Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America’s Future By Jean M. Twenge

Reviewed by Mike Males | June 8, 2023

2 Out of 5 Stars: Leaves Out Huge Issues 

Generations sounds at least the hundredth alarm in the last hundred years proclaiming a “new mental health crisis” among teenagers (did you know 75% of 1930s “Greatest Generation” boys tested mentally defective “due to anxiety”?). Alan (Closing of the American Mind, 1987) Bloom lambasted Jean Twenge’s and endorser Jonathan (Coddling of the American Mind, 2018) Haidt’s 1980s Gen X as mentally disturbed, intolerant, and pop-media warped (plus uneducable and unemployable), Now, Twenge and Haidt find Gen Z troubling.

Still, Twenge is right: “Gen Z is different.” That signals caution in how we clueless old folks assess it. Her and others’ traditional interpretations of Gen Z’s self-reported depression, anxiety, social media use, etc., risk serious misunderstanding – just as Twenge’s 2006 Generation Me misinterpreted narcissism scales (they now track social disadvantage) and confused pop-culture quips with “evidence,” producing disastrously wrong forecasts. Twenge-2006 predicted youthful epidemics of social disorder, school failure, disconnection, “hooking up,” dishonesty, and “dangers that were once unknown.” Twenge-2023 now admits these never happened.

Generations is much better, with interesting generational surveys (which can dictate answers that may not reflect respondents’ true choices) and detailings of Gen Z’s gender fluidity and rejection of traditional milestones. Unfortunately, Generations suffers from Twenge’s usual refusal to engage major facts that challenge her thesis. “No other plausible culprit has emerged,” Twenge declares, for  the “very large and sudden changes in mental health” among teenagers other than “technology, especially social media” (p. 401).

Yes, culprits have emerged. Big, obvious ones, requiring much effort to overlook.

The same CDC survey reporting increased teenage depression and anxiety also reported a doubling in violent abuses and a quadrupling in emotional abuses – the latter victimizing a staggering 55% of youths– inflicted by parents and other household adults. Grownup violence and bullying toward teenagers at home exploded over the last decade to levels far higher than teens experience at school or online – all to deafening silence by Twenge, Haidt, and social-media blamers.

Additionally, depression tripled among parent-aged grownups to diagnostic levels higher than among adolescents. Among ages 25-54, deaths from suicides, drug/alcohol overdose, and guns soared from 35,635 (2000) to 110,184 (2021) as Gen Z grew up, a tripling in per-capita rates and an increase 1.7 times faster than among teens. By 2021, parents’ risks of dying from self-destructive causes increased to four times higher, and criminal arrest rates to twice as high, as among high-school-age teens; plus 130,000 more parent-age COVID deaths.

Generations spends scores of pages on mental health, yet “abuse” doesn’t appear in Twenge’s index. Twenge’s 515-page book dismisses sexual harassment and assault in scant sentences as something only celebrities or young peers do. In fact, household adults’ 1+ million sexual abuses victimizing children and teens substantiated by the Administration on Children and Families as Gen Z grew up argues otherwise. (Twenge’s Generation Me likewise deployed one idiotic Wavy Gravy quip to dismiss the mammoth Boomer drug scourge.)

Twenge, Haidt, and other academics and professionals – who should brand their own Xers and Boomers the “you can’t say that!” and “stay safe” generations – owe their popularity to ignoring and downplaying parents’ and grownups’ skyrocketing, widespread depression, addiction, self-destructive deaths, and violent and emotional abuses victimizing teenagers. While studies blaming social media are conflicting and methodologically limited, an overwhelming research consensus links parental abuses and troubles to teens’ depression, anxiety, and other ills.

