a great
deal, and with a great deal of confidence, about what all young people need,
and about what works. Useful recent sources for "what works" information
include our own Developmental
assets research synthesis book, and two books (1997 and 1999) from
the American Youth Policy Forum in Washington
D.C. on "some things do make a difference for youth." We don't
need more needs assessments and stories about needs assessments, but more
about these positive responses to meeting those needs. All kids need to
feel safe, loved, and capable. All the rest is details.
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