X-treme Behavior
In February of 2001, a new MTV show called Jackass began getting a lot of bad press. A thirteen-year-old Connecticut boy and his friends had defied the show’s “don’t try this at home” warning and lit himself on fire, following an episode in which the host (in a flame-retardant suit) lay down on a grill with some steaks. The boy suffered serious injuries, and calls to ban the show followed, as did complaints that “the antics have apparently inspired a lot of kids to go out and copy their jackass heroes.”1 Dozens of other news stories documented pranks and stunts gone awry. Some of the stunts were similar to those featured on the show; others were allegedly inspired by it or simply considered “Jackass-like.” In the case of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who jumped over a moving car (and videotaped it), the kids vehemently denied that they were imitating Jackass, and the MTV show had never aired such a stunt.2 It was the police who insisted this was a copycat incident.
While it is unclear exactly where the ideas for such acts of daring stupidity may originate from in situation to situation, press accounts support the popular belief that “kids will do a lot of stupid things.”3 An ABC 20/20 broadcast featuring the burned thirteen-year-old described how kids think that they are “immortal,” and a U.S. News and World Report story argued that “teens tend to think they’re invincible and are drawn to risky behavior that looks exciting.”4
This certainly appeared to be the case in many of the “stupid teen tricks” reported that year: teens pretending to be escaped prisoners, faking a kidnapping, dragging a dead cat, and assaulting homeless people, all captured on the perpetrators’ own video cameras. While the word teen was often featured prominently in the high-profile Jackass headlines, many of those involved were actually adults age eighteen and nineteen, and probably old enough to make their own decisions, however poor, without being under the spell of the MTV show.5
Can young people sometimes act stupid, reckless, and violent? Yes. But are these qualities really endemic to the teen years? Certainly most young people do not engage in this type of behavior, particularly if they are female. But even the vast majority of young boys would stop short of setting themselves on fire or jumping over a moving car.
So why do we associate risk-taking and extreme behavior with young people? In this chapter I will explore the perceptions and realities of the risks young people take with alcohol, drugs, sex, and other behaviors. Sure, the extreme cases are there if we look for them, but risk-taking does not define the teen years as much as we might think.
Since we have been primed to believe that kids these days are out of control, it doesn’t take much prodding from the news media to support what we think we already know. By associating such dangerous behavior with youth-oriented MTV, we malign both. But MTV is certainly not the only network to celebrate dangerous and risky behavior. NBC’s Fear Factor features guests eating the otherwise inedible and doing death-defying stunts. ABC’s long-running family show America’s Funniest Home Videos includes lots of cute pets and babies, but also frequently airs footage of people getting hurt either accidentally or while doing stunts, and videos are even accompanied by cartoonish sound effects. During its brief run, Jackass did not accept audience submissions and provided warnings not to try the featured stunts at home by starting each broadcast with the message that “Jackass features stunts performed by professionals and/or total idiots. In either case, MTV insists that neither you nor any of your dumb little buddies attempt the dangerous crap in this show.”6 In contrast, the ABC program America’s Funniest Home Videos airs only submissions and offers prizes for the best video. It is highly likely that this show could have caused injury to viewers staging stunts in hopes of winning some money. Yet it is interesting that this show hasn’t received the same sort of vitriol or calls for its cancellation as Jackass did from parents and Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the home state of the thirteen-year-old who allowed himself to be set on fire.
But even if most kids aren’t really “jackasses” and would never invent or reenact a dangerous stunt, a valid question remains: Why would watching Jackass and other presentations of extreme risk-taking behavior appeal to so many young viewers, particularly teen and young-adult males? If the next generation isn’t made up of “jackasses” or copycats, why might they like to watch those who are, and why would everyone else be so fascinated and disgusted by this propensity?
First, the elusive young-male audience is highly prized and sought after by advertisers, who know that teen and young-adult males don’t watch a lot of television. Shows like Jackass and other types of entertainment that feature people pushing the limits of acceptable behavior are desperately trying to reach a very fickle audience that has lots of other entertainment choices today.
Second, by flouting conventions of acceptable behavior, Jackass appeals to an antiauthoritarian impulse that many young people feel. As Hank Stuever describes it in the Washington Post, “They’ve tapped into something deep and meaningful in all that pointlessness: cultural revolt.”7 He also goes on to describe a scene in the Jackass movie, where the pranksters go to a golf course, the ultimate symbol of male social acceptability, and blow air horns just as golfers are about to swing. “The jackasses stick it to the Man,” notes Stuever.
The appeal of Jackass and other shock-style programs may have less to do with the audience members themselves and more to do with the difficulty of reaching that audience in any other way. And for those who did watch Jackass before it went off the air in 2002, there is no evidence that the show itself made them any more likely to become risk-takers. The reported cases where people got hurt were isolated, sad incidents, but we have no way of knowing all of the factors that led to the participants’ decision to do something that they clearly should not have.
Not that risk-taking is always a bad thing. Our society encourages risk in many forms, be it economic, emotional, or physical. Professional athletes, Olympians, and marathoners are often lauded for pushing themselves, or even for playing while hurt. Capitalism is based on risk; if we weren’t willing to take chances with our money, the stock market would collapse and no one would ever create a new business. The most successful entrepreneurs and innovators have to be able to take risks, risks that many others may be too afraid to take. We have a love/hate relationship with risk in many ways, being envious of those whose risks pay off, and often judgmental of those whose don’t. Gamblers who win a lot of money are sometimes lionized (as during televised poker tournaments), while those who lose a lot are considered to be suffering from an addiction.
Risk involves change, something younger people may be more comfortable with. Perhaps that’s why historically young people have been on the front lines of social movements. Change can be scary; as representatives of change, young people may create anxiety in their elders, who may be fearful of change and of not knowing what will come next.
Recent research and debate have considered whether there is a neurological reason for teens to take risks, focusing on the idea that the part of the brain that promotes inhibition is not fully formed until early adulthood. Presuming this were true, we would expect near universal teen risk-taking, in varying degrees of magnitude. We might even accept it as normal and as a phase that people are meant to pass through in a normal life course.
Actually, the idea that adolescence is a time of biology-based rebellion and risk-taking is over a century old. G. Stanley Hall’s work on adolescence introduced the idea that the teen years are a naturally stormy time. He largely based this theory on his own stormy adolescence and struggles for autonomy with his father.8 Rather than considering the teen years an experience based on a number of contextual factors, Hall pioneered the idea that the teen years were a return to savagery, and that adolescents should not have too much stimulation, at the risk of awakening the temptation that lurked within them. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, urbanization was one such stimulation that was thought to bring out the savage in young boys, because adults who were likely raised in rural surroundings felt cities were unnatural places to come of age. Margaret Mead famously challenged the notion of Hall’s universal adolescent experience in Coming of Age in Samoa, noting that much of what we associate with the biological is in fact social and cultural.
