Trashing Teens (2007)

I think one major reason that modern adolescents can be so moody, impulsive, and irresponsible is widespread chronic sleep deprivation.

Adolescents naturally have very late-shifted chronotypes. I.e. compared to older adults they tend to wake late in the day and stay up late at night. Yet American high schools have ridiculously early start times. For example it's not unusual for schools to start at dawn. Which means students taking the bus may have to leave before dawn.

We have decades of research demonstrating the impact of sleep deprivation on cognitive functioning, decision making judgement and emotional stability. It's little wonder that a segment of society that we're forcing into chronic sleep deprivation acts "immature".

We just don't recognize the problem because it's too easy for us old folks to write off the symptoms as the "foibles of youth". Yet it's us old folks pushing these torturous schedules onto teens, despite mountains of scientific evidence saying otherwise.

Paul Graham actually wrote about this in 2003: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

I could not agree more. Adolescent education is completely and utterly broken in most developed societies and is causing pain and misery on a vast scale, but fixing it is a complete non-priority for those who could.

Greta, when you're done with climate change, can you fix schools please?

My grand mother was born in 1894 and was tenth of eleven children. She spent here early years on a farm helping with her younger brother. She attended school until the 4th grade. At 11-years-old, she was working full time in a cotton mill. At 14 she had her first child.

My grandmother and grandfather maintained a farm while both worked in the mill. Mornings started at 4:30am six days a week.

Grandma had a picture with all of the young girls at the mill, and would always point out a couple of the unmarried girls who were 16 in the picture and say that they were old maids.

It is possible, maybe likely, that we have extended childhood too far, and I am sure that given the right upbringing, my 11-year-old daughter could function just as well as my grandmother, but I have not prepared my daughter for that type of life. My daughter has never been required to start the day with chores; she has never been responsible for others. If we are going to change how we treat teens, we need to start a lot younger and change how we raise children.

Really interesting article! This quote was particularly insightful and thought-provoking:

"Teens in America are in touch with their peers on average 65 hours a week, compared to about four hours a week in preindustrial cultures. In this country, teens learn virtually everything they know from other teens, who are in turn highly influenced by certain aggressive industries. This makes no sense. Teens should be learning from the people they are about to become."

One of the factors may be the desire for indoctrination, from many sides. As long as you're legally a child, your time and attention is effectively someone elses's property. The school system can have you schooled for n*10 hours a week on whatever it considers objective truth. There is lots of political tampering with this everywhere. Parents can (legally) control what media you consume, what information you get and who you can interact with. It's partly about the power to make young people what someone else wants them to be. (Not that it usually works as expected.)

I'm not saying adolescents should not be educated (in fact, I think there is lots of unrealized opportunity for society in public education), just that this is a tasty quasi-political power that's hard to give up and tempting to expand.

I vividly remember being frustrated as a teenager that I essentially lived my life as a vassal until age 18 or so.

The school system felt utterly farcical. Like being trapped in a cage with a bunch of idiots.

In adult life you can quit a job, leave a town, change yourself. As a teenager your most expressive period is robbed from you.

Definition of adult depends on your values and culture. Some people staying with parents taking care of family would be adult in east Asia, but not having your own house and mortgage lacks maturity in the west. What it means to be an adult in the west is up in the air at the moment. We don't have easy institutional or cultural markers for what the American dream is or what adulthood should be. The old institutional rites of passage through college and graduation milestones is looking less attractive as the internet grows. Marriage can be seen as uncertain.

The only thing I can suggest is the idea of picking up your own cross and bearing it. Kid/job/mortgage has a lot of uncertainty built into it at the moment.

My pet theory on teens, and one I'm brainstorming for my own kids, is that they don't have enough meaningful responsibility within their families or communities. Somehow I want to find them work that is critical for the family and let them be in charge of it.

Whether they are more competent than we assume is an interesting angle, but I look back at my teens and feel like I was both competent enough for most work but also utterly useless compared to what I am now.

Edit: I'd reform school to add in lots of responsibility for older kids to teach and care for younger kids. Also perhaps get them helping with food production in gardens, farms, grocers, restaurants. What other meaningful work could we find for teens?

I remember reading sentiments like in the late 00's and early 10's and feeling justified in feeling that I at that age was being infantilized by society and that teenagers and people in their early twenties are more capable if they were given just, as the article puts it, not just more freedom but more responsibility. Today though, more than 10 years later, it seems the pendulum has continued to drift even further, with some people suggesting, as the article hints, that adults aren't really adults until perhaps 30.

>In recent surveys I've found that American teens are subjected to more than 10 times as many restrictions as mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many as incarcerated felons.

What does this even mean? I don't feel as though "restrictions" are countable, fungible things.

I think the artificial extension of childhood is caused by the rapid increase in complexity of modern society, while our biological makeup is pretty much the same as 10.000 years ago.

To hold an avarage job and participate in society as an informed citizen you seem to need at least ~20 years of education in western economies.

We can't just go around by our instincts like animals any more without getting in trouble, I think that is what caused the extension of childhood.

I'm sure that a lot is wrong with our current eduction system for teens and that giving some amount of responsibility to teens would be good. But the claim that adolescents are as good or even better than adults when it comes to decision making or responsibility is just plain wrong and there is plenty of physical evidence that disproves it.

When teens reach their adolescence, the functioning of the frontal lobe in the brain is tuned down. The frontal lobe is what gives people self control; tune it down and you become more impulsive, emotional and risk seeking. The frontal lobe only returns to its normal mode when people reach their early twenties.

Source: e.g https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...

