Reviews Written By: A1V2G3IMXY51JEprovided by Amazon.com |
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 | The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids | |
 | "Teens are fine; grownups (and psychologists) are messed up" | 2008-11-24 |
| If author Levine reversed her book's title and emphasis to warn about the epidemic of parents inflicting their own materialism, drug and alcohol abuse, crime, divorce, and other ills on their teenaged kids, this would be valuable book. Just look at the misguided, favorable reviews to see how badly this book miscommunicates the realities facing teens today. I taught at a big university near Marin County and saw hundreds of these "priveleged" (and not so privileged) students at close range. As a generation, they're fine, generally coping well with stresses. Their parents' generation, however, is not all right. I'm convinced from the growing stack of books like these that psychologists desperately need to get out of their offices and spend time in homes and real-life environments to see how a variety of young people (not just the tiny fraction they see as clients) are coping. Or, at least, psychologists should stop citing anecdotes and self-praising cases and study the social statistics for the areas they live in. Let us take public health and crime figures for Marin County and compare adults ages 40-49 (the average parents) with teens. About 10 times more parents than teens die from drug abuse, 50% more 40-agers are arrested (including nearly TWICE as many for felonies) than teenagers, FIVE TIMES more 40-aged parents than teenaged youths are arrested for drug and alcohol related offenses, and seven times more parents than teens commit suicide. Those are just a few indicators among many to suggest that it isn't the teens--it's the grownups of Levine's generation who are messed up. You can explore more of these shocking statistics for yourselves. For example, see California tabulations at: http://stats.doj.ca.gov/cjsc_stats/prof06/21/18.htm (crime) http://www.applications.dhs.ca.gov/vsq/screen1a.asp?Year_Data=2006&Stats=1 (health) Levine's claims that teenagers today are more materialistic, selfish, money-hungry, etc. are just garbage. The same surveys she cites actually show that as a result of their parents' generation's greedy refusal to pay taxes to support schools, teens and college students today face massive debts and must work more in college to pay skyrocketing tuitions than their more generously supported parents did 40 years ago. By the best measures, students today are much more community oriented, happier, and less materialistic and troubled than their parents were or are. So, my modest suggestion is that if you mistakenly bought this book, rip out 90% of the pages and keep only the few in which Levine urges parents to cut out their own bad behaviors and values. Reviewers: stop buying into these books, even if they do flatter your personal demographic. Publishers: we've got a big enough stack of psychologists' narrow, bubble-world misconceptions derived from fixating on their most troubled clients and failure to engage the realities of the larger world. Mike Males, Ph.D. http://www.YouthFacts.org | ||
 | Freaks, Geeks and Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools, and the Culture Consumption | |
| "We're all in high school" | 2005-05-05 |
| Dr. Milner is correct that adolescents "lack...power over
the central features of their lives." One power I wish teens had is to prevent portrayals such as this. This book is an exercise in unreality. Adults are charged with "inadvertently" exercising the wrong kinds of controls over teenagers, which excuses adults from facing the fact that our own values and behaviors--not what structures or lectures we aim at adolescents--are the most critical influences on the young. "Why do American teenagers behave the way they do?" Dr. Milner asks. The USA has 30 million teenagers, ranging from Hmong migrant laborers to middle-class Latinos to Marin upscalers (note: the last are the only ones culture critics care about). No responsible social scientist uses a term such as "behave the way they do" to describe such a large, diverse group. "Why are many teenagers obsessed with who sits with them at lunch, the brand of clothes they wear, what parties they are invited to, the privacy of their bedrooms, the intrigues of school cliques, who is dating or breaking up with whom, what is the latest popular music?" he asks. Because adults around them are obsessed with the same kinds of status markers. Hard to believe, but teens account for just 3% of consumer spending in the US. Who accounts for the other 97%? That's right--the parents, educators, and adults Dr. Milner depicts as so disturbed and baffled at where teenagers could possibly get the idea that what clothes you wear, what styles you affect, who you associate with, what circles you are included in, what other people's sex lives are like, etc., are important. Dr. Milner treats adults simply as controllers and arbiters, not as role models whose own smoking, drinking, sexual behavior, fashion consciousness, status seeking, and cliquishness crucially impact those of the young. This is a fatally un-introspective book. Dr. Milner asks: "Why have alcohol, drug use, and casual sex become widespread?" They haven't. These behaviors have declined sharply among teens in recent decades and, more important, consequences of such behaviors (drunken driving, drug overdose, pregnancy) have plummeted among today's adolescents compared to previous generations. Today's parents have far worse illegal-drug and alcohol abuse problems than their teenage kids do. The question is: why doesn't a noted social scientist such as Dr. Milner know these things? This book perfectly illustrates the hierarchical arrangements of grownup society Dr. Milner is so troubled by when reflected by adolescents. Where "cool kids" distance themselves from "geeks," Milner distances adults (high status) from adolescents (low status). Where popular high schoolers view outcasts as being weird, different, messing up the school, and requiring insults and thumpings from the alphas to restore the proper order, Milner charges teens with objectionable, unhealthy values that are messing up our society and require superior adults to reassert our corrective authority. When it comes to us versus them, power versus reject, meaningful achievement versus superficial status, painful introspection versus blaming scapegoats, and every other flaw we see so clearly in teenagers but are blind to in ourselves, Dr. Milner's book inadvertently illustrates the degree to which high schoolers anticipate grownups and grownups recapitulate high school. Mike Males, Sociology Department, University of California, Santa Cruz | ||
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