And while it is true that some teens may take personal risks, such as engaging in dangerous stunts, promiscuous behavior, or substance use, so do many adults. And certainly not every young person lacks inhibition. At the same time, lowered inhibition may not always be a bad thing. The adolescent brain, as some claim, may be wired to take chances, but not necessarily with the adolescent’s safety. Risky behavior might include pursuing a seemingly impossible dream, running for class president, or attending a university far from home in a strange place. Regardless of biological debates, the social meaning of adolescence in the contemporary Western world means self-discovery, independence, and identity. Adolescence is the time when young people begin to chart a course for their adult lives, a course sometimes far away from their parents. But often, as journalist Barbara Strauch notes in her book The Primal Teen, young people have too few outlets for healthy risk-taking, and see only one path for themselves—often the one their parents have laid out for them—and are not aware of other choices.9
If adolescence is marked by rebellion and conflict, it’s likely not just neurological or hormonal. Teens in the United States today straddle the fence between childhood and adulthood, with expectations that they behave more and more like adults while still being regarded as immature and even dangerous. Adolescence is stormy in part because we make it that way.
But some of us continue to insist that it is the teens themselves, not their circumstances, who are out of control. For those who wonder why some teens are prone to lighting themselves on fire or jumping over moving cars, modern science purports to have another answer: temporary insanity. This claim has been made based on recent neurological research that indicates that teen brains are still evolving, and that the adolescent years are a time of major neurological change. Yet the brain continues to change throughout the life course, in part as a response to a person’s environment. While some scientists have labeled the adolescent brain “primitive,” much as G. Stanley Hall insisted, our negative perception of teens is likely coloring the so-called hard science of brain research.
We have the tendency to consider adults finished, somehow complete in their humanness, and to consider children and teens as being in less than the idealized adult state. But we can also see that younger brains are less rigid and more able to adapt, particularly when it comes to language. The neural pathways that the brain carves out to become more efficient also make it difficult to make changes as we get older. A study published in Nature notes that aging in the brain appears to actually begin in early adulthood, but we rarely attribute social problems of the middle aged to a decaying brain.10 In any case, the language that is often used to describe the neurological traits of adolescence is often loaded with the baggage of our viewing teens as a problem. Although infants and toddlers have far less impulse control than teens do, we would be reluctant to label them “insane.” But then again, we often define insanity based on fear, and we have a long history of fearing teens.
Maybe it is the anxiety we feel that comes with the growing independence of adolescents that causes many of us to fear teenagers. We think they might have more opportunities to get into danger than infants and toddlers do (though accidents are also the leading cause of death for young children).11 The fact that teenagers are the subject of derision is less about any biochemical or neurological reality and more about our reluctance to acknowledge that some of the behaviors we fear most may start in adolescence, but are present in many adults too.
In the next sections I will explore several types of behavior that scare many adults: alcohol and drug use, promiscuity, piercing, “extreme” sports, tattooing and cutting, and thrill-seeking in general. In addition to looking at the perception and the reality within each behavior, I will consider what role adults play in these so-called teen behaviors. Rather than take the more common, isolated approach that teens who get into trouble do so because of temporary insanity, or because of the negative influence of popular culture and other teens, I will suggest that parents and the other adults in young people’s lives are powerful role models whose behavior is sometimes mirrored by the teens around them. In many cases, young people are actually less likely to engage in dangerous behavior than the adults in their lives.
In addition to maligning the many young people who do not engage in dangerous behavior, conceptualizing adolescents as temporarily insane normalizes behaviors that may actually be cries for help or indicators of not-so-temporary mental illnesses that do not necessarily just fade with time. We have probably all heard or used the phrase that someone is “acting like a teenager.” In the next few sections, I will challenge exactly what that means.
Underage binge drinking, which in some cases can be fatal, is also a common news story, especially in the spring after graduation or in the fall after antsy parents have dropped their kids off at college dorms. A 2002 study conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, Columbia University, found that 49 percent of adults were “very much concerned” about underage alcohol use, and 31 percent believed underage drinking to be a very big problem in their community.12 Not surprisingly, alcohol and drugs take the lead as the most commonly feared “jackass” and copycat behaviors.
Tragedies certainly do occur involving alcohol and drugs, and substance-related injuries or deaths should never be minimized. Yet concern tends to focus mainly on young people’s misuse of alcohol and drugs, while as we will see, it is older adults who are more likely to use and abuse both, with even more deadly consequences.
But headlines like the Hartford Courant’s “Headlong Descent into the Depths of Alcohol: Drinking Was Just Part of College for a Quinnipiac Student and His Friends—Until One Tragic, Late-Night Binge” tell the heartbreaking story of a college student’s death after drinking an incredible amount of alcohol.13 Stories like this and others that make news are in fact tragic and help us think that alcohol is a youth problem, not a societal problem that at times involves young people.
While substance abuse can and does impact people of all ages, we tend to blame young people for creating the problem. True, the abuse often starts in adolescence, but the reasons that people abuse any mind-altering substance go beyond just teen peer pressure. As far as drinking is concerned, we have defined it in the United States as an important marker delineating adult status and maturity. Considered socially appropriate in social gatherings and celebrations, it is a very accepted practice for adults and considered off-limits for children. While teens and young adults under twenty-one are not children, they are not considered mature enough to handle alcohol. Stories about binge drinking seem to support this. Young people aspire to be adults, and want to be seen engaging in behaviors that make them seem more adult-like. Drinking is one threshold that is relatively simple to cross over. If young people are drawn to drinking alcohol, it is in part because they want to seem more like their elders.
But contrary to inflammatory news reports, teen drinking is not universal in the United States, nor is binge drinking. According to Monitoring the Future, the rates of teen drinking have been declining. In 2004, 48 percent of high-school seniors reported that they had consumed alcohol within the past thirty days.14 Some of this alcohol was likely consumed with peers, but this number also includes those who may have had wine as part of a religious ritual or family event. Thirty-three percent reported being drunk in the past thirty days. While these numbers may seem high, as I discussed in chapter 4, young people today are actually less likely to report drinking or binge drinking than their parents or people my age were. During the 1970s and 1980s, about 90 percent of young people reported having drunk alcohol at least once, while by 2004 the number had declined to about 77 percent.15
Yet according to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story, “everyone seems to agree [that teen alcohol use] is getting worse statewide,” a statement that encouraged readers to fear the consequences of this perceived trend. The writer conceded later in the story that this perception may be the result of more news publicity.
