|
| Mike Males |
Scary survey finding: 10 million high schoolers drink alcohol every month, including 5 million who get drunk (Monitoring the Future). Real-life outcome: Of America's 30,000 monthly deaths and injuries from drunk driving and over-drinking, just 3 percent involve involve high schoolers. Logical action: Let youths drink all they want, but make grownups abstain.
Behavior-risk surveys are out of control. If such such surveys are valid, every American teenager should be dead five times over. Sure, all teens are "at risk" on paper-- if "risk" is wildly exaggerated, symptoms confused with causes, and context and individuality are eliminated. Dubious surveys, sweeping repressions that trample teens' rights to privacy, free time, peer interaction and personal consideration.
An egregious example is the 2000 Add Health report, whose main finding is that unsupervised time with peers predicts adolescent risk more than do income, race, or family structure. Every teenager, rich or poor, "is at risk," the press cited lead author, Dr. Robert Blum, as saying.
Now, if one's "risk survey" finds poverty largely irrelevant, some head-scratching should ensue. In the real world world, poorer youths (regardless of race) are more at risk from guns, violence, teen pregnancy, HIV, crime, school failure, smoking and most other ills than better-off youths. In Dr. Blum's own state, Minnesota, America's poorest African-American and near-richest white teenagers dwell. Compared to white youths in Minnesota, black youths are 10 times more likely to have babies, eight times more likely to die violently, 12 times more likely to die by guns, and 40 times more likely to be murdered. Would Add Health authors seriously contend the biggest reason for these staggering differences is that black kids have too much free time?
After cautioning against assuming correlation equals causation, Dr. Blum does just that. He recommends that parents and programs closely supervise and structure teens' free time and friendships--a classic case of American scientists converting symptoms into causes to produce a one-size-fits-all remedy that is unwarranted, impractical and potentially harmful.
In real families and communities, trends in, and levels of, teenager behavior outcomes (such as violent death, crime, birth, HIV, drunken driving, smoking, etc.) are powerfully correlated with corresponding adult outcomes, and most are connected to poverty. Further, individual teenage risks are strongly predicted by those of family adults (as Add Health confirms). So, if alcoholic dad is in prison for raping the babysitter and mom is cooking methamphetamine with her psychotic boyfriend, it's no surprise that junior hangs out more with peers than at home. Lest anyone think this scenario is outlandish, FBI reports show 1.4 million parent-age (30-50) adults arrested for violent, property and drug felonies in 1999, a tripling in 25 years.
Millions of children grow up in poverty and millions more live in households where adults are violent, addicted and disarrayed--and then when a youth reacts by "acting out," researchers declare adolescent behavior is the problem requiring remediation and suppression. Parents are excused for being "overworked" and "preoccupied," politicians are excused for failing to address America's disgraceful youth poverty epidemic, and the decades-old homily that parents should just watch kids is duly recycled.
|
HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE NEWSROOM? CLICK HERE! |
Justice Policy Institute senior researcher Mike males' new book, Kids and Guns: How Politicians, Experts, and the Press Fabricate Fear of Youth, is posted at http://www.commoncouragepress.com. E-mail: mmales@earthlink.com .