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Boys (and girls) on the bus

March 15, 2013 by

Bronx high school kids riding home on the bus on the last day of school are “impressively wise, amazingly clueless, casually mean, and extremely sweet” in The We And The I, writes Alexander Russo.

The movie, which stars teenagers recruited from a Bronx community center rather than actors, “neither scolds nor sentimentalizes its young characters,”  according to the New York Times review. “Instead the film invites viewers, of whatever age, to immerse themselves in the chaos, glee and heartache of a long ride home on the last day of school.”

Filed Under: Culture, Education Tagged With: , , ,

When cruel is cool

January 11, 2013 by

As an eighth grader in 1986, John Cook urged a girl to commit suicide in the underground newspaper he briefly published with two friends. He accused another of promiscuity. He attacked black teachers and classmates with racial slurs. In Confessions of a Teenage Word-Bully, Cook tries to understand why he did it and the effect on his victims.

Ramming Speed was filled with gutter racism, written by me, that turns my stomach to think of today. It directed at two young girls the same sort of highly public, humiliating sexual slander and innuendo that helped drive 15-year-old Phoebe Prince to kill herself in 2010 in Massachusetts, and it literally called on one of those girls to commit suicide. As much as it was an act of defiance against a school administration we perceived as wanting, it was an act of brutal and indefensible bullying against children we knew to be vulnerable. It was wanton adolescent cruelty of the sort that routinely makes headlines today.

The girl urged to commit suicide by “Ramming Speed” did attempt suicide.

Cook was trying to impress the “cool kids,”  writes Emily Bazelon on Slate. The most promising strategies to prevent bullying rely on shifting the social norms, “figuring out how to make meanness socially costly, as opposed to power-enhancing,” she writes.

Bazelon links to a story on “slut shaming” on WNYC’s Radio Rookies. Reporter Temitayo Fagbenle, 16, interviews a friend who boasts of ruining a girl’s reputation by posting sexual photos of her online. He’s reveling in the “coolness points he scored,” writes Bazelon.

Filed Under: Bullying Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Unplugged — and unheated

November 11, 2012 by

Superstorm Sandy forced digital kids to unplug, notes a lifestyle piece in the New York Times.

BLANK screens. Cellphones on the fritz. Wii games sitting dormant in darkened rec rooms. For a swath of teenagers and preteens on the East Coast, the power failures that followed Hurricane Sandy last month represented the first time in their young lives that they were totally off the grid, without the ability to text, play Minecraft, video-chat, check Facebook, or send updates to Twitter.

And so on. Some poor teens were forced to talk to their parents.

Unmentioned are thousands of kids and their parents who’ve been freezing in the dark for nearly two weeks. They don’t have running water or toilets that flush. No wonder they think they’ve been forgotten.

Filed Under: technology Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Stress + hysteria + teenage girls = epidemic

March 14, 2012 by

The Mystery of 18 Twitching Teenagers in Le Roy can be explained by teenage girls expressing stress in physical ways (“conversion disorder”) and mass hysteria, suggests a New York Times Magazine story.  The epidemic started with high-status girls and spread to the less popular. A search for environmental toxins — ones that affect only adolescent girls — fueled the panic.

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Onion: Brain-dead teen to be euthanized

February 4, 2012 by

Brain-Dead Teen, Only Capable Of Rolling Eyes And Texting, To Be Euthanized, reports The Onion, in jest.

Filed Under: Children, Parenting Tagged With: , ,

Growing up is hard to do

December 21, 2011 by

Growing up is hard to do: Young people are extending their school years and delaying work and marriage, according to America’s Youth Transitions to Adulthood (pdf), an analysis of Americans 14 to 24 from the 1980s to 2010 by the National Center for Education Statistics.

In 1980, 16 percent of young adults ages 22 to 24 were enrolled in college compared to 30 percent in 2010, NCES found.

Fewer teen-agers hold jobs, notes Inside School Research.