Graduation and prom season usually bring a flurry of concern about underage drinking. A May 2005 Denver Post story, “Graduation Celebrations often Leave Teens at Risk,” noted that “teens too often confuse celebration with intoxication,” and that “teens who drink are more likely to commit or be the victim of violence.” These statements may be true, but they are certainly not only true for teens. In fact, as I will discuss in the next chapter, adult drunk driving is a far worse problem that teen drunk driving (which has been dropping), as are adult alcohol-related arrests and health consequences. According to the 2003 National Crime Victimization Survey, a nationally representative survey conducted annually, 17 percent of all crime victims believed their assailant was drunk at the time of the crime, with about 6 percent believing that the perpetrator may have been using a combination of drugs and alcohol.16 Results from the 2003 National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) indicate that heavy drinking is highest for twenty-one- to twenty-five-year-olds. For those under eighteen, adults outdo them in heavy drinking until age fifty.17
In some cases, our focus on teens has bordered on the absurd. In June 2005, police raided a backyard graduation party in Maryland, asking teens to undergo Breathalyzer tests following a noise complaint. No one tested positive at this highly chaperoned party, which featured a moon bounce and a s’mores pit. Before the police left, they ticketed cars parked on the street for minor infractions. “It’s almost like they were angry that they didn’t find anything,” a parent noted.18
Even when teens are not drinking, they are the focus of concern. The Houston Chronicle reported on a school district in Fort Bend, Texas, where a survey found that 75 percent of the district’s students reported that they do not drink. Yet the district received more than $600,000 from the U.S. Department of Education to reduce alcohol abuse and applied for an extension to continue to receive money.19
Why would a district that has so little underage drinking need federal money for a problem that barely exists? True, some students could have lied on the survey, and alcohol consumption rates could actually be higher. But then we would also expect people to lie on other alcohol surveys, and we still find rates of alcohol consumption far higher nationally than at this school. Let’s presume for a moment that the survey was more or less accurate. Why would the federal government, currently mired in budget problems, fund a program when a problem is minimal at best?
For one thing, no politician would dare stand up and vote against funding a program to stop teen drinking. That would be political suicide. Alcohol makers are on this bandwagon too, with “We Card” campaigns, thereby letting their real customers think that they are caring corporations. It’s more likely the corporations simply don’t want teens to give their products any bad publicity. By focusing on teen drinking and the tragedies that sometimes result, we take the focus off the roles that adults play in both teen drinking and alcohol-related social problems.
This is not to say that underage drinking should be ignored or minimized. According to the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiologic Survey, teens who start drinking before the age of fifteen are four times more likely to become alcoholics than those who start at twenty-one.20 But as any addiction counselor will tell you, substance abuse does not happen in a vacuum, and it’s not simply exposure to alcohol that creates problematic behavior.
Those that become addicted are often the children of alcoholics or are attempting to manage emotional problems with the substance. According to the NSDUH, approximately five million adults with children living in their homes are dependent on alcohol—affecting approximately 9 percent of all kids under eighteen.21 These parents are far more likely to also use illegal drugs than nonalcoholics (36 percent versus 11 percent), and are more likely to abuse prescription drugs (16 percent versus 5 percent of nonalcoholics). Not surprisingly, these parents also report more instability in their homes. Kids with mothers diagnosed with a serious mental illness are also more likely to have used alcohol or drugs during the past month compared with others (27 percent versus 19 percent).
In truth, alcohol abuse by adults is far more of a threat to young people’s health and well-being than teen use is a threat to society. Parents involved in domestic violence, driving their kids while drunk, and creating an overall unstable family life are far more destructive than teens who may drink at a graduation party, often without causing problems for themselves or others. But unlike prom season, there is no “destroyed family” time of the year to trigger those horror stories in the press.
Where teens are concerned, alcohol is hardly mentioned without its more menacing-sounding peer, drugs. Typically when drugs are mentioned we think of hard-core illegal drugs, which seem to represent turning away from conventional society. While alcohol use by both teens and adults dwarfs illegal-drug use, the fear of illegal drugs is just as strong. According to Monitoring the Future, 23 percent of young people reported using an illegal drug within the past month, and 11 percent used an illegal drug other than marijuana in 2004.22
Drug use creates fears in parents and politicians alike. As with alcohol, many young lives have certainly been mined by drugs, as have many not-so-young lives. According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), in 2003 thirty-five- to forty-four-year-olds were the age group most likely to visit emergency rooms for cocaine-, heroin-, marijuana-, and stimulant-related problems.23 DAWN estimated no cocaine-, ecstasy-, LSD-, or PCP-RELATED visits for people under eighteen. In California, drug overdose deaths among young people have declined slightly, while for those over forty, overdose deaths rose 73 percent between 1990 and 2003.24
Further, the FBI estimates that about 5 percent of all homicides in the United States are drug related.25 Of people eighteen and over on parole or supervised release, approximately 24 percent were illegal-drug users, compared with 8 percent of adults not on parole.26 But as with alcohol, public focus and concern centers on young users and virtually ignores the individual and social problems brought on by adult use. The foster-care system alone spends millions to provide placement and care for thousands of children each year whose parents can’t take care of them due to substance abuse.
As with alcohol, even when no problem exists, adults still worry. The Boston Globe reported on a statewide survey that indicated cocaine use was “on the rise” in Massachusetts, but officials in the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, had seen little cocaine use there.27 This is no surprise, since nationally the percentage of high-school seniors who have ever tried cocaine has hovered around 8 percent for many years, and it has been even lower for younger kids (3 percent of eighth graders and 5 percent of tenth graders).28 But the story cautioned readers not to let go of cocaine fears, quoting an official who said, “its use may remain ‘under the radar.”’ The article also cited a substance abuse counselor who noted that she “has treated thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who have used cocaine.” A juvenile court judge was also quoted, who observed “an almost casual approach among youths to alcohol and marijuana.” Of course, these professionals do not encounter the average teen in their work, but those already in trouble.
In truth, illegal-drug use among teens is lower now than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The percentage of high-school seniors who have ever tried marijuana dropped from 60 percent in 1979 to 46 percent in 2004.29 Nearly a third of high-school seniors in the late seventies reported having used marijuana within the last month, which was down to about a fifth in 2004.30 Other illegal drugs are much less significant among high-school students, according to Monitoring the Future. In 2004, 8 percent of high-school students had tried cocaine, down from a peak of 17 percent in 1985, while 1.5 percent of twelfth graders had tried heroin (down from 2.2 percent in 1975), and 5 percent had used LSD (down from 11 percent in 1975). Drugs such as ecstasy and crystal meth have gotten a lot of attention lately, but only 8 and 4 percent of high-school students have ever tried them, respectively. In recent years ecstasy use has declined while crystal meth use has held steady, although its use has declined slightly since the late 1990s.
