The sleepover dilemma
By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - 3 Comments
Sociologist Amy Schalet on why it’s time to start having a new conversation with our kids
Katrin Thomas/Getty Images
Seven years ago Veronica Redgrave made a decision that many parents wouldn’t even consider. The Montreal-based publicist permitted her 17-year-old daughter to have her steady boyfriend sleep over occasionally. “Our communication was always very open,” says Redgrave, who was raised in a strict British family where sex was not discussed. “She had her own space in the basement. And I respected it.” Her daughter is now 24, a graduate of the London School of Economics and living in Amsterdam. She’s still involved with the same boyfriend.
At the time Redgrave knew her permissiveness was unconventional by North American standards. But now, with the November publication of Amy Schalet’s Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex, it turns out she was “being Dutch.” As Schalet, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, reports, nine out of 10 Dutch parents sanction such arrangements, versus the “not under my roof” directive maintained by nine out of 10 American parents.
Schalet interviewed 130 parents and teenagers in both countries to explore the cultural gulf. Dutch parents “normalize” teenage sexuality, Schalet concludes, as a way of maintaining a connection with and continuing to exert an influence over their teenagers. It’s an extension of a Dutch matter-of-fact attitude toward sex ushered in since the ’70s: sex education begins at age four and contraception is readily available. Yet it’s far from an “anything goes” attitude, Schalet writes: Dutch parents have to feel comfortable that their child, generally 16 or 17, is old enough to be sexually active, is using reliable contraception, and is in a stable relationship with someone who will fit into the family unit. Dutch parents also expect teenagers to abstain from sex until they’re ready.
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Bullying 2.0 is more like a drama class
By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 4 Comments
“Bullying” may be the accepted term for kid-on-kid brutality, but it’s seldom used among kids themselves
Chris Whitehead/Getty Images
What is likely the only thing Lady Gaga and Conservative MP Mike Allen have in common? Both believe that bullying should be a criminal offence. Following the suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer in Buffalo, N.Y., last month (the teen was bullied mercilessly for being gay), Lady Gaga expressed via Twitter that “Bullying must become illegal,” and underscored her position by pressing President Barack Obama about bullying while towering in heels (Obama has since described the encounter at a fundraiser as “intimidating”). New Brunswick’s Mike Allen, for his part, has been working with BullyingCanada.ca to make bullying an illegal act. Despite their efforts, however, neither the pop star nor the politician has been successful. While various behaviours that fall under the bullying umbrella—assault, uttering threats, harassment, unauthorized use of a computer—are included in the Criminal Code of Canada, the term bullying itself is not. The young offender who last year allegedly attacked Mitchell Wilson—the 11-year-old Pickering, Ont., boy who recently committed suicide after being bullied relentlessly for his muscular dystrophy symptoms—was charged with assault, not bullying. And maybe that’s a good thing; because the divergent languages of bullying—what adults call it and what its younger victims do—may be more problematic than its pending legal status.
Recent research confirms what I—someone not far removed from adolescence—have suspected for awhile. “Bullying” may be the accepted term for kid-on-kid brutality, but it’s seldom used among kids themselves. “They view the term as adult-driven,” says Wendy Craig, a Queen’s University psychology professor and researcher at the Bully Lab. “Teens especially don’t generally refer to the term.” Craig echoes recent research by Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick, whose innovative paper on bullying in the United States found that young people don’t use the word “bullying” in the same way and/or nearly as frequently as parents and educators do; not only is the term practically unused, it’s considered painfully passé. In fact, when most teens hear about bullying they automatically assume a “grade school problem” that doesn’t apply. On GritTV last year, actor John Fugelsang argued that the verb bullying should be retired for good. “Bullying is a flaccid, outdated, archaic, Archie comic term,” he said. “It’s quaint, it’s useless, it’s toothless.”
So how, then, do young people label the humiliating and infuriating abuse of power adults call bullying? In classic teenager style, ironically and maybe even more insidiously, they call it “drama.” Why drama? “The emic use of ‘drama,’ ” wrote Boyd and Marwick, “allows teens to distance themselves from practices which adults may conceptualize as bullying. As such, they can retain agency—and save face—rather than positioning themselves in a victim narrative.”
