The root of this problem has nothing to do with alcohol, sex, or driving cars. The basic fact here is that American teens today are infantilized to a degree never before seen in human history.
Teen mental health requires that we give them basic human respect. That means we STOP calling them kids. We must get real about the fact that their brains are not "still developing". We need to face the fact that drinking, driving, socializing, romance, sex, and working nights and weekends all go together. They are part of adult society, learning responsible behavior, and just basic freedom.
All new drivers are bad. If we set the driving age to 30 then 30-year-old new drivers would be the worst. In Europe the driving age is 18. So there inexperienced 18-year-old drivers are the worst. In the US it's younger, but it doesn't matter what age you actually start.
Many states have raised their driving ages. That's very demotivating. It prevents many 16-year-old young adults from seeing each other and/or getting to and from a part time job, where they would have even more healthy social interactions, and where they'd also earn some money so they can afford to go to the movies or take a date to a nice restaurant.
The minimum wage hasn't been raised for 15 years. Inflation has taken away a lot of the motivation for entry level employees to work.
In many places under 18s are banned from the mall. Chicago even has a curfew for young adults (aka teens). This demographic gets treated like dirt, and everybody justifies this horrendous treatment by claiming that they are brainless but dangerous children who need protection from themselves. Helicopter parenting is now being applied to higher and higher ages.
The solution is not a paternalistic imposition of youth centers where they'll have a supervised third space safe and under control all the time. Make the police stop harassing them when the play basketball in the evening. Let's go back to treating them with respect and calling them young adults. Let's quit freaking out when they have sex, or choose a boyfriend we don't approve of.
The real solution is to stop infantilizing them. It would be great to stop demonizing them too. Banning them from the mall and imposing curfews on them is fucked up. They'll find and or make their own third spaces if we just stop imposing idiotic totalitarian restrictions on them.
I wanted a license to drive in 1990. Driving in the sf bay area was still fun and you could get about.
Now driving is not fun. Super fucking expensive, mucho traffic and there are vanishly rare 3rd locations to drive to.
It's the assholes my age who decided stranger danger and road hazards must be addressed by all parents now driving kids to k-12. Now that one is used to carting them about what's an extra trip to drop them at a friends?
I also didn't have sex in hs. Not sure why this (always morphing) ideal hs experience is held up as a life goal.
One salient question is: are all those delays in risky or "adult" behavior a sign of a general delay in attaining emotional maturity and/or a sense of autonomy and agency in the world? I do regularly read folks who teach teenagers saying they think the teens are less mature and agentic than they used to be. Arnold Kling was the most recent example, I think-- his catchphrase is "17 is the new 15".
It's hard to tell whether these claims are valid because there's no good metric, unlike for the possibly-correlated risky behaviors. But if it's true, it seems bad despite the lowered risks. This is partly intuition about what makes for a flourishing life but also partly because some of the risks will just shift, e.g. teens being bad at driving is probably more about their inexperience than their age, so learning to drive at 21 will just make you a bad 21-year-old driver. And surely to *some* extent that's true for sex as well: it takes practice no matter when you start.
Certainly more opportunity to work and less helicopter-monitoring by parents would be worthwhile to shore up teens' agency and maturity. And I'd expect an NRO article written by a military vet on this topic to sing the praises of enlistment or advocate mandatory national service or some such-- they're really falling down on the authoritarian job. :) But there's probably also a connection here to Brink Lindsey's thesis that the institutional arrangements of modern society make it harder for everybody to be agentic, and to Tanner Greer's meditations on the decline of self-government; you'd expect those kinds of changes to hit younger people first and hardest.
The root of this problem has nothing to do with alcohol, sex, or driving cars. The basic fact here is that American teens today are infantilized to a degree never before seen in human history.
Teen mental health requires that we give them basic human respect. That means we STOP calling them kids. We must get real about the fact that their brains are not "still developing". We need to face the fact that drinking, driving, socializing, romance, sex, and working nights and weekends all go together. They are part of adult society, learning responsible behavior, and just basic freedom.
All new drivers are bad. If we set the driving age to 30 then 30-year-old new drivers would be the worst. In Europe the driving age is 18. So there inexperienced 18-year-old drivers are the worst. In the US it's younger, but it doesn't matter what age you actually start.
Many states have raised their driving ages. That's very demotivating. It prevents many 16-year-old young adults from seeing each other and/or getting to and from a part time job, where they would have even more healthy social interactions, and where they'd also earn some money so they can afford to go to the movies or take a date to a nice restaurant.
The minimum wage hasn't been raised for 15 years. Inflation has taken away a lot of the motivation for entry level employees to work.
In many places under 18s are banned from the mall. Chicago even has a curfew for young adults (aka teens). This demographic gets treated like dirt, and everybody justifies this horrendous treatment by claiming that they are brainless but dangerous children who need protection from themselves. Helicopter parenting is now being applied to higher and higher ages.
The solution is not a paternalistic imposition of youth centers where they'll have a supervised third space safe and under control all the time. Make the police stop harassing them when the play basketball in the evening. Let's go back to treating them with respect and calling them young adults. Let's quit freaking out when they have sex, or choose a boyfriend we don't approve of.
The real solution is to stop infantilizing them. It would be great to stop demonizing them too. Banning them from the mall and imposing curfews on them is fucked up. They'll find and or make their own third spaces if we just stop imposing idiotic totalitarian restrictions on them.
I wanted a license to drive in 1990. Driving in the sf bay area was still fun and you could get about.
Now driving is not fun. Super fucking expensive, mucho traffic and there are vanishly rare 3rd locations to drive to.
It's the assholes my age who decided stranger danger and road hazards must be addressed by all parents now driving kids to k-12. Now that one is used to carting them about what's an extra trip to drop them at a friends?
I also didn't have sex in hs. Not sure why this (always morphing) ideal hs experience is held up as a life goal.
That article is fucking bullshit.
One salient question is: are all those delays in risky or "adult" behavior a sign of a general delay in attaining emotional maturity and/or a sense of autonomy and agency in the world? I do regularly read folks who teach teenagers saying they think the teens are less mature and agentic than they used to be. Arnold Kling was the most recent example, I think-- his catchphrase is "17 is the new 15".
It's hard to tell whether these claims are valid because there's no good metric, unlike for the possibly-correlated risky behaviors. But if it's true, it seems bad despite the lowered risks. This is partly intuition about what makes for a flourishing life but also partly because some of the risks will just shift, e.g. teens being bad at driving is probably more about their inexperience than their age, so learning to drive at 21 will just make you a bad 21-year-old driver. And surely to *some* extent that's true for sex as well: it takes practice no matter when you start.
Certainly more opportunity to work and less helicopter-monitoring by parents would be worthwhile to shore up teens' agency and maturity. And I'd expect an NRO article written by a military vet on this topic to sing the praises of enlistment or advocate mandatory national service or some such-- they're really falling down on the authoritarian job. :) But there's probably also a connection here to Brink Lindsey's thesis that the institutional arrangements of modern society make it harder for everybody to be agentic, and to Tanner Greer's meditations on the decline of self-government; you'd expect those kinds of changes to hit younger people first and hardest.