Twenge hints at but fails to present what a profound revolution younger Millennials and Gen Z are bringing. Remember the terrors teenagers traditionally were lambasted for? Crime, shootings, school dropout, “teen pregnancy,” stealing, vandalizing, all-around savagery. Gen Z has all but abolished that teenager. Using consistently reliable California statistics and comparing 2021 to 1995 and 1970 (that is, Gen Zers versus Xers and Boomers), the trends are astonishing: Rates of criminal arrest: down 96%, down 92%, respectively. Violence arrest: down 81%, down 83%. Gun deaths, down 35%, down 69%. Suicide: down 11%, down 18%. Juvenile probation referrals: down 93%, down 92%. Youth incarcerations: down 80%, down 88%. “Teenage” births: down 89%, down 84%.

A Gen Z that has sharply reduced its school dropout (by 70%), increased its college attendance and graduation rates (by 30%, despite larcenous costs), and sharply boosted political activism and voting is not “struggling with mental health,” as Twenge and others insist. A better interpretation is that the depression and anxiety expressed by today’s youth are logical, healthy, even motivating responses to the anxiety-driving conditions they experience.

Proof that external conditions, not internal mental processes, are paramount is the biggest reasons younger Millennials and Gen Z show such dramatic behavior improvements: the 75% reduction in child poverty fostered by increased tax credits for poor families, and the 95% reduction in children’s neurotoxic lead levels due to environmental regulations since 1990. When economic and environmental conditions improved, youth behaviors improved astonishingly. Imagine 16-year-olds with lower crime rates than 46-year-olds… that’s Gen Z.

The massive, definitive 2022 Pew study (more pivotal research Twenge fails to engage, possibly because it challenges her claims) found teens use social media to connect and find support during tough times. That liberal and (recently) more educated modern populations are more anxious and depressed indicates more realistic comprehension of the crises we face.

Twenge, Haidt, and others readily judge and prescribe even as they ignore younger Millennials’ and Gen Z’s most crucial features – their parent generations’ extraordinary troubles alongside youths’ spectacular improvements (are these related?). Teens were accused of growing up too fast and taking too many risks; now they’re growing up too slowly and risking too little. Like Bob Dylan’s “Mister Jones,” we older folks don’t know what is happening here, and fear and self-superiority fueled by works like these too easily resonate with us. We need to leave those kids alone and fix our own grownup problems.

At a time when many make self-satisfied gestures at the notion of “alternative facts” that it looks like we’ll be living with for the next four years, I’d like to point out that we’ve come to live with a few alternative facts of our own.

A branch library I served at during the early 1990s attracted the patronage of a young man named “Rubin.” He was about fourteen then­­–the peak age identified by teachers, librarians, developmental psychologists, and administrators for “teen behavior problems.” From that point of view, Rubin might well have been labeled, incessantly hawked over, and routinely expelled from the library. This is an actual fact that happens every day.

The point I want to emphasize, though, is that there is no such thing as “teen behaviors.” This is an “alternative fact.”

“Teen behaviors” is just a cliché, a synonym, for staff who don’t understand, or know how to build relationships with others who don’t match prescribed and over-determined expectations.

Ruben was stretching and exploring his social environment when visiting the library. Who would accept him? Who would toss him aside? This is an actual fact of social life.

Here’s how this story developed. I asked him his name. I asked him who his favorite teacher was and acted like I knew her (“Oh, yeah. Ms. Patton, at Belmont, sure, I know her . . .”). When he asked me, I told him my girlfriend’s name. I gave him his own library nickname, “Screech,” (after the nerdy character in Saved by the Bell–the 1980s/90s TV sitcom—though he was certainly not a nerd–whatever that is!). I introduced him to e-mail and early online chat (remember this was early-90s!). Then I made fun of the people he thought he was communicating with when he was online chatting and flirting. He hated me for that! J

During this time, Ruben began to experiment with profanity. Not an uncommon fact.

Suddenly, everything was F… this and S… that.

Staff descended on him.

Frankly, I think that some staff came down on Ruben harder because he and I had developed a relationship–this was a cynical opportunity to prove that my approaches were naïve. This was not only an alternative fact. It was also counterfactual.

When I was not around, Ruben was expediently ejected from the library upon the inevitable next profanity infraction.