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RIM’s secret weapon :-)
By Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 12:13 PM - 6 Comments
The BlackBerry maker has found devoted followers in text-messaging teenagers
Photograph by Jessica Darmanin
It’s a balmy March afternoon in Toronto and Emma Brun-Hayne is lounging with two friends in Yonge-Dundas Square, the city’s ad-plastered shrine to commercialism. She talks loudly over the din of a nearby street performer’s drum solo while her turquoise-coloured fingernail traces the touchscreen of her new BlackBerry Torch smartphone, in constant search of updates from friends. While teenagers are known for their dramatics, one can’t help but take Brun-Hayne, 19, at her word when she professes her love for the wireless device. “Without my BlackBerry,” she says, “my life would be over.”
In the age of the iPhone and a host of Google-powered phones with cool names like Galaxy and Nexus One, it might seem unusual for someone like Brun-Hayne to be so over the moon about a BlackBerry. After all, it’s the same wireless device that an army of Bay Street bankers and lawyers have clipped to their hips just a few blocks away. But what’s good for the suits—a no-nonsense keyboard suitable for typing corporate emails—also happens to be just the thing for teens’ and tweens’ favourite mobile pastime: sending text messages. Thousands of them.
Or, in the case of BlackBerry, instant messages. There’s a difference. Research In Motion Ltd. originally developed BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, so employees could chat in real time, but it has since morphed into a powerful social networking tool. And some observers argue the feature, despite having roots in 1990s desktop chat tools like ICQ and MSN Messenger, may actually hold the key to RIM’s future success as it fights an increasingly pitched battle with rivals Apple Inc. and Google Inc. “As BBM goes, so goes RIM,” says Kevin Restivo, a senior analyst at research firm IDC Canada. “I’d argue it’s as important to RIM’s future as wireless email, which is, of course, the ‘killer app’ RIM used to become a tier-one supplier of smartphones.”
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Why you should let your teenager sleep in
By the editors - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 10:23 AM - 4 Comments
A forward shift in sleep patterns may be a natural accompaniment to sexual maturation
“The difference is like night and day.” So, perhaps with tongue slightly in cheek, says retired principal Wayne Erdman of Eastern Commerce Collegiate Institute’s experiment in late high school start times. Eastern Commerce C.I., located just off Danforth Avenue east of Toronto’s Greektown, is in the middle of its second year of starting classes at 10 a.m. That’s a shockingly late hour by contemporary North American standards, and some traditionalists will never learn to like the idea. The working world that Eastern’s students are about to enter, they say, doesn’t compromise with late sleepers; it fires them. The sooner the kids learn the harsh truth, the better.
But Erdman tells the Toronto Star that the late-start concept, though not yet subject to its first full scientific analysis, looks like a hit when it comes to educational outcomes—and parents and students seem to agree. Local trustee Cathy Dandy is an aggressive advocate of research showing that there are good reasons to give adolescents a break that neither children nor adults may need; if she had gotten her way, Eastern classes would be starting as late as 11:30 a.m.
That sounds crazy, but it might be less crazy than the old way of doing things. It is starting to look as though a forward shift in sleep patterns is a natural accompaniment to sexual maturation—not just in humans, but in mammals generally; rats and monkeys, it seems, engage in their own version of what parents witness in their recalcitrant 16-year-olds. Teenagers have an ability to stay up late and sleep in that a 2004 Dutch-German study characterized as “unsaturable,” and even proposed it as a defining feature of adolescence. You’re officially an adult when you can’t stay up all night anymore.