Even a few young people lost to drugs is too many, but it is erroneous to describe substance use and abuse as primarily a teen problem. Teens do encounter many adult-like experiences that may include drugs and alcohol, but they are entrants into an existing problem, not the central cause of the problems that are often the result of this use.
As I noted with alcohol, if we want to understand why young people sometimes use drugs, we need look no further than the adults around them. Illicit-drug use peaks in early adulthood, but between 8 and 9 percent of adults between thirty and forty-four are estimated to use illegal drugs.31 Our society also has a deep ambivalence about drugs used for medicinal purposes. We have become a society comfortable with medicating all sorts of problems, from shyness to high cholesterol (which helps us to continue our poor eating habits).
Drugs obviously have many legitimate medical purposes, but illegal use of legal drugs is a major problem, and not just for teens. In 2003, an estimated 31.2 million Americans twelve and older used painkillers for nonmedical purposes.32 However, this is not a new issue at all. Estimates suggest that the biggest period of drug abuse in the United States was not the 1960s but actually at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. So-called health tonics of the period contained highly potent substances like morphine, heroin, and marijuana. Of course, Coca-Cola got its name from the cocaine it once contained, and was served as an alternative to alcohol. When the Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906 all ingredients had to be listed, but before then consumers had no idea that they were dosing themselves—and their children—with highly addictive drugs. The largest group of addicts was middle-class white women living outside cities, who purchased the tonics from catalogs or traveling salesmen. And today, the hidden addicts, the ones who get relatively little public attention and few national prevention programs, are also middle-class suburbanites who take pills, sometimes prescribed for them, sometimes not. Just as our predecessors of a century ago, we are still likely to look for a pill to cure what ails us.
But teen drug use gets the most attention, perhaps because it reinforces what we think we know about teens. Our contemporary fear is not unlike what past generations thought they knew about Mexican Americans, who were blamed for the problems brought by their alleged marijuana use in the 1930s, and which cleared the way for a Depression-era repatriation policy enabling Americans of Mexican descent to be deported to Mexico. Later, African Americans in central cities were blamed for their decline due to crack use in the 1980s. Groups with the least social power, such as teens, become the target of blame for problems we would rather not face ourselves. The population currently most feared as out of control is typically the group of focus when it comes to the abuse of mind-altering substances.
Images of young college students drinking on beaches in barely-there bathing suits, and the ubiquitous late-night cable-TV ads for Girls Gone Wild videos, seem to substantiate our belief that young people today are not just drunken drug users, but sexual risk-takers. Sexual behavior by young people is often thought by adults to be the result of peer pressure, and many adults fear that sex has become something that means very little to kids today. Talk shows with sexually adventurous teens and their frustrated parents also seem to confirm a very powerful stereotype about teens, that “everybody’s doing it.”
But they aren’t. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1991 and 2003, teens were less likely to have ever had sex (47 percent versus 54 percent in 1991), and if they had, were much more likely to have used a condom during their last sexual encounter (63 percent versus 46 percent in 1991).33 But what about the so-called oral-sex epidemic discussed on Oprah and Dr. Phil episodes, where teens allegedly engage in sexual behavior conveniently not labeled as “sex”? In spite of the sometimes shocking anecdotes that scare parents, there is no systematic evidence that this behavior has increased.34 We can thank former president Bill Clinton for putting oral sex into public discussion—and for characterizing it as different from actual sex. In our confessional popular culture, disclosing extremely private information, such as by talking about sexual practices, is no longer as taboo as it once was, but has become instead a ticket to the media attention so many people of all ages often court.
The truth is that young people today by all accounts are less promiscuous, and are much better at preventing pregnancy than teens of just a decade ago. Yet according to a 2003 Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 35 percent of adults wrongly believe that the problem has gotten worse.35 Teen pregnancy rates fell 28 percent between 1990 and 2002, and abortion rates fell 33 percent between 1990 and 2000.36 In 2003, the rates for pregnancy and giving birth for fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds dropped to their lowest point in American history.37 As far as sex is concerned, kids today are actually showing more restraint than their parents’ generation did, even when they go on spring break. “Most kids are well-behaved,” a restaurant owner in San Padre Island, Texas, told the Houston Chronicle about the visitors who come to this currently popular spring-break locale.38
So why is it that we think teens and young adults are sexually out-of-control when trend data tell another story? As I discuss in my book It’s Not the Media, because popular culture is laden with sexual imagery, there is an erroneous assumption that teens will imitate what they see. More to the point, news stories about teen promiscuity are more interesting to read than stories about the typical experience of an American teen today. Salacious news gets more attention than chastity. Plus, there is something alluring to older people about the idea of being young and carefree and even irresponsible. It is this image that no doubt attracts students to spring-break resorts, as they are hoping to be part of the action, or at least to be closer to it.
Shaking our heads at young people’s fun is an old pastime, and seems to make getting older a little easier if we redefine fun as stupidity. Of course, the fun we associate with youth is often exaggerated. Adolescence and early adulthood are rarely the best years of our lives or a nonstop party. Young people themselves may feel like they are missing out on something when life doesn’t match the stereotype of what youth is supposed to be like. Instead, the party in their minds and ours is rather an aspirational lifestyle that marketers peddle and that sells spring-break travel, clothes, and other products that both young and not-so-young people hope will make their lives fun and make up for what they think may be missing.
While promiscuity may seem like a new and urgent problem, with deadly sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) that we never heard of thirty years ago a possibility today, these concerns are not as unique to our times as we may think. Before antibiotics, many now treatable sexually transmitted diseases could be deadly. And teens today are not the first generation to be accused of going too far. “It has struck sex o’clock in America. A wave of sex hysteria and sex discussion seems to have invaded the country,” claimed a 1913 article in Current Opinion.39 These fears were based on the growing independence of women in cities who were moving about on the streets without male supervision. Similarly, fears today largely focus on girls, as do the Girls Gone Wild videos. In the beginning of the last century, critics were openly concerned that girls of questionable morality would spoil good boys’ virtue, not the other way around. Today little has changed, because we rarely address boys’ promiscuity, when in fact it is boys who are more likely to be sexually active at earlier ages. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, boys are two and one-half times more likely to claim that they have had sex before thirteen compared with girls.40 Assuming this is not an exaggeration, it is unknown whether these sexual experiences are consensual or coerced. For many young people, their first sexual encounter is unwanted sexual abuse.