Adults use profanity all the time in the library. No ejection there. Fact.

Even before I’d encountered educator Ruby Payne, who has produced spectacular contributions to the work professionals do with clients from intergenerational poverty, I knew Ruben was reaching to broaden his horizons. His cursing was indeed selective and strategic (not compulsive) . . . he did it to express his growing power, familiarity, and comfort within our little library community.

One day I told him that I needed him to “help me do some stuff” and asked for his assistance. I invented a few tasks for him to do while I was on the reference desk . . . and told him that he needed to be within ear-shot of me while I was serving on the desk.

I wanted him to observe my interactions with library users.

After about an hour I took him aside. I asked him to evaluate what he observed of my interactions with the public. What did he think of my attitude in serving the people who came up to the desk? Why was I kind of dressed-up (buttoned-down collar on a pressed shirt, ironed slacks, and polished street shoes)? What did he observe of my phone work? What kind of language did I use and why?

Eventually, we got around to how those things were important aspects of serving the community. My language, dress, and manner reflected the respect I both gave and how I was received by library users.

Our interaction went something like this:

Anthony: Do I talk the same way with you that I do with other library users?

Rubin: “No.”

A: Do you think I talk “all polite like that” with my friends?

R: “No.”

A: With my girlfriend?

R: “NO!”

A: “Why?”

R: “Because you know them.”

A: “Right. I talk differently when I am representing the library.”

A: “When you (Rubin) use swear words in your own life you might be just relating casually with your friends or you might be disrespecting the people around you. But you make a choice, don’t you? When you cuss while you are volunteering for the library, though, you tell the public that the library doesn’t respect them. And when you do it around these children you are squandering the role model you represent to them.”

A: “Is this what you want?”

I will not say that Ruben stopped cussing overnight. He didn’t. And that’s a fact. But over the next few weeks, it dropped off to nearly nothing. And that’s a fact, too.

After our discussion, and building on our relationship, he modulated his language himself because he could see the implications and preferred to avoid them in the library.

Is this being a social worker? A psychologist?

No. It’s the kind of explicit and discrete role modeling you hear and read about all the time but rarely see in action. It’s modeling what community-based public service is about. It’s modeling what it means to respect and serve a real and actual community–a factual place and time. It’s modeling these things not simply for one young man who deserved just a little more attention but it’s modeling that behavior perhaps even more significantly for library staff that might otherwise feel entitled to impose their own alternative facts, privileging their alternative facts selectively on the head of young people.

While I don’t have any photos or evidence, you’ll have to just take my word for how this story ended. Ruben became a steadfast volunteer for the branch. He began demonstrating how people could use the computer scanner (new then). He started assisting the computer tutor with word processing instruction for Spanish speakers. He eventually served one-term as my appointed YA volunteer program assistant.

Rubin became, in Ruby Payne’s terms, a “homegrown leader.”

The other option would have been to institute alternative facts and throw him out every day.

American Library Association’s (ALA) recent dog-piling on young people for their incapacity to discern “fake news” got me thinking.

In its 22 November issue of ALA Direct, that “tightly curated” e-newsletter, the association pointed uncritically to a recent Stanford study cherry-picking on young people for media skills that our last election cycle showed challenged adults as well – with far more dire consequences. Unfortunately, cherry-picking on youth appears endemic to ALA.

YALSA, too, continually and cynically “punches down” on young adults.

I’ve been doing some cherry-picking of my own. The same deficit vision of young people on display in ALA Directreappears in YALSA’s new “Summer Learning Approach.” This new programming recommendation indulges curricular goals unsuited for public libraries along with the always ill-defined “connected learning” agenda, as well as the desperate and equally specious “summer slide” cliché that remains contested among researchers. Further, a critical review of the association’s Core Professional Values statement yields the same deficit-based assumptions about youth: “responding to teen needs,” “builds and maintains knowledge of teens’ social, emotional, mental, and physical development” etc., etc., etc.