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University without high school
By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 61 Comments
This alternative-education advice (including how to get parents onside) is aimed at teens
“Choosing to leave [high] school is an entrepreneurial move, not a cop-out” is the message of a new book aimed at teens, College Without High School. The author, Blake Boles, the co-founder of Unschool Adventures, writes, “Life is not a pyramid with doctors, lawyers and professors on the top, McDonald’s cashiers at the bottom and school the only ladder between.”What does a high-schooler “who slaves away at meaningless disconnected problem sets every night become in later life?” he asks. “She becomes an adult who slaves away at a job she doesn’t enjoy, for less money than she deserves, for a one-week vacation through which she would prefer to sleep.” Boles’s book offers teens step-by-step advice on how to drop out of high school to tag tree frogs in Costa Rica or teach basic computer skills in Tanzania. It also shows how to condense schoolwork to meet admission requirements for university later on. Continue…
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Youth Survey: Teens lose faith in droves
By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 92 Comments
Islam and atheism are on the rise while Christianity fades
Every day, Mohamed Hadi wakes up before sunrise for morning prayer. The 19-year-old then boards a bus for the 90-minute ride from his home in Richmond, B.C., to the campus of Simon Fraser University, where he’s studying to become a physiotherapist. He’s involved in the Muslim Students’ Association, and with Rich in Faith, a Muslim youth group he founded that offers tutoring and mentoring services. Hadi’s a busy guy, yet he always finds time for his religion, including prayer five times a day. “It helps me stay composed,” he says, “and to maintain balance in my life.”Such devotion is rare among teens these days—or at least, among those from Protestant and Catholic households. Just as the younger generation is abandoning the Christian faith, though, non-Western religions, such as Islam and Buddhism, are growing in Canada at a surprising speed. According to new data from Project Teen Canada, more teens now identify as Muslim than Anglican, United Church of Canada and Baptist combined. As a group, the percentage who adhere to so-called “other faiths”—including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism—has grown fivefold since Project Teen began its surveys in 1984, while the percentage of teens who identify as Roman Catholic has declined by one third, and the percentage who identify as Protestant is down by almost two-thirds.
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Youth Survey: City vs. Country kids
By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 9:57 AM - 51 Comments
Small-town teens are more likely to have had sex. And honesty and politeness is less important to them.
Parents seeking a safe haven for their kids away from the pressures and pitfalls of the modern world might want to think twice about “simple” small town living. The values of rural teens aren’t that different than their urban counterparts—and their behaviour is sometimes worse.
When it comes to sex, 60 per cent of 15-to 19-year olds from communities with populations less than 10,000 admit to being active, versus just 49 per cent in the country’s largest (400,000-plus) centres. And more small town kids (75 per cent) are accepting of premarital relations than in the big city (70 per cent.)
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Why teens are "crazy" and the need for a short leash
By Kate Fillion - Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 1:29 AM - 14 Comments
Kate Fillion talks with psychologist and teen expert Michael Bradley
Q: What’s going on with teens that makes them act, as you put it in your new book, “crazy”?A: Neurologically, their brains are going through an explosion of growth, getting ready for the great leap into adulthood. But there’s neurologic fallout from the renovation process: emotional processing speed gets slowed down, they’re less able to read adult emotional cues. Second, the world is telling them to be crazy, do things that are self-destructive. Cultural prompts, in the form of song lyrics or scenes in movies or video clips, are telling them drugs, sex and certain forms of violence are cool, adult and harmless. Thanks to the efficiency of electronics, we pound them with these suggestions to a degree we’ve never pounded on another generation of teens. A third issue is that, as parents, we don’t really respond very well. Responding to these contemporary problems with rules from past generations just doesn’t work.
Q: What kinds of parental responses are disastrous?
A: The biggie is to use fear. A lot of us were raised by parents who’d hit, yell, threaten and punish. That’s a lot of our training, but it doesn’t work today. We also can’t police a kid’s world the way our parents could. The mission statement used to be, “How do you control the kid?” We can’t afford that anymore, because of the changes in the culture. Now it’s, “How do I teach my kid to control herself?” It means talking to your kid with respect, asking good questions, helping her form a set of values, because you’re not going to be there when she needs those values to negotiate her culture.
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The teen sex epidemic?
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 9:45 AM - 0 Comments
Teens more sexually conservative than previous generation, research shows
A few years ago, talk show host Oprah Winfrey warned of a teenage oral sex epidemic. Data released earlier this month seemed to confirm they were engaging in risky sexual behaviour, when the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics reported the teenage birth rate had risen for the first time in over 10 years. But that’s misleading, the New York Times reports: in fact, teens today are more sexually conservative than the previous generation. Just 48 per cent of high school students had had sex in 2007, down from 54 per cent in 1991, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey. As for oral sex, national statistics are relatively new, but it certainly doesn’t appear to be an “epidemic.” Roughly 16 per cent of teens have had oral sex but not intercourse. Adults, too, take a less restrictive view of oral sex than they did a few generations ago, researchers note. People may think teens are engaging in risky sexual behaviour because dating norms have changed, experts say. While it was once a structured activity, today’s dates are more likely to be a casual gathering of teens, and “fooling around” doesn’t always leading to a structured relationship.
