Now before anyone begins to mouth off that I’ve become too adolescent-centred let me say that adults can say, do, and, not do things which can be
considered very good for young people and so also for themselves. I think the self- same adults can also say, do or not do things that are an injustice to young people. Too often adults give young people a bad press. This was confirmed for
me when recently I read a report in my local newspaper about a public meeting
in our Town Hall which had been called to discuss a general concern about street crime.
Don’t get me wrong; destructive and violent street crime
disturbs and frightens me as much as the next person, but on reading the newspaper report
it became obvious within the first few sentences that the meeting considered
young people to be the principal villains when it came to street crime.
Naturally, epitome of good citizenry that I am, I was not at the meeting, and to be fair, the report seemed
to suggest there was a consensus in the meeting that young people should not
be stereotyped and that only a minority of young people were involved in
delinquent behaviour. Nevertheless it appeared that for many at the meeting
delinquency on the town’s streets could only be put down to
youth.
Street crime : not happening
One of the reasons wheeled out to explain this problem was
that there was not enough organised activity available for youngsters and so
with nothing else to do they go out on the streets and rampage. There is
usually some truth in old chestnuts but adults who totally fall for this one
are in serious denial. They have consciously or unconsciously blocked from their
memory what it is to be young.
Hasn’t it always been the case that for some young people to
be involved in organised activity like the scouts or to be a member of the youth club has been cool, while for others, perhaps those of a more solitary nature, belonging to
such organisations has always been uncool? That a substantial number of young
people do not join in the activities of a youth organisation does not
necessarily mean there is a shortage of resources, neither does it mean that youngsters who do not join organised youth activities are more likely to
be street criminals.
We forget too that like us before them, teenagers either
quietly or more obviously, are embarking on that often embarrassing and painful
search to find an adult identity. As part of this process youngsters need in
some way to break away from their parenting figures and sometimes they do this
by rejecting what adults provide for them.
These rejections can be painful for adults. Few of us can be
perfect parents, and this is a time when both generations, parents and
youngsters are meeting new experiences, and so mistakes are made, but parenting
adults have a vital role in allowing enough space for a youngster's quest for adult
identity to take place. At the same
time as keeping our young people as safe as we possibly can we should ensure that young spirits are not broken. Adolescence is a time for using the mutual trust that has built up through the childhood years to allow the
risk-taking that necessarily has to take place as young people grow into
adulthood.
This is why it is so regrettable that our idea of the
adolescent period is largely centred on the behaviour of young people, rather
than being seen as a time of re-negotiating personal positions between two
generations. If there is a relationship problem between two generations, then
the older generation has to take some (and in my view, most) of the
responsibility for it, since after all it is supposed to be wiser. So, when,
as we walk up the High Street of our local town or city, we see or
hear something which suggests to us that the behaviour and values of our young people are
deteriorating, we should be more open and tolerant in our thinking when we ask
what has caused this “deterioration.”
My particular generation, those people who were teenagers in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, were the ones who believed they had revolted
against what we thought was the repression, (particularly of emotional and
sexual matters) suffered by our parents’ generation, and so it seemed we should
offer our children greater freedom of expression.
Street crime may have happened
In any such social developments there is a down
side as well as an up side. It is all too easy for us to forget, when we
complain about the foul language of some young people nowadays, that from the
late 1960s and early 1970s, in the spirit of freedom from repression (some
called this “ becoming permissive”), our generation allowed for the first
time sexual intimacy, sexual swear words, violence and sexual violence to be
increasingly viewed on the cinema and television screen.
I happen to think that there are more positives to
having less censorship rather than increased censorship, as long as the
problematic issues which arise are discussed sensitively between generations,
and between parent and young person. I do not think these discussions occur
often enough or when they do they tend to turn into adult rants (like this know-all one you may still be reading now).
More worrying is that when we adults lay the
responsibility for increasing anti-social behaviour in our society at the feet
of young people, we conveniently forget our part in cultivating a social
environment in which anti-social behaviour can flourish because we have failed
to take on our full parenting responsibilities. We do not always work very hard at being positive role models for our youngsters. All too frequently, we leave this to social networks, the internet, television and computer games, the youngsters’ peers groups, and other adults.
At the same time we deny the paradox that those very acquisitive, aggressive
cultural role models and values - which we adults, from the righteousness of our
moral pedestal, condemn as powerful negative influences on our young - are in fact the values of a political system and marketing and media
industries which we, directly or indirectly, in our clamour for greater financial wealth, have allowed to develop and flourish.
It is not helpful to deny that there are serious problems
facing young people in our community or that there are some youngsters who are
behaving in a way which harms others and themselves. But shouldn’t adults
reflect on ways to solve these problems by first acknowledging a significant responsibility for their creation, rather than passing the blame on to young people, or indeed on
to their teachers, youth workers, social workers and the police? Isn’t there a
need to recognise and accept the necessarily perennial inter-generational problems
involved in the process of growing up? Adults have a responsibility to contain
these problems but also to accept them as a normal part of life.