What do the younger readers think of this?

What got me is "30 is the new 20". That may be mostly economic, driven by student loans keeping twentysomethings broke and the decline of middle class job openings.

The article makes many strong but dubious claims. Like, I am inclined to believe that many teens and kids could handle more responsibility, but a lot written in article just does not sound trustworthy. (The part where I disagree is the part where author promotes early marriage, I dont think it is good idea to marry as teen.)

Like:

> American teens are subjected to more than 10 times as many restrictions as mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many as incarcerated felons.

> It's hard to keep a marriage together when there is constant conflict with teens.

Are conflicts with teens really cause of that many divorces?

> The factory system doesn't work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date.

That is highly exaggerated statement. I am pretty sure 2 years after you are just find.

> Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives.

Is this actually true that over 50% of people hate school in America?

> young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil

Is this result of actual study of teens in those societies? Or just reflection of assumptions? Because from what I read about history, in European societies where young people worked in the past, young people were still quick to join revolutionary movements or just get drunk and fight it out in streets. Plus, they often lived and work with families for economic reasons.

> Teens in America are in touch with their peers on average 65 hours a week, compared to about four hours a week in preindustrial cultures.

Were they really "in touch" with siblings and cousins only for 4 hours a week?

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Plus, the reason teens are not considered adults is not that their IQ would be low. The reason is impulsivity and similar considerations.

> two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date

I don't get this point? Does algebra get outdated in two years? History? Grammar? Big O notation? Design Patterns? Concrete pouring techniques? Basic chemistry?

Didn't see a lot of citations in that a article. Still I'd agree that parents may have too much authority over teens.

Growing up in a very religious household did some damage to me. But thankfully the schools taught us to break out of group think, the scientific method, and exposed us to a lot more viewpoints.

Though I doubt letting younger teens enter into long term contacts. Teens can be impulsive and lack the experience to comprehend the consequences.

One of the things which blew me away as a yoot; reading about Alfred Krupp, who built a small family business into the Krupp empire ... starting at age 14.

For whatever reasons, no real english language Wiki entry (this is all there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krupp#Alfred_Krupp), but there are multiple books on his incredibly productive life. Makes any modern entrepreneur look like a wantrepreneur. He did it as a teenager.

I don't think the PT article is exactly right, but history teaches us it is obviously true that teenagers are capable of much more than we ask of them now. Alexander won his first battles at 16. Augustus was active in politics as a teenager. Keeping kids cooped up playing video games and skateboarding is just keeping competition caged in, rather than unleashing human fire on the world.

I have to think that the cause of our overschooling is the fact that for the most part there is nothing for teens (and now even young adults) to do. We don't have jobs for the vast majority of young people. We don't even have enough jobs for people over the age of 26 (even though we saw the unemployment level is at record lows). If we put all these people in the work force it would cause a huge economic and political crisis.

Prejudice based upon age is the last remaining socially acceptable form of prejudice. Most articles about adolescents read exactly like opinions about various races, women, etc in the past. The arguments are the same, and the conclusions are the same. The lack of scientific evidence is, also, the same. Repeatedly they observe some limitation and conclude, without any evidence at all, that the limitation is not due to lack of education or socially-inflicted lack of experience but endemic and unavoidable.

One of the most popular misunderstandings of neuroscience going around recently is the "brain isn't fully developed until age 25" idea. This is often parroted and repeated, often by otherwise quite knowledgeable people, without any understanding of what brain development is, or how it occurs. The idea is used to support notions of restriction and sheltering, which is totally at odds with every understanding of how brain development actually occurs. The brain develops in response to novel experience, and solely in response to novel experience. Lack of novel experiences leads to lack of brain development. When an infants visual cortex is immature and incapable of stereoscopic vision, the exactly wrong course of action would be to cover one eye. Doing so would prevent the brain from developing the ability to integrate vision from both eyes into a coherent single image. The issue is even more problematic when you look at what criteria is used to judge the brains "immaturity" in the material supporting the "immature until 25" claim. What they examine is neuroplasticity. They observe that neuroplasticity reduces substantially after age 25. They interpret that as a sign that the brain is 'done' with it's primary development, but that's a bit of an arguable point. It is just as likely, in my opinion, that neuroplasticity in a high state is the desirable condition and that its reduction is a consequence of the end of introduction of large quantities of new experiences due to most people entering the working world and settling into a 'routine' life.

On a lighter note, just imagine if this perspective were to change, socially. If in 10 or 20 years time prejudice against teens were viewed with as much disgust as racism and sexism are now. Old tweets griping about teens being surfaced and people being 'cancelled' over them, etc. It would be quite different. But, there would probably be markedly less school shootings.

Youth rights is something I wish liberals would get behind publicly. I know nobody wants to make controversial statements supporting people that can't vote, but at least teens control a decent portion of the online political activity. Instead, we're watching a mass crackdown on teen vaping and college drinking in fraternities. At least Bernie is willing to fight off people trying to let employers pay teens less than minimum wage as they do in Australia.

We can't go back (and who would want to) - the challenge for a modern parent is to give the kids as much rope as humanly possible. It's tough and can be terrifying - when are they old enough to cross the big street two blocks from the house or walk to school alone. I did those things at 7 (with my 9 year old brother), but my daughter was around 11 when we got up the nerve to let her. But the role of the parent should be constantly pushing the little birds closer to the edge of the nest, even when the thought is unsettling.

One of the issues I see is that teens usually don't think about the future, and that is bad if you think that they are the future... does this make sense?

emerging science about brain development suggests that most people don't reach full maturity until the age 25

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=141164...