As the median age of marriage rises and the onset of puberty drops, we are left with a large gap between sexual maturity and marriage. Although attitudes about premarital sex have become more accepting (25 percent of Americans felt in 1998 that it is always wrong, compared with 29 percent in 1982), some people’s fears about sex have seemed to grow in proportion to others’ acceptance.41 Currently, abstinence-only programs that provide limited information about birth control and sexual health are national policy. There is nothing wrong with abstinence, but teaching only abstinence may not be very effective. A comprehensive study of sex-education programs found that the ones most successful in preventing teen pregnancy were those that gave clear and accurate information, were interactive, and focused on behavior rather than on trying to impact values or self-esteem.42 A 2005 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that teens who made virginity pledges were less likely to use condoms when they did have sex, and were just as likely to test positive for STDs as non-pledgers.43 In spite of the fact that a 2003 survey found that 67 percent of Americans supported providing comprehensive sex education, the federal government spent $167 million in 2005 and in 2006 proposed to spend $206 million to fund abstinence-only education.44
Just as concerns about substance use and sex have grabbed headlines and attention, fears about youth violence also never seem to go away. As I talked about in chapter 3, actual rates of youth violence have been on the decline, especially in schools. So rather than just focusing on actual violence, the news media gives us headlines about the violent games that kids (especially boys) play, again capturing public concern.
In It’s Not the Media, I devote several chapters to fears about the media and violence, and will not duplicate that discussion here. Video games in particular have come under fire by politicians and activists who fear violent games will create violent kids. While no research conclusively supports this fear—although studies using questionable measures are often used as proof—the fear continues, because it seems rational to us that if kids play violent games, they themselves will adopt violence in their lives.
Parents sometimes point to rough play to validate concerns about media violence. Where else could kids be getting it from, they might ask? As Gerard Jones points out in Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, boys especially often play fight, without ever intending to hurt anyone. He postulates that because kids, especially young children, are often powerless in the world, this is their way of feeling more powerful. For older kids, this need may be played out through so-called extreme sports; which include skateboarding and in-line skating stunts, snowboarding, and even backyard wrestling and fighting.
In 1995, ESPN started the X-Games, so named for their focus on nontraditional extreme sports like skateboarding and stunt-bike riding. But this is certainly not the first time that risk has been incorporated with leisure. Mountain climbing, surfing, sky diving and bungee jumping all involve an element of danger and are enjoyed by adventurers across the age spectrum. Roller coasters are appealing because they provide us with excitement, generated by a perception of risk, even if the potential for real danger is minimal.
Skateboarding is a sport met with ambivalence by many adults, but its popularity is widespread, thanks in part to the X-Games and celebrity skateboard heroes like Tony Hawk. Of course, skateboarding has been around for decades—it is believed to have been created by surfers in the late 1940s as a way to have fun on land. According to a 2001 online survey, swimming remains the most popular sport in America among teens thirteen to nineteen, but 46 percent of boys (and 19 percent of girls) responded that skateboarding is their sport of choice.45
Yet in many cities across the country, skateboarding is illegal on public streets. True, it can be loud—a good number of skateboarders favor careening off obstacles on my street—and stunts can cause injury. Some communities have created skate parks where riders can practice stunts, and in some cases these communities issue tickets if park users are not wearing safety gear like helmets and kneepads.
But some cities are reluctant to allow skateboarding anywhere. As one Florida resident told the St. Petersburg Times, skate parks can become “teenage hangouts,” which she clearly found objectionable.46 Skateboarding complaints often have little to do with skateboards at all. In the 1980s, young people were prohibited from playing hackey sack in some public places. For those unfamiliar with the fad, the hackey sack is a small, golf-ball-sized beanbag that players basically juggle with their feet and kick to others. Kicking a small beanbag is a rather quiet and safe activity, but it was the teens gathered in public places that were considered the problem. Restrictions like these not only criminalize popular youth pastimes, but make being a teen in public tantamount to a public nuisance. Skateboarding may be a misdemeanor in some places, but it remains a very common activity and mode of transportation with young people. Some of my university students ride a skateboard to make sure they get across campus in time for class.
Far less common than skateboards are fight clubs and backyard wrestling, where participants stage fights and invite others to watch. Because of their underground nature, there is no way of knowing for sure how common they are, but a July 2005 Google search for the phrase backyard wrestling yielded 243,000 hits. Videotapes are widely available for sale online, and video games have been created based on backyard wrestling. While reports of police breaking up fight clubs are sporadic, because these staged events are often recorded by participants to be posted online, they can easily make their way onto cable news talk-shows.
Shots of graphic violence and injury lead many of us to ask why anyone would participate. A British newspaper, The Independent, examined one backyard wrestling group in Ventura, California, a community just northwest of Los Angeles.47 The reporter found that parents were often actively involved, even supportive of their kids’ participation. The kids themselves, mostly boys in their mid- to late teens, saw the activity as a form of showmanship they were dedicated to perfecting, as they practiced carefully choreographed moves and accepted the blood and bruises that came with them.
Beyond just viewing the kids as “jackasses,” the author notes that these kids had felt unsuccessful in nearly every other aspect of their lives. Academic success or skills in more conventional sports proved to be elusive, and this was the one way that many of the participants could gain the admiration of their peers. Backyard wrestling became a way for the boys to gain a sense of self, ironically through the creation of characters and personas similar to professional wrestling. Some of the boys have posted their characters’ “bios” online and have hopes of later becoming professionals. When one boy’s injury ended his backyard career, he became a coach to the other boys.
It may seem absurd for kids to engage in such dangerous behavior. Montreal’s Gazette published a story with the headline “Stupid Human Tricks Include Extreme Backyard Wrestling,” and claimed that backyard wrestling “is sweeping America, the latest symptom of a whole generation’s craving for thrills.”48 Once again, all young people are implicated, not just those who have obtained a sense of identity through their participation. For some, being in a club or league is something they have given a lot more thought to than critics may realize. As one backyard wrestler in Northern California told the San Francisco Chronicle:
We are given a government that is a lie, no more real than the choreographed endings of wrestling matches where major corporations pull the strings of our puppet governmental figureheads like Vince McMahon pulls the strings of the superstars working for him. Underground backyard wrestling gives me a way to make the kids of this generation feel again, it gives me a way to act out important lessons of humility and put forth ideals of good and evil in a way that even the desensitized youth of today can take to heart. Extreme underground wrestling allows me to work with the anger inside that has built up as I grow older and become more aware of the lies prepared for us by our fathers for many generations.49
Critics of wrestling may claim that young people like the one quoted above are victims of a violent media culture and unaware of the consequences of violence, but the appeal goes beyond movies, television, and video games. Fighting as a sport predates televised wrestling by centuries. Just as the Romans would draw the masses to a slaughter, boxing continues to attract the wealthy to ringside seats and millions to pay-per-view. Fighting draws a crowd. The National Hockey League accepts a certain amount of fighting, and unexpected melees during football and baseball games regularly make the sports highlight reels. Whether or not we like to admit it, fighting is exciting to many people. The difference between backyard wrestling and fighting is that entertainment is the point, rather than settling a score. That’s probably what makes many people shake their heads in amazement, but it’s what adults have been doing for centuries, continuing a long tradition of human bloodlust.