For all the professional capacity represented in these institutional documents, there is no attention to end user value. Moreover, the association’s current “Re-envisioning YALSA to Support Our New Mission” (see YALSA Blog 3 November 2016) reproduces what YALSA usually does – and says nothing about value for young adults.

But YALSA’s cynical punching down on youth gets worse than mere institutional aspirations. From another official blog post, we learn about “Bullying Prevention Month.” The cynicism is so deeply ingrained in this discourse that the conversation assumes only youth-on-youth bullying.

Teen birth rates have plummeted, crime rates are at all-time lows, and graduation rates are at all-time highs. Yet officialYALSA blog posts continue to sound the alarm about these tired moral panics. Some teen girls do get pregnant. But teen moms gave birth to both Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. Can’t YALSA at least acknowledge that the rate has dropped?

Such official statements are not simply meaningless. They produce a dire, misleading vision of increasingly dangerous youth, self-destructive, and/or deficient – requiring all manner of “preventions” that libraries cannot prove they meaningfully address.

Why ALA and YALSA feel compelled to constantly regurgitate the “teen problem” wrapped in the same-old prevention talking points we’ve heard from pedestrian sources for decades is beyond me.

Imagine talking about any other social group this way.

Why don’t librarians just Google any of the thousands of sites dispensing these worn-out homilies over the last quarter century?

Librarians are supposed to be better than that. YA librarians, in particular, should be up in arms protesting anti-youth bigotry, not reproducing it!

Library professionals need to model using the best information, advancing innovative and critical thinking, not recycling clichés, stereotypes, and phony moral panics.

The most recent flavor of privileging youth incapacities appears in this November’s YALSA Town Hall summons. Come one, come all! Hear about how libraries can assuage the kiddies’ hurty feelings about what the adult electorate did to the country! Partisan politics aside; I can’t fathom YALSA calling a Town Hall had the other candidate won!

What evidence connects library service to demonstrably “helping youth cope with the challenges, stress, and even threats,” election or no. Further, the Town Hall promises resources to “build empathy and understanding among youth” – all easy to measures, right?

Wrong. Libraries are not positioned or prepared for these things. Nor do young adults need fixing from libraries.

Rather than chasing these indefinable emotional concerns or electoral politics, what if Town Halls punched up instead and developed audiences of professionals concerned with the widespread poverty more and more youth live in since 2008? What if YALSA concerned itself with collecting information for teachers about how schools and the FBI are eroding their students’ civil rights and intellectual freedoms? What about fortifying local organizations with information regarding youth immigration policy or defending religious minority rights?

Youth don’t need another do-gooding adult agenda punching-down on them.

Have you seen the news? From coast to coast youth are organizing in middle and high schools, in churches and synagogues, they’re marching in the streets and in the hallways, they’re on the radio and all over the Internet in creative and innovative ways connecting through their own interest groups – be they age, race, social class, sexual orientation, religion, or region.

San Francisco teens protest for their right to vote. San Francisco Youth Commission

In my region of the country, youth won their right to elect school board members (Berkeley). They gained 48 percent support for the right to vote in San Francisco elections. Just listen to them testify before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors last May [http://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=10&clip_id=25297]

“Sure,” you say, “That’s the Bay Area.” But there’s a national campaign growing to enfranchise youth from age 16 – from Broward County in Florida to New York. Two Maryland cities have already enfranchised youth (Takoma Park and Hyattsville) and seventeen states already allow seventeen-year-olds to vote in primaries and caucuses. And this isn’t even to mention the twenty other countries in which citizens under eighteen already vote in national elections!

Given that high school students across the country peacefully protested November’s election – the assumption that YA librarians need to teach young adults anything about tolerance or empathy or civic engagement, if not blatant anti-youth bigotry and hubris, is at least deeply cynical.

Imagine that! The profession’s only association even nominally dedicated to serving YAs is institutionally cynical about their own users!

