Teenage kicks? Today’s young people are too focused on the future
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Version 0 of 1. When I tell people that I am a secondary school teacher there is one standard response: incredulity. This is usually followed by comments about how “tough” working with teenagers must be, as I am transformed, before my interlocutor’s eyes, from a diminutive 5’2” woman into an Amazonian who is brave enough to battle the Vicky Pollard generation. My protests that my students are lovely, largely conscientious and that I enjoy my work are taken as signs of a saint-like humility. It is an almost universal belief that teenagers are trouble. Yet as new figures from the Department of Health show, adolescent delinquency, that familiar rite of passage, is fast disappearing. Teenagers today are less likely to take drugs, smoke and drink. And over the past 40 years, and especially the past 15, teen pregnancy rates have been in decline, while abortion rates for under-18s have also fallen. Seemingly, anything mum and dad got up to is now considered passé and pathetic, even sex, drugs and rock and roll. The picture of teenage excess and debauchery hammed up by TV shows like Skins and Geordie Shore is for adult consumption. Teenagers themselves aren’t buying it. In 2003, 30% admitted to having taken drugs. Ten years on, when the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) surveyed more than 5,000 schoolchildren, that figure had fallen to 16%. Only 9% of teens said they’d had a drink in the last week, compared to 25% a decade earlier, and just under a quarter had tried smoking, compared to 42% in 2003. This is the Facebook generation. We pity them for living out every aspect of their lives online, a practice that impairs their ability to get blotto on White Lightning on a dreary Friday night, due to the worry about the potentially very public consequences. Cataloguing their entire lives on Instagram, Twitter or whatever other web thingy they’re using this week, they will, we sigh, be forever dogged by youthful misdemeanours we once could happily leave behind. But they are savvier than we give them credit for. Why indulge in teenage excess when it will exist in perpetuity to shame you – there for future employers, lovers and in-laws to mine and judge you by? They are also recognising the ways in which the counterculture is sold to them by marketers and advertisers. Who can blame them then for following the straight and narrow? Their behaviour is also being influenced by increased alcohol and cigarette prices, greater promotion of their health risks, better sex education in schools and more readily available contraception. Yet in an attempt to explain the myriad, complex factors that have led to the trend for teenage sobriety and abstinence, one nameless “government source” put it down to “demographic change”, citing the fact that “there are now more Muslim girls who don’t drink and have sex [and are] having an influence on their peers”. It is astonishing to see the figures interpreted like this: turned into a nebulous warning about “too much immigration” on the one hand, and a back-handed multiculturalism-ain’t-so-bad compliment on the other. (Cue the Daily Mail’s headline: Generation sensible: How today’s teenagers are less likely to drink, smoke or take drugs ‘because of rise in the number of young Muslims’) This confusing and simplistic assessment ignores the move towards social conservatism by teenagers across the developed world. There have been falls in teen drinking over the last decade in Sweden, Russia, Norway, Iceland, Australia and the United States, as well as the UK. Given that we are in the middle of a global recession and austerity, these figures should come as no real surprise. And we shouldn’t read them as a sign that teenagers are simply remaining children for longer. In these difficult times, the meaning of adolescence has been reconstructed. Gone is the rose-hued image of it as a period of ennui where mistakes were possible, even encouraged. Teenagers today are some of the most tested and examined in generations, and carry with them a prevailing sense that these years are preparation for a highly competitive adult life. Their trajectories are much more linear and rigid: “I will get my GCSEs, do A-levels and go to university.” And in a world where failure to do so increases the likelihood of ending up trapped in poverty pay and/or a zero-hours contract, today’s young people are exercising necessary pragmatism. Generation sensible is on the rise and good luck to them. For them, a great deal is at stake. |