Tattooing is also an ancient tradition, now largely associated with young people. When I’ve brought up the topic of tattooing, piercing, and other types of body modification in my deviant behavior courses, most of my students say that they view these practices as former signs of deviance, but certainly not current markers. I show news clips of kids suspended from school for having pierced tongues, and almost to a student they scoff at older school administrators who just don’t get it. Maybe in the past it would have been strange to have multiple piercings or tattoos, they tell me, but not anymore. Students in my classes will often volunteer their own reasons for getting pierced or tattooed, usually something as simple as they liked the way it looked, and will say it is no big deal to them.
But concerns about teen tattooing and piercing remain. For one, without parental consent they are usually illegal before eighteen. And as news reports detail, fears about tattooing and piercing are a rite of passage for anxious parents of teens as much as for some teens themselves.
This anxiety was probably enhanced in 2002 by the publication of two studies in Pediatrics that looked at whether there was a relationship between tattoos, piercings, and other dangerous behavior in adolescents. The first study, published in June 2002, received news coverage across the country with headlines like “Body Art May Be Tip of Child’s Wildness” and “Marked for Trouble.”50
Overall, 13.2 percent of the study’s sample had at least one tattoo, and more than two-thirds of them got their first tattoo when they were seventeen or older. While the authors claimed that only 3 to 8 percent of the general public have a tattoo, a 2003 online Harris Poll found that 16 percent of adults surveyed had at least one.51 The Pediatrics study found that piercing was more common than tattooing; of those surveyed, 26.9 percent had at least one piercing (defined as anywhere other than the earlobe). The most likely site was on the ear cartilage, 13.6 percent, while 11 percent had belly rings; nipple or genital piercings were the least common at 2 percent.52
The study’s authors claimed to have found a relationship between having a tattoo or piercing, and substance use, sexual activity, and even suicidal thoughts. The authors also found that those who modified their bodies at earlier ages were more prone to substance use, and that if the tattoo came from a professional artist, they were less prone to be violent than those with a self-created or nonprofessionally created tattoo.
The authors were careful to note that the tattoo or piercing was not the cause of any of the behaviors defined as risky. They also pointed out that the mere presence of a tattoo or piercing did not mean that any one individual necessarily engaged in the behaviors they singled out. Other physicians responded to this study with some skepticism, warning that it was important for doctors not to overreact or make assumptions about their younger patients based on their appearance alone.
Additionally, this study had several serious shortcomings. First, it included “adolescents” between the ages of twelve and twenty-two. Forty-three percent of their sample of 484 was over eighteen. Although some people might not like the fact that young adults may have sex, smoke cigarettes, or drink alcohol, it is perfectly legal for many of them to do so. There’s a big difference between the behaviors acceptable for twelve- or twenty-two-year-olds, and combining these behaviors in a study dilutes the potential of finding out more about kids and risk. It is quite likely that getting tattooed or pierced and engaging in sex, drinking, smoking, and experimenting with drugs are all associated with a third factor: getting older.
Second, as the authors acknowledged, the study involved only military dependents who received health care at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, California, which the authors rightly noted is not a group that is representative of the entire population of people their age.
However, a second study about tattooing and adolescent behavior, published in December 2002, was based on a nationally representative sample. The surveys on which this article was based were conducted with 6,072 young people age eleven to twenty-one in 1995 and 1996. The study’s first wave found that 4.6 percent of respondents had at least one tattoo. A year later, the second survey found 3 percent had a tattoo. The authors conceded that tattoos might be much more common now and their findings might be different if the surveys were conducted later. Within this group of respondents, tattoos were associated with lower parental income and education and greater likelihood of living in a single-parent household. The tattooed respondents were also more likely to report having friends who use drugs, drink, smoke, have sex, get into fights, and skip school.
The authors noted that their goal as physicians was to alert practitioners to consider tattoos a clinical marker of possible risk-taking behavior in their patients. Of course, kids in low-income families are less likely to have access to regular medical care to begin with. What is interesting here is that tattoos themselves have become the warning signs and risk factors rather than a possible indicator of poverty and its known impact on young people’s health and well-being. Tattoos revealing gang affiliation would certainly indicate a serious health risk, but it is the tattoo’s meaning, not just its existence, that we need to consider.
These two studies were clearly constructed to find negative behaviors associated with tattoos and piercings, rather than to look at issues like creativity, independence, or academic achievement. Sometimes the questions we don’t ask are even more important than those we do. The studies were also designed to serve as a warning to adults that antisocial behavior may be predicted by young people’s appearance.
We can’t completely dismiss tattooing and piercing as inconsequential. In spite of a common perception that these are new practices, historically both have represented rites of passage into adulthood, particularly in tribal cultures. In more recent American history they have come to symbolize antiauthoritarian behavior and group affiliation, be it gang or military. That’s why it is so interesting that military kids’ tattoos would be studied without including the history and context of the meaning of tattooing in their lives, in a study that instead views their body modification as problematic.
Tattoos and piercings have somewhat contradictory meanings in contemporary American society. They aren’t uncommon; as noted earlier, a Harris Poll found 16 percent of all adults reported having at least one tattoo. According to the poll, they are most common among people in their midtwenties and thirties: 36 percent of those age twenty-five to twenty-nine and 28 percent of people age thirty to thirty-nine reported having at least one tattoo. 53 The percentage of young people with tattoos in the two studies discussed above ranged from 3 to 13 percent, which means kids are less likely to have tattoos than people in their forties at 14 percent. Kids are more on par with people age fifty to sixty-four at 10 percent, or even with their grandparents sixty-five and over, of which 7 percent of those who responded to the poll were tattooed.
But the size and placement of tattoos or piercings make a big difference in whether someone is really setting themselves apart from conventional society. A small, hidden tattoo versus a large tattoo or piercings covering the face yields very different reactions and social consequences. The secret tattoo or piercing has little social cost and has become a status symbol, a form of coopting a countercultural style without really taking an outsider stance.