I say “nominally” because, first, despite our rhetoric about “serving young adults,” libraries historically seek to mollify adults more than young adults (in service development, execution, and evaluation). Despite lectures about “what we offer” it’s really been adults that libraries aim to please – to “help” youth “develop into mature adults,” “to succeed in school,” “to stay off the streets,” “to learn skills.” None of this youth development agenda speaks to their interests as individuals or as collective social agents in the here and now. Meanwhile, they are defining their own interests and exercising their own voices.

They rarely do it, however, within libraries. And, truth be told, they never have.

Second, while defining YA services through adult concerns, libraries have concentrated only on themselves. As YALSA’s aspirations document, libraries continue to count only self-reported “output measures” – how many books, computer stations, hours of tutoring, program head counts – but not young adult outcomes ­– their experiences, chances, meanings, and the value they derive using libraries. Instead, they go on creating their own meanings entirely independent of an institution presumably dedicated to serve them!

Despite all the claims libraries may feel forced into making, YA librarians really need do only two things:  1) contribute to the institution’s overall effectiveness with young adults — through ethical conduct, operations, and insuring delivery of professional informational services; and, 2) connect information and young adults based upon their interests.

And that’s hard enough.

Society does not and cannot hold libraries accountable for addressing large, ill-defined, or mythical social behaviors. It is not the responsibility of libraries to do so – the story is the same for school libraries (though here, curricular goals do matter). And libraries exhibit no small amount of cynicism claiming they can.

At some point libraries and YA librarians need to reconcile the difference between adultist agendas and rhetoric of assisting deficient young people in “growing up” versus the role they could play in enhancing and enriching the experience of youth people in the present.

One is about the library’s legacy; the other must be about its destiny.

Few clichés promise to do more damage to libraries than claiming to be “safe spaces.” Libraries are not safe spaces. At the very least, such a claim perpetuates an immodest and ill-defined boast and, as with most boasts, this one can’t be delivered.

Recently, within the space of only one month, two west coast libraries witnessed tortured souls openly committing suicide during public hours. A third reported a fatal overdose.

What could library staff tell parents about the library as safe space then?  What can administrations tell staff? What kind of “safety” is that?

Touting that nothing bad will happen represents one kind of conventional claim of the safe space cliché. Of course, as we all know, other examples challenge libraries daily. Lots of these, while perhaps not so tragic or dramatic as these recent circumstances, confront libraries in myriad ways in how they function not as fantasy but actual public space. We tend not to think or talk about them, though, when engaging hyperbolic rhetoric.

Like on streets, however, or on public transportation, in large entertainment venues, or the recreational facilities we share, unintended things happen and happen quickly, no matter how many cameras or badges or lights we install.

Control is a myth in public space.

A second challenge is the myth of the intellectual safety space libraries frequently claim to represent. I hasten to remind readers that the VOYA co-founder herself, Dorothy M. Broderick, famously encouraged libraries to intentionally post provocative signs stating: “If you do not find something offensive in here please see a librarian.”

Libraries are thus not intellectually “safe spaces” either. Although these days one hears fewer complaints about “second-hand porn” (young people inadvertently exposed to dangerous screens) citizens can get into all kinds of dangerous situations bumping up against ideas and browsing titles and images unsuited for people with “safety” foremost on their minds. Ideas and art and creativity, by definition, defy “safe.” Libraries are chock-full of them all. And librarians are ethically bound to be proud of that.

A third and even broader type of challenge to the illusionary safe space claim is the ideologically reaching notion of libraries created and designed to elevate the human spirit. This notion claims to connect us to ideal concepts of democratic community – the idea that libraries are, for instance, “free to all” as old Carnegie buildings promise, in stone, above many a front door. In libraries, the story goes, all can safely pursue their interests no matter where those interests go . . . “Oh, the places you’ll go!”

