Is Adolescence Really Changed by Unlimited

 Minutes with No Roaming Charges?

                                                           By Mark Perlsweig, M.D.

Teenagers have not really changed much in the past 30 years, but their social and cultural environment has radically changed in comparison to previous generations. Today, teens can advise their parents on the finer points of purchasing and operating a home wireless computer network, but they are apt to be befuddled by a rotary dial telephone. Today, teens can chat with each other easily and frequently through cell phones and instant messaging. A generation ago, a teen needed to plan a call to a friend when someone was likely to be at home because there was no answering machine. Despite this, some families insisted that the phone could not be answered during the family dinner. Today, teens can entertain themselves with an amazing variety of cable channels, movies on DVD, and video games. A generation before, visual entertainment was limited to three television network channels, a couple of independent stations, and PBS. Unless, of course, you had a UHF antenna.

The changes wrought by technology are obvious, but the social and emotional effects on teens and their families are more subtle. Teenagers develop a sense of themselves partly through their interests, evolving skills, successes, and failures. Immersed in a world of complex, rich, and varied options for entertainment and communication, the adolescent’s process of developing academic, athletic, musical, and artistic skills by more traditional methods such as practice, book learning, and lectures appear tedious. For example, suppose we want to teach our teenager about Pearl Harbor and its historical significance. Most teens would genuinely learn a great deal from a visit to Pearl Harbor or from a video on the subject (either a documentary or a historical drama). But, because of the adolescent’s environment of never-ending imagery, learning from a traditional school format via a text and lecture is perceived as boring and irrelevant despite the fact that the subject matter presented is identical. A generation ago, we sat in rapt attention staring at a television screen showing a Saturn V rocket sitting motionless on a launch pad for the full duration of a 20-minute countdown. This countdown was occasionally interrupted by the thrill of a countdown delay. Frankly, any teenager worth their salt today would tell us to “get a life.”

Simultaneously, the competitive pressures surrounding the teen’s development of academic, athletic, musical, and artistic skills have intensified. Girls just don’t simply go to dance class anymore. Now there is a performance replete with costumes, props, and a production. This will shortly evolve to an invitation to the “competition team” requiring more hours of practice and travel to performances. This leaves our teenager slightly short of time to devote to the soccer team and its attendant practices, along with private music lessons, practicing for said lessons, and the performance for the parents at the end of the semester. But we are leaving out the band practice for the statewide merit competition and the upcoming performance of the national anthem before the next Giants game. Of course homework takes up a lot of time, and with this hectic schedule, the math tutor is going to have to show up with a takeout dinner on Saturday nights (when there is no school dance, of course). Well, things might ease up in high school after the kids are finished with the SAT prep course, the SAT (now including the essay), the SAT II, and 10 college applications.

In essence, what was known in the 1960s and 1970s as the “rat race” was, at that time, relatively confined to the lives of adults. As a society, we have allowed the “rat race” to invade childhood and adolescence. We have simultaneously sent both parents to work under conditions of somewhat longer hours and somewhat higher stress making them much less available to have the time and the patience for emotionally supporting their families. The classic institutionalized example of family support, the weekday dinner at home, is disappearing. It is this combination of chronically increased stress with a reduction in available time and energy for family emotional support that is largely causing an increased amount of anxiety, stress, and depression in this generation of teens.

Imagine a teenager who is a B student, slightly better than average looking, in reasonable physical shape but not “skinny,” an average soccer player and slightly above average at dance or music. This teen is easily able to identify all the pressure he or she experiences on a daily basis to look better, to have enough friends, to improve their grades, and to practice more at sports and music. This teen is also keenly aware of which peers are more attractive, stylish, or popular. They also know many students who can best them academically. They know which of their peers are star soccer players and musicians. This is a teenager who is perceived by his or her parents as competent with a broad and well-rounded experience. But this teenager may perceive himself or herself as less than adequate in virtually every area of his or her life. This is a misconception on the teenager’s part, of course, but he or she may not understand it as such without the help of a parent who has some free time.

Our teenager’s misconception and attendant stress is compounded by the content of media images and messages experienced by kids. Beautiful people inhabit movies, cable, and commercials. The underlying values of beauty, wealth, celebrity, status, and success are common advertising and entertainment themes. These advertising themes also contain the repetitive message that individual effort and choice are means to attaining these values. The consummate example of this current trend is the plastic surgery “makeover” show. The purpose of these themes is to encourage the sales of goods and services in a capitalistic society. However, our teenager’s awareness of the existence of these themes in contrast to his or her own life circumstances leads to a sense of alienation.

In life, it is critical that there is some time available in which to experience freedom from having a goal. There should be time not intruded on by dazzling external entertainment. Adolescents require some time to imagine and pretend, to ponder who they are and who they might become. Teens need time to play, to love, to wonder, and to hangout. They need time to puzzle over why they are having all of their feelings and circumstances, successes, and disappointments. They need parents who are wise at one moment but who fall into self-contradiction in the next. They need some of this time by themselves and some of this time with their friends. They need some of this time with their parents and some of this time with their siblings. They need their parents’ patience. They would also benefit from having their parents officially sanction some of this time of “doing nothing” as being really worth something. Parents can assist their teenagers’ healthy development by being aware of the impact of technology, the media, and capitalism on the psyche of teens. 

Dr. Perlsweig is  a child psychiatrist and psychiatrist in Burlingame.