A Chicago Sun-Times story asked the question many parents might have asked themselves: “What’s with all this body piercing? Head shaving? Tattooing? Purple hair? Weird clothes? Don’t you wonder if teens really, truly like that stuff, or are they doing it to shock us?”54 “The fads of teenagers can run from the ridiculous to the absurd,” stated a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article on body piercing.55
Adolescence and young adulthood are about exploring identity, about trying to be unique individuals while still fitting in with our peers. Tattoos and piercings are often ways to do that; however, the more body decoration we adopt, the more we may be differentiating ourselves from the mainstream and aligning ourselves with countercultural subgroups. But neither practice is isolated to teens and young adults. As sociologist Clinton R. Sanders discovered in his interviews with people who have tattoos, people of all ages use tattooing as a way to create a sense of self-definition, and tattoos are often an important marker of transition or a central life event rather than a passing teen fad.56
What some young people have done is make practices of subcultures more mainstream, adopting the “coolness” of the outsider stance while remaining an insider among like-minded peers. Even those whose appearance some may consider shocking find connections with others so adorned, relating to each other in their rejection of mainstream appearance norms. While the authors of the Pediatrics articles discussed above warned that these are kids practitioners should be on the lookout for, viewing their style as possibly indicative of risk-taking behavior, it is important to look beyond appearance and to understand why some of these kids may feel like outsiders to begin with.
“It’s hard to believe there’s ever been a time in America when the body parts of teenagers were so ornately decorated or, some would say, mutilated,” an article in the Oregonian began.57 Not only is there a real problem in dismissing tattooing and piercing as only a teen fad, but there is a real difference between adornment and mutilation. While one person’s idea of style may certainly vary from another’s, having a tattoo or nose ring is no more about mutilation for the wearer than getting a face lift or a nose job is for the cosmetic-surgery patient. Both are appearance changing, involve pain, and are attempts to achieve a desired look prized by particular groups. Conflating body modification with self-mutilation masks the very real problem of people who purposely cut themselves—not because it is a fad, but because it is a way for them to manage emotional troubles. If self-destructive behavior is considered par for the teenage course, we miss real danger signs when this behavior happens. We may be tempted to think that these warning signs are a phase that many teens go through, and to brush off truly alarming behavior as garden-variety teen angst. But it’s important to distinguish a multiply pierced or tattooed person who enjoys the style from the person who enjoys the pain—a frequent observation of those who have treated people who harm themselves.
Cutting has received a lot of public attention recently, but it is not a new phenomenon. An organization to treat people who self-injure, called Self Abuse Finally Ends (SAFE), was founded in 1985. It is difficult to estimate how many people intentionally hurt themselves without the goal of committing suicide because they often go to great lengths to hide their actions and only self-injure on hidden parts of their bodies. Sociologists Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler interviewed self-injurers, and found that they tend to be loners who generally see their behavior as shameful and otherwise “subscribe to conventional norms.”58 Often victims of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, self-injurers use cutting or burning as a coping mechanism, not as a fashion or identity statement like tattooing or piercing. This practice is a good example of the problem of viewing adolescence as a period of temporary insanity. We may minimize the experiences of being a teen, or accuse them of overreacting to the stress in their lives, and in so doing may trivialize their emotional struggles.
Some cutters describe the experience as a reminder that they are alive, in contrast to their feelings of emotional deadness. Young people who are thrill seekers may be experiencing similar emotions, and may feel stimulated by taking chances with danger. Instead of dismissing these emotional difficulties as “raging hormones” or attributing them to simply being a teen, we ought to take the signs more seriously when they do appear. If we view adolescence itself as a time of “normal” mental illness, we might dismiss symptoms of depression as a normal state of adolescence. Depression is very different than having a few bad days and expressing anger that may annoy adults, however, and it is something that should not be overlooked. Behavior that makes adults complain that “teens think they’re invincible” may in fact be a cry for help—or just kids testing their own personal limits in their quest for independence. It’s hard to know for sure without investigating the circumstances, but we will not know if we stick to well-worn generalizations about kids.
Perhaps the key condition that affects many young people today isn’t adolescence as much as it is boredom. While we often hear about the issue of overscheduled children, some communities lack much of anything for older teens to do. Because young people gradually have had less responsibility for bringing home wages to their families, and because household chores have become more automated, young people have a lot more free time on their hands now than did the young of past generations. Instead of just condemning young risk-takers, we need to offer more opportunities for young people to channel their energy in safe and constructive ways.
While fears that young people will imitate shows like Jackass or their peers’ substance use or body modification circulate between news reports, activist groups, and politicians, it is easy to overlook the biggest influence on young people’s lives: their parents. Yes, friends are important, but when it comes to seriously dangerous behavior, chances are good it was a long time coming, and not typically a spur of the moment bad decision. If we are worried about kids emulating other people’s behavior, parents should be our first concern, especially if the parents are substance users or living chaotic lives themselves. When young people seek stimulation that may seem reckless, we also must ask what sort of stress many otherwise well-functioning adults may thrive on too. The stress we accept of work, debt, and other aspects of contemporary life may send the message to our children that being an adrenaline junkie is normal.
And in spite of our worries about peer pressure and popular culture, conformity isn’t always negative. Knowing how to fit into a variety of groups is a valuable social skill, particularly if we can do it without completely losing our individuality. Most young people deal with educational and religious institutions, which promote high levels of conformity and sometimes discourage them from asking critical questions and making self-guided choices. Parents often encourage, if not demand conformity from their kids. So it’s no wonder that young people seek acceptance and may not challenge perceived group norms.
What teens and young adults are doing when they experiment with sex and alcohol in particular is attempting to conform and adapt to adult practices. When given few guidelines as to how to safely engage in these behaviors, they come up with their own rules. Other Western countries don’t expend nearly so much energy trying to shield young people from knowledge about sex and the use of alcohol. Instead, particularly with alcohol, young people are slowly introduced to drinking alcohol under supervision, rather than learning to drink in secret, as many Americans do.
In truth, most American young people are not acting with reckless abandon. National trend data indicate that if anything, young people are now better behaved and less prone to take risks with drugs, alcohol, and sex. For those who do, the causes are likely more complex than simply being a teenager. While some rebellion is a normal part of becoming independent, kids who take big chances with their health and safety are likely acting out against years of instability in their lives, and even against social conditions that limit young people to an increasingly narrow, one-size-fits-all path. The next chapter explores a teen rite of passage commonly associated with risk: driving.
“This Show Must Go,” Broadcasting and Cable, April 30, 2001, 82.
“Judge Orders Reading of the Classics for Teens,” Internattonal Journal of Humanities and Peace 17 (2001): 75.
“This Show Must Go,” Broadcasting and Cable.