History, however, indelicately calls us on such soaring lies. History tells us, for example, that white middle-class woman didn’t find libraries “safe space” (as users or professionals) until the waning moments of the 19th century. African Americans didn’t find libraries safe until struggling well past the middle of the 20th century. Disabled people required federal legislation, too, before they could consider libraries safe. With this history can there be much doubt, especially in today’s political climate, that immigrants (among others) might find libraries not particularly safe from insult, surveillance, and suspicion?

Young adults, our particular concern, may well number chief among the groups to question the library as safe public space. Momentarily set aside how libraries evoke the claim every day without serious definition, Young adult visitors might experience all three of these different kinds of challenge simultaneously. Young adults routinely find themselves “tossed” from libraries for minor or perceived behavioral infractions. This practice remains so common that staff only rarely document it – so, it can’t be studied or questioned. Staff receive no training in safeguarding library space for young people. Libraries frequently defer to security staff – affording them a free hand in interpreting both behavior and library policy. And this, of course, does not even address the ongoing systematic and institutional refusal of libraries to allocate an equitable share of library space for YA service. Libraries still devote less than .03 percent of total assignable square footage to YA space – much less than even bathrooms.

Space is power. The more space one controls, the safer one can make it. Claiming and controlling space, though, requires the assertion of private control, and private control represents precisely the opposite of what libraries offer.

Should libraries stop claiming to be safe spaces? Of course. But the better question remains why they make the silly claim in the first place.

Libraries are not designed for safety. Safety is not in the library’s mission. Library services cannot even clearly define what “safety” means in any generalizable or measurable or defendable way. Nor should they try.

On the other hand, as architect Jan Gehl writes:  “Public life in good quality public spaces is an important part of a democratic life and a full life.”

Good quality public space is something we can design, define, and ensure in meaningful ways. Quality public space resides within the purview of professional responsibility. Quality space connects the library’s role with the provision of trusted (as well as suspect) information. Libraries uniquely offer the opportunity to inhabit a public space designed not to construct consumers but citizens. Quality public space comports with the library’s mission to contribute to the well-being of a democratic community.

The renowned urban planner, Jane Jacobs, got it right over a half-century ago when she advanced her “eyes on the street” thesis. The more people in a public space, Jacobs advanced, the safer that space. Quality public library spaces designs can assure many eyes in the building. The more eyes in the building, the safer space becomes.

How much more time must pass before libraries realize that young adults don’t need any “youth development” agenda to recognize them as active participants and contributors to the culture?

While libraries wring hands in moral panics and exaggerations over “youth crime,” “peer pressure” (it’s always peer pressure), and developmental needs (and it’s always needs) – things libraries actually can’t do anything about–the youth go forward without permission from some institution claiming to “empower” them with “community assets.”

It’s too easy to characterize recent youth activism as coming from the cultural or political “left.” Still, it’s difficult to ignore the progressive impacts that the DREAMers or the Black Lives Matter movements are having on national politics and policy (see, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter, and Walter J. Nicholls, 2013, The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate).

More recent, and less difficult to place on a left/right political spectrum, is the growing national campaign to expand local voting rights for youth. Witness last November’s 48 percent of San Francisco’s electorate supporting the measure’s first attempt (http://vote16sf.org/). Many other campaigns achieved even more successful victories that now allow for youth to participate in the election of school board members and other local matters.

There is not, however, anything new about youth activism. Youth activism goes back too far into history to allow for serious treatment here. But let’s just stick our toes in a bit, shall we?

Indeed, in January 1961, the just-elected John F. Kennedy anticipated a coming groundswell of youth activism. In his inaugural address, he called a new generation of Americans forward, issuing some of the most quoted words in American history: “Ask not what your country can do for you,” the young president implored, “but what you can do for your country.”

Shortly thereafter, in 1962, the Port Huron Statement founded the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). “We are people of this generation,” they declared, “bred in at least modest comfort… looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Huron_Statement]. Even then youth had to overcome adult cynicism and dismissal. “Fine,” they said, “we’ll change the world by ourselves.” Nearly did, too. As did the thousands of youth activists who desegregated Jim Crow’s  public schools, pools, recreation centers, and many other public facilities.

