Youth Survey: Generation tame

On an individual level, teens are demonstrating a remarkable ability to self-correct. Erin Jardine, a 17-year-old from West Vancouver, was deeply at odds with her parents over the past couple of years, and increasingly found escape in liquor and pot. “In Grade 8 and 9 I’d been at the top of my class,” she recalls. “In the next two years I started socializing and drinking and my grades dropped. I mean, the numbers were ridiculous.” So after a prolonged period in which she lurched from partying to bouts of misery, she signed up for an outdoor camp last summer run by CanAdventure Education, an organization for troubled teens. Today, she’s excelling at a new school and is in the process of choosing a university to attend next fall.

Like many of the youths surveyed in Project Teen Canada, Erin is motivated primarily by a desire to build a stable adult life. “I see myself at 40 years old, married to someone for the long term with a family, settled down somewhere,” she says. And in fact, the 2008 survey found that a full 67 per cent of adolescents—the highest percentage ever—now rate family life as “very important,” up from 59 per cent in 2000. There was also a significant increase in the proportion who expect to get married, up by six per cent since 1992. The proportion who plan to have kids is up by an amazing 13 per cent. Perhaps most surprising was a huge increase in the number of youth, both male and female, who want to stay home to raise the kids. Since 1992, the number hoping for more of a ’50s-style family has surged from 33 to 43 per cent.

The question is how they’ll do it when they have little in the way of an example. The ubiquity of broken families, Bibby notes, has thickened teen resolve not to repeat the mistakes of their parents, the most divorced generation in Canadian history. But exactly what will there be to hold households together? In the old days, organized religion would have set a template, consecrating marriage, welcoming children into the world and generally setting down the formula for a stable and upright family. But today, only two in 10 young people attend church regularly. Breaking with the past will require a new social model that adapts old-fashioned values to modern reality.

The first outlines of such a model are starting to take form. On one hand, today’s teens put the same stock in the nuclear family as their churchgoing grandparents, yet these days, most are comfortable if that partnership is common law, or if it is between people of the same sex. The important thing appears to be the underpinnings: more than 80 per cent of teens rate honesty and trust as the most important values in their lives.

Before we give the kids all the credit, though, it’s worth pondering the role of adults in producing such a clear-eyed, well-adjusted generation. Bibby points to the unprecedented resources civil society has socked into enhancing teen lives—from addiction intervention to the construction of skateboard parks. “Just think of any kind of problem that breaks out in a school,” he says. “Think of the experts and the practitioners who come in to help deal with these things.” For some reason, we seldom try to calculate whether all this social engineering is yielding benefits. Is it possible the boomers got a few things right?

More neglected still is the role of individual parents. While many moms and dads have grown up in broken homes, or seen their own relationships fail, they are no less determined than previous generations to steer their kids onto solid ground. That means teaching bedrock virtues such as honesty and trustworthiness. “We may have chosen not to go to church,” says Jennifer Parker, a 34-year-old mom in Ponoka, Alta. “But a lot of our beliefs are still moral beliefs, and we’re conscious as parents that our kids’ values are going to have to come from us.” The task can be daunting—not least because of technology’s power to tug kids away. Understanding today’s teen requires at least passing familiarity with a disorienting array of new media. “We have to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, chat,” says Parker, “and the minute we figure out how something works, they’ve moved on to the next thing.”

Still, whatever parents are doing seems to be working. When the Project Teen Canada team asked respondents to name their greatest influences in life, eight out of 10 named their fathers; nine out of 10 cited their moms. Both figures are notably higher than they were in the ’80s. Better yet, teens don’t seem to view their folks as moralistic scolds. A surprising proportion—more than 70 per cent—actually said they get enjoyment out of their parents.

Of course, no one’s about to declare the end of teen angst. Sure, a measurable reduction in teen drinking is encouraging news, but the 70 per cent who say they imbibe is still too high. So too is the 50 per cent who know someone with a drug or alcohol problem. Just as disconcerting is the growing gulf between teenagers and, well, the real world. It’s all well and good to seek what Bibby terms “upgrades” on the lives their parents lived. But it would be nice if the proportion of youth who follow the news hadn’t declined by 11 per cent since 2000 (this in the most plugged-in generation ever). It would also be heartening if the time teenagers spend simply sitting and thinking weren’t being devoured by computer games and texting.

In light of these facts, Bibby expects strong resistance to his findings from the very teen crisis apparatus he partially credits with all the good news. “The experts act almost annoyed when you suggest kids are actually looking a little better,” he says. Some of that blowback stems from genuine difference of opinion. But a lot grows out of popular wisdom coming out of the United States. Bibby points to the work of education professor Diane Levin, whose book So Sexy, So Soon has stirred concern on both sides of the border that revealing clothing and explicit media content is driving kids toward sex at an ever younger age. Yet Statistics Canada reports that fewer teens here are sexually active before the age of 15 than was the case in the 1990s.

In the end, the kids will likely follow their own instincts. While they might be taking silent cues from their parents—and might even seek help in times of crisis—they’ve little time for adult authorities who worry about their futures. Jesse Lupini, the 17-year-old from Victoria, summed up the sentiment in a recent guest column for his local paper. “Adults have generated a number of teen stereotypes,” he writes. “Teens are irresponsible, untrustworthy, rude, sexually obsessed, loud, inclined to drink to excess, take drugs, eat badly . . . ” But how about the adults who lie, drive drunk and do drugs, Lupini asks? What about the corporations run by adults that market junk food and sexualized clothing to youth? What about the parents who buy that stuff for their kids? “Frankly,” he concludes, having worked up a rather adult-sounding rant, “it’s a wonder we’re coping as well as we are.”