Marc Silver, “You’re Looking at a Jackass,”’ U.S. News and World Report, February 12, 2001, 62.
Craig Schneider, “Cobb Teenagers Admit Bizarre Prank with Dead Cat,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 3B; Paul Purpura, “‘Jackass’ Act Draws Catcalls for Teens,” Times-Picayune, November 14, 2003, 1; Kieran Crowley, Selim Algar, and Dan Mangan, “Five Teens Busted in Turkey ‘Prank’ That Ko’d Driver,” New York Post, November 19, 2004, 5.
Cited in Paul D. Winston, “Modern Approach to Natural Selection?” Business Insurance, February 12, 2001, 21.
Hank Stuever, “The Rear End of Civilization as We Know it,” Washington Post, November 8, 2002, C1.
See chapter two in Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice about Children (New York: Vintage, 2003).
Barbara Strauch, The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 106–7.
Tao Lu et al., “Gene Regulation and DNA Damage in the Ageing Human Brain,” Nature 429 (2004): 883–91.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics Program. “Child Mortality: Death Rates for Children Ages 5 to 14 by Gender, Race, Hispanic Origin, and Cause of Death, Selected Years 1980–2000,” accessed via http://childstats.gov (last accessed January 5, 2006).
National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, Columbia University, telephone poll of 900 respondents, 2002.
Janice D’Arcy, “Headlong Descent into the Depths of Alcohol,” Hartford Courant, January 2, 2003, A1.
Monitoring the Future Study, “Trends in 30-Day Prevalence of Use of Various Drugs for Eighth, Tenth, and Twelfth Graders” (Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2004).
Monitoring the Future Study, “Long-Term Trends in Lifetime Prevalence of Use of Various Drugs for Twelfth Graders” (Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2004).
U.S. Census Bureau, “Victim’s Perception of the Use of Alcohol and Drugs by the Violent Offender, 2002,” National Crime Victimization Survey (March 2003).
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings (Rockville, Md.: Office of Applied Studies, 2004).
Nancy Trejos and Daniel de Vise, “Police Ticket Cars in Lieu of Teens,” Washington Post, June 7, 2005, B4.
Robert Stanton, “Underage Drinking Targeted in Schools,” Houston Chronicle, May 19, 2005, 1.
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, “Understanding Underage Drinking,” National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (September 2004).
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, “Alcohol Dependence or Abuse among Parents with Children Living in the Home”; and “Children Living with Substance-Abusing or Substance-Dependent Parents,” (Rockville, Md.: Office of Applied Studies, 2003).
Monitoring the Future Study, “Trends in 30-Day Prevalence.”
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, “Illicit Drugs, by Patient Characteristics,” table 7, Drug Abuse Warning Network, 2003: Interim Estimates of Drug-Relcated Emergency Department Visits (Rockville, Md.: Office of Applied Studies, 2004).
Cited in Daniel Costello, “Boomers’ Overdose Deaths Up Markedly,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2005, A1.
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Drug Related Homicides,” ONDCP Drug Policy Information Clearinghouse staff from FBI, Crime in the United States: Uniform Crime Reports, annual.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2003 National Survey.
Christopher Rowland, “Few Local Signs of Rising Cocaine Use,” Boston Globe, November 7, 2002, 1.
Monitoring the Future Study, “Long-Term Trends in Lifetime Prevalence”; Monitoring the Future Study, “Trends in 30-Day Prevalence.”
Monitoring the Future Study, “Long-Term Trends in Lifetime Prevalence.”
Monitoring the Future Study, “Trends in 30-Day Prevalence.”
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2003 National Survey.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2003 National Survey.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Trends in the Prevalence of Sexual Behaviors, 1991–2003,” Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health and Human Services, 2003).
Lisa Remez, “Oral Sex among Adolescents: Is It Sex or Is It Abstinence?” Family Planning Perspectives 32, 2000.
National Public Radio (NPR), Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University telephone poll of 1,759 adults, with an oversample of 1,001 parents of children in grades seven through twelve, September and October 2003.
U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, “Teenagers’ Births and Birth Rates by Race and Age: 1990 to 2002,” and “Abortions by Selected Characteristics: 1990 to 2000,” Vital Statistics of the United States, annual.
Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, “Birth Rates for Females Ages 15–17 by Race and Hispanic Origin, 1980–2003,” America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 2005).
Harry Shattuck, “Road Trip,” Houston Chronicle, March 7, 2004, 1.
Cited in David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and At Play (New York: Anchor, 1985), 140.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Study (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health and Human Services, 2003).
National Opinion Research Council (NORC), General Social Survey (Chicago, 1998).
Douglas Kirby, Emerging Answers: Research Findings on Programs to Reduce Teen Pregnancy (Summary) (Washington, D.C.: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 2001).
Hannah Brückner and Peter Bearman, “After the Promise: The Consequences of Adolescent Virginity Pledges,” Journal of Adolescent Health 36 (2005): 271–78.
National Public Radio (NPR), Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University Kennedy School, telephone poll.
Reported in Michael J. Weiss, “The New Summer Break,” American Demographics (August 2001): 49, based on Element Online Survey of 1,143 thirteen- to nineteen-year-olds, May 14–May 21, 2001.
Michael Sandler, “Slew of Letters Grinds Skate Park to Halt,” St. Petersburg Times, September 15, 2002, 1.
Ajay Singh, “Wrestling: In for the Kill,” Independent, March 31, 2001, 10–16.
Marcus Warren, “Stupid Human Tricks Include Extreme Backyard Wrestling,” Gazette (Montreal), January 6, 2003, A12.
Sam McManis, “Backyard Wrestling—All Pain, No Brain,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 1, 2000, 1.
Lisa Prue, “Body Art May Be Tip of Child’s Wildness,” Omaha World Herald, October 8, 2002, 1E; Suz Redfearn, “Marked for Trouble,” Washington Post, June 11, 2002, F1.
Harris Poll of 2,215, conducted online, July 14–20, 2003.
Sean T. Carroll et al., “Tattoos and Body Piercings as Indicators of Adolescent Risk-Taking Behaviors,” Pediatrics 109 (2002): 1021–27.
Harris Poll.
Barbara Cooke, “When Teen Flair Is Scare; New Look Could Signal Problem,” Chicago Sun–Times, March 10, 2000, 48.
Jane Brody, “Looking at the Hole Picture,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 24, 2000, 1G.
Clinton R. Sanders, Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
Margie Boule, “No Loopholes in Laws on Body-Part Piercing and Oregon Teens,” Oregonian, November 9, 2004, E1.
Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler, “Self-Injurers as Loners,” in Constructions of Deviance: Social Power, Context and Interaction, 5th edition (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2006), 337–44.