From 1980 to 1999, 30 percent or more of 16- and 17-year-olds were employed at least part-time, but that percentage has been plummeting since 2000, and by 2009, only about 15 percent of teenagers in that age group had a job.

Only 49 percent of high school dropouts held a job in the year they left school, compared to 64 percent in 1980.

Educational expectations are higher:  “Among the poorest 25 percent of young people, only 11 percent of high school seniors in 2004 said they did not expect to complete high school, compared with more than a third of the poorest students in 1972.”

 

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Are texting teens losing empathy skills?

June 18, 2011 by

Texting teens aren’t learning empathy skills, according to psychologist Gary Small, who spoke at a Hechinger Institute seminar on digital learning in California.

The digital world has rewired teen brains and made them less able to recognize and share feelings of happiness, sadness or anger, said the UCLA professor of psychiatry and aging, who has also studied adolescent brains.

“The teenage brain is not fully formed,” Small said . . .  “I’m concerned that kids aren’t learning empathy skills. They’re not learning complex reasoning skills.”

Small noted that up to 60 percent of synapses in the brain are pruned away between birth and adolescence if they aren’t used. He cited the oft-quoted Kaiser Family Foundation study from 2010 that showed teens spend half their waking hours with technology, from cell phones to computers and/or television. The study found that typical eight to 18-year-olds devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes to using entertainment media across a typical day, or more than 53 hours a week. Thanks to multitasking, they are actually packing a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes’ worth of media content into those seven and a half hours.

Other researchers disagreed. Teens are adding media interaction to face-to-face interaction, said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist who directs the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s research on teens, children and families. Teenagers say they’d rather be with their friends in person than communicate via electronic devices, Lenhart said.

Filed Under: Children, technology Tagged With: , , ,

Who is Osama bin Laden?

May 4, 2011 by

Who is Osama bin Laden? Boing Boing posts Sean Bonner’s screen grab:

tumblr_lklp15mesn1qzq4qro1_500.jpg

“Osama” searches spiked: Two thirds of those asking  “who is Osama bin Laden?” were 13 to 17 years old, reports Yahoo.

Filed Under: Children Tagged With: ,

Doctors warn of ‘Facebook depression’

March 29, 2011 by

Depression-prone teens can feel even worse when they see that classmates have lots of “friends,” activities and “photos of happy-looking people having great times,” pediatricians warn.

“It’s like a big popularity contest — who can get the most friend requests or get the most pictures tagged,” said Abby Abolt, 16, a Chicago high school sophomore and frequent Facebook user.

Filed Under: Children Tagged With: , , ,

Teen sex is dreary on MTV’s ‘Skins’

February 11, 2011 by

MTV’s Skins, which features “lurid and explicit” teenage sex, teaches teens some valuable lessons, writes Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post. Other teens-gone-wild shows make adolescent sex and drug use “seem glamorous and exciting,” she writes.

CW’s “Gossip Girl” . . .  portrays the “scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite,” as the anonymous narrator says at the start of every episode.

By contrast, the kids on “Skins” seem sad, lonely and disturbed, each in his or her own distinctively troubled way. Cadie is a strung-out pill-popper with a stable of inept, pill-dispensing shrinks and parents who are too self-absorbed to pay her much attention beyond suggesting that she take her meds. Chris is a strung-out pill-popper – he’s taken an excess of Erectagra – whose mother abandons him with a scrawled note and $1,000 in cash in an envelope.

They manage to make sex seem like a dreary, transactional chore – a sex-for-pills exchange is arranged to engineer a loss of virginity – and drugs and alcohol seem like, well, drugs and alcohol, unpleasantly disorienting and prone to induce vomiting.

Marcus thinks teens will appreciate their own nagging parents after watching the checked-out, boozed-up parents on Skins.

Will teens watch Skins as a cautionary tale of the downside of sex, drugs and lax parenting? Or will they take the show as a sign that promiscuity and drug abuse are normal?

Filed Under: Children, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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