Within library history, however, “youth activism” appears recognized only when ALA stages it. Long before the recent exaggerated performances of conservative provocateurs on college campuses, ALA found it useful to stage weighty debates over free speech and intellectual freedom within a high school setting. The association actually commissioned the production of The Speaker, in 1977, a 42-minute filmed dramatization that set ALA aflame in controversy and recrimination for the next generation: Should the school host a reactionary speaker or not? High school activists are portrayed as working through the dilemma with the librarian, of course, portrayed as the wise arbiter. The point here is that ALA elevated representations of high school students to address important ethical challenges the adult professionals were fighting over.

Actual history, however, portrays librarians in a much less positive light. Less acknowledged, largely even unknown today is the history of black teenagers who, as early as 1939, protested racial segregation of all-white public libraries. One of the first incidents appears to have taken place at the Alexandria, Virginia, Public Library. Many years later, in the spring of 1960, even anticipating Kennedy’s call, thirteen black high school students in Danville, Virginia, filed a successful federal lawsuit to desegregate their library. In response, the library shuttered its doors. That incident sparked many years of black youth pressing for library integration through “read-in” protests in other Virginia towns, in South Carolina, in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Nearly a quarter century after Alexandria, in 1962 Montgomery, Alabama, an African American teenage girl filed a lawsuit in federal court to desegregate her public library. Instead of obeying the court order to desegregate, the library removed the building’s tables and chairs. Some of the youth reportedly brought in their own folding chairs from home.

In the words of historians Shirley A. Wiegand and Wayne A. Wiegand, whose new scholarly treatment, The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South, (forthcoming in 2018), “Hundreds of young public library protestors have gone largely unrecognized for their acts of courage.” What little we know of the history of library services to Mexican-American youth would add many more names to that list.

Why don’t librarians know more about young activists even within the context of their own institution? Could this fact lend credence to why they don’t appreciate youth’s capacities for activism today?

But neither is youth activism the exclusive cultural property of the political left. Along with the last half-century’s rise of mega-churches, communities of faith have cultivated youth activism across a wide spectrum of activity. Southern California’s suburban Harvest Crusades, for example, draw huge youth-oriented festival-like crowds. These revival concerts, promoted by young, informally dressed, multi-colored hair-died youth, advocate for the moral and religious agendas of their respective faith traditions.

This, too, constitutes youth activism. Indeed, communities of faith cultivate and respect youth activism comparatively more than the secular community. Faith charges them with purpose.

Youth have never needed “empowerment” by libraries as many claim. Indeed, librarians need youth activism more than youth need libraries to become activists. Librarians need youth activists to secure equitable library resources (staff, training, materials, space). Librarians need YA activists to defend their intellectual freedoms and access to information. Librarians need YA activists to ensure they’re treated equitably by library staff, security staff, and administrations. Librarians need activist young adults to infuse user perspectives into planning, program development and delivery, and service evaluation.

What young people could use from libraries, however, is information to inform, direct, and energize their activist impulses. Young people should value the library as an institution supportive of their contributions to their social and cultural concerns, not a temple of “youth improvement.”

Libraries are all too often mired in their own legacy practices and preconceived programming models geared toward simplistic headcount tabulations, printed flyers, and sign-up sheets.

When libraries successfully contribute true information support responsive to local youth experience, they won’t need flyers. The youth will organize themselves and just take over! They’ve proven they can do that time and time again.

In the current print version of this June’s VOYA, I offer an authoritative list of recent adult non-fiction titles that take up youth activism in a serious fashion.

Beyond the Celebrations

The disturbing things LIS students find out about real YA programming and professionals’ ethical obligation to improve YA experience

It becomes more difficult each year to convince LIS students that they need to demonstrate service impact on YAs.

It is especially difficult when they see so little professional commitment to it coming from practitioners in the field. Why is it that so few YA librarians exhibit curiosity about the outcomes their users derive from their professional interventions? It certainly is a rare instance in which librarians demonstrate this curiosity to their future colleagues.

Before you get too angry at this revelation, however, let’s establish a few basic definitions. First and foremost, let’s differentiate library inputs and outputs from outcomes.

• Inputs count the resources libraries offer their users: number of public access hours, number of computers and staff and programs, size of collections, and so on.
• Library outputs are things libraries traditionally count that occur as a consequence of inputs: visitor or “gate” counts, log-in hours on library computers, program attendance or “head-counts,” circulation statistics, etc.

Inputs and outputs help the library keep track of the resources it uses – something comparable year after year, for example.

Neither, however, address nor reflect . . .

• The degree to which actual users value their visits, benefit from computer use, enjoy programs, or grow from borrowed materials. These are Outcomes that reflect impact and illustrate what users feel was useful to them. Outcomes document the quality of YA experience.

During the more than ten years I’ve been teaching graduate LIS students interested in youth services, I have assigned a field experience in which students evaluate a YA or youth services department or program. Students from all over the country take these classes – so we’re not targeting a particular region. What students find during these examinations of “real-life” YA services is that in only very rare circumstances are young adults asked about the degree to which they value, benefit from, enjoy, or grow from what libraries offer.

How, libraries are increasingly asked, do they know they’re throwing “strikes” (offering successful services)?

Yes, students collect, review, assess, and incorporate input and output measures into their overall analysis. Not all libraries willingly share these normally public statistics with LIS students, however; something already of a concern. But most do. Thus, students analyze such things as the number of professional staff hours a library assigns to YA services, the number of summer reading program sign-ups the library records, perhaps YA-specific circulation. These are not unimportant details, particularly when compared meaningfully across several years.

Nor does ignoring the degree to which young adults enjoy, value, appreciate, and grow from their experiences necessarily mean they do not enjoy, value, appreciate, and grow from them. They very well may do so.

But it also means, however, that few libraries exhibit curiosity about these questions. It means libraries seldom collect evidence about them. To be blunter, it also means that, during the past ten years, overwhelmingly few libraries even ask their YA users about their experience. How do libraries know they’re throwing strikes?

Moreover, it means that when next year’s planning comes around, those same libraries possess no YA user data upon which to help modify and improve the services they offer. Are these the best service offerings the library can offer their YA community? How would they know? Are the appropriate resources (staff, skills, time, funding, space, planning, etc.) aligned to support the success of the services they offer? How would they know? If they don’t, what steps are necessary to better align resources with programming objectives? What other service/programming options might be better? Again, how would they know?

These questions cohere into one: To what degree do young adults value library offerings?

This is the question libraries must constantly engage to deliver professional-level YA services. Professionals must exhibit curiosity about the degree to which their interventions are valued. They must produce evidence to support it and the evidence must be easily understood by the library’s many constituencies – especially the public.

Are there obstacles to asking/answering these questions? Yes, of course. But if YA services are ever to be regarded as a professional specialization and add meaningful public value to the library and to LIS, then professionals must pursue them.

My students must assess the obstacles their example libraries face when confronting their lack of user-centric evaluation. These obstacles are familiar to any paradigm or organizational shift – such as the change from an institutional reliance on input and output measures to user evaluation in outcomes.

Students properly assess, for instance, that libraries do not align sufficient time for such evaluations during their service/program planning stages. They assess that staff do not possess sufficient skill to evaluate their own offerings – a skill set these students will certainly not lack. Another common assessment is that organizational culture would reject user-centric evaluations.

In most instances, I would suggest that these issues form common information needs or requests. How do I/we better align planning stages to demonstrate program value and effectiveness for our users? What skills do I/we need to evaluate professional services? How can I/we change the organizational structure to adopt professional-level service evaluation?

Project Outcome

Although this is a column, not a workshop, I’d like to serve temporarily as a reference librarian. In addition to several books and articles on outcomes, the Public Library Association