It’s Tough to Be a Kid These Days
Young people are struggling to grow up.
Somewhere, Christopher Hitchens writes that at least half a dozen events in the history of the U.S. have been described as the day America lost its innocence. The Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, Prohibition, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the McCarthy hearings, J.F.K.’s death, Vietnam, Watergate, the Oklahama bombing … Should I continue? The question, really, connects to what made the U.S. so innocent in the first place. And the answer I propose is age. The country is barely older than 200.
But why does youth correspond to innocence? It was not always so. Only in the past century or so has childhood in the West come to be seen as a time of innocence, and only gradually. It is not that long ago that children would to live in filthy Victorian workhouses and sleep four to a bed. (My great-granda was born in one.) Those same Victorians sent children up chimneys. As to the idea of the ‘teenager’, it did not appear until the 1960s, when there was still a thriving youth labour market and children were beaten by parents and teachers. A working fourteen-year-old was treated as an adult.
The word ‘teenager’ did not appear till the 1960s, when there was still a thriving youth labour market and children were beaten by parents and teachers.
Things look a bit different now. Children are thought to be vulnerable and in need of protection. Our teenage years are seen as a time of struggle, when the parts of the brain develop at different speeds, when we take risks, when we are highly susceptible to physical, emotional and psychological harm. Sociologists have even come to use the word ‘young people’ (and to retire the term ‘adolescence’) in order to expand the age range for those considered to be young. In the West, it is now common for children to live with their parents till they are 23 or 24, and live with them again in their late twenties after having lived elsewhere. The thinking is that our development into adults can take time, and can be painful.
Though, as a culture, we perceive that children and teenagers are fragile, we also respect them in a way we did not before. Young people have more candid, more equal conversations with their parents, and teachers take the thoughts of their charges seriously. We have child psychologists, who treat the child’s experience as valid. Parents often let their children make important and potentially life-changing decisions about their lives.
Young people report having more candid and more equal conversations with their parents, and teachers take the thoughts of their charges seriously. We have child psychologists, who treat the child’s experience as valid.
At the same time, young people must grapple with what sociologists call the ‘de-traditionalisation’ of society. We have abolished the shared standards by which a young person could measure herself in times past. Each person must now overcome what Erich Fromm called our ‘fear of freedom’ — a fear of independence so great that (on Fromm’s view) it drove people towards the Nazis. Children, teenagers and twenty-somethings do not ‘receive’ an identity in the same way they once did. They must make one, and then find the strength to affirm it in a world of rival identities. They must find the self-assurance that eludes the heroine of Fleabag, who wants someone ‘to tell me what to wear in the morning’.
In the shape of the the internet, they can find support in this quest. The internet gives young people a way to encounter far more identities than they could in the past. Even isolated children and teenagers can find others like themselves. Geography is no longer a main determining factor in who we grow up to be. And young people can find online communities with which they can share their frustrations, hopes, dreams and ideas. A gay teenager can now find others like himself in a way that is more or less anonymous and safe.
Geography is no longer a main determining factor in who we grow up to become. And young people can find online communities with which they can share their frustrations, hopes, dreams, ideas.
Of course, the internet cuts both ways. It is now a cliché to say that social media does appalling harm to young people (and to older people, for that matter). Girls as young as eight develop terrible worries about their bodies. Images of self-harm are idealised. And then there are the Andrew Tates of the world, telling boys who lack self-confidence that girls are the source of their woes and — more still — that girls should serve them.
It to those boys and young men who, arguably, are finding it hardest to adjust to this new state of affairs—to ‘grow up’, in the sense of developing a strong sense of self. There are vanishingly few images of healthy masculinity to replace those of the past. In a viral video, an interviewer asks Londoners ‘What are men good for?’ and receives, without exception, either a disparaging appraisal or silence. This has almost certainly contributed to the widespread reports of sadness, worry, stress and suicide among these groups, as well as to the rise of violent gangs and groups, online and offline.
There are vanishingly few images of healthy masculinity to replace those of the past.
Some psychologists and sociologists say that so many of us struggle so much to solidify a sense of identity that it as if we are trapped in a kind of permanent adolescence. We are the main characters in a lifelong bildungsroman, a never-ending process of moral and psychological development. But one wonders if this has to be so bad. After all, the only proof we have a mind is that we change it, and all thinking people know that we never step into the same river twice (to quote Heraclitus): that the world, which includes ourselves, is always changing, whatever we like to pretend. Perhaps, then, we should stop searching for a perfectly solid sense of identity, for a category, for a label. Perhaps we should embrace our fluidity. Perhaps we should allow ourselves to shape and be shaped. And perhaps we should encourage children and teenagers to be the same: to roam, to explore, to adventure, and never to find themselves. Is wisdom not a kind of studied childhood?
For all the problems we face growing up today, we should remember how it was for young people just over a century ago. In 1914, the flower of British youth — including boys barely out of childhood— rushed to fight in the First World War. By 1918, just four villages in the United Kingdom were able to say that they had not lost one of their boys. (Ironically, one of these ‘blessed villages’ is called Upper Slaughter.) There is no better evocation of the appalling sense of absence in the wake of that war than Larkin’s MMCXIV, which describes boys signing up to fight: ‘Never such innocence, / Never before or since, / As changed itself to past / Without a word — the men / Leaving the gardens tidy, / The thousands of marriages, / Lasting a little while longer: / Never such innocence again.’
