Youth Survey: Generation tame

Asia Reid isn’t asking for a medal. The 15-year-old went to a party last New Year’s Eve knowing full well that liquor would be flowing. And it’s not like she’s never tasted the stuff. Reid is your typical teenager in Ottawa running with your typical crowd, and the scene that night might have been drawn from a Judd Apatow comedy. There was a booze-fuelled bash at the home of a girl who is an acquaintance of Asia’s ex-boyfriend (“I’m not really close with her”), plus a rare green light from the folks to get out and enjoy herself. If ever there was a time to indulge, this was it.

Strange, then, that such old-fashioned qualms should have stopped her hand when the strong drink came around. “My parents’ opinion has always been a huge thing in my life,” the Grade 9 student admits, sounding sheepish. “It’s not so much the punishment I would get if they found out I’d been drinking. It’s that, if I ever disappoint them, it makes me feel, like, weird.” Then there was school. “The people who party a lot skip class, and I want to go into biology or engineering,” she explains. “I’m going to have to take some pretty hard courses. I won’t be able to miss school all the time.”

By taking a pass on the punch and tequila that night, Asia has contributed to one of the most remarkable shifts in adolescent behaviour in recent memory. Those timeless hallmarks of teenage rebellion—booze, cigarettes, drugs and sex—are officially out of favour, according the latest results from Project Teen Canada, an ongoing survey whose in-depth portraits of teen life date back to 1984. Alcohol use among youth has fallen seven percentage points in the last eight years. Smoking has plunged to unseen levels, while marijuana use, though still higher than it was 20 years ago, is well down from its crest in 2000. As for sex, well, if teenagers are having as much as of it as some adults fear, they’re certainly not bragging. Fully 56 per cent of respondents say they never have it at all.

THE YOUTH SURVEY AT MACLEANS.CA: 1. Generation Tame 2. City vs. Country Kids 3. Teens lose faith in droves 4. The surprising optimism of Aboriginal teens 5. When it comes to sex, teen girls are acting more like boys 6. Immigrant teens find that tolerance goes both ways in Canada

To Reginald Bibby, the University of Lethbridge sociologist who oversees Project Teen Canada, the entire picture speaks to a tidal swing in values—one that reaches across lines of race, gender and geography. Since practically anyone can remember, adult society has grappled with the fear that the next generation is shot through with decadence, or headed for dissolution. Baby boomers were as susceptible to these anxieties as anyone—they were, after all, the experts in turning on and dropping out. So imagine their surprise to learn that their children and grandchildren are turning their backs on the no-borders ethos, and that this new crop of teens longs for some of the very conventions their folks rejected. The discernible retreat from the venial sins is only one sign of their dissent, says Bibby. “They appear to be opting for things that were important to their grandparents,” from monogamous relationships to 1950s-style nuclear families. From a parent’s point of view, this is about as good as rebellion gets. Steering clear of drugs? Building a stable future? These are teenagers we’re talking about, right? But it does pose an interesting question. In an age of unprecedented personal freedom, with the modern tapestry of vice and opportunity spread before them, why are teenagers getting so good?

You’d have been hard pressed to find an expert who would have called it five years ago. Unshackled from the dictates of religion and unburdened of social convention, the so-called “millennials” were heading into adolescence with none of the external controls that governed their folks. And more than a few pessimists foretold disaster. By 2000, the last time Bibby and his team took stock of teen values, bookstore shelves were crowded with titles like Teens on the Edge and Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment.

But if Project Teen Canada tells us anything, it’s that our fears are founded on a faulty assumption, namely, that opportunity would necessarily lead young people to indulge. Yes, drugs are as readily available as ever; 70 per cent of teens responding to Bibby’s survey say it is not difficult to locate marijuana or hashish. Yet the proportion reporting regular or occasional use of the stuff has fallen by 16 per cent in the last eight years. More surprising still, teens are actually less permissive toward cannabis than their parents. Only 38 per cent support legalizing the drugs, versus 45 per cent of adults.

Same goes for drinking. While social advocates warned through the 1990s that the liberalization of liquor laws would lead to a spike in teenage alcohol abuse, today’s youth are less interested in drinking than their counterparts in the previous decade. Roughly seven in 10 report drinking alcohol regularly or occasionally; in 2000, that number was closer to eight out of 10.

But nothing defies conventional wisdom quite like the responses to Bibby’s queries on sex and relationships, which are demonstrably rooted in values we assume are on the wane. Today’s teenagers report having slightly less sex than youths were 10 or 15 years ago (this at a time when pornography is no more than a mouse click away), while placing a much greater emphasis on old-time romantic conventions like loyalty and love. Nearly nine out of 10 respondents said they disapprove of sexual affairs outside marriage, and fully 60 per cent said they disapprove of premarital sex in cases where the partners merely “like” each other. But factor in love, and the kids go all mushy. Fully nine out of 10 said they accept premarital sex in cases where the people truly loved each other, with 70 per cent saying they not only accept such relationships but approve of them. Clearly, marriage isn’t so important to them as the feelings behind it. Nor, for that matter, is sex.

How, then, did this moral and social redux come to pass? At least one cause, says Bibby, can be found in the well-founded, if clichéd, principle that familiarity breeds contempt. “Whether we’re talking about drugs or divorce, they’ve gone through these things, they’ve experienced them,” he says. “They’ve had a chance to do a lot of reflecting, and they’re not just reading about this stuff in books.” In the case of marijuana, the availability appears to be draining the drug of its potency as a symbol of rebellion. Meantime, teenagers are inundated with information about the health effects of tobacco, so even before cigarettes were forced by law under the counters of convenience stores, kids seem inoculated against attempts to market them. “We’re ridiculously savvy with advertisements,” one 17-year-old explains to Maclean’s matter-of-factly.

The result is a generation that tends to examine its own urges on a meta-level, accommodating and managing them in ways older people could scarcely imagine. Jesse Lupini, a 17-year-old from Victoria, tells the story of an impromptu meeting he and his Grade 12 classmates held over the question of whether to allow alcohol at this year’s after-graduation party. A majority favoured a dry event, even though the unsanctioned party will take place off school property. Still, says Lupini, “the general consensus was ‘let’s not ruin it for the ones who want to drink,’ and I thought that was interesting. I mean, we even sent around a survey afterward. It’s very much an attitude of choosing to live your life one way and not telling other people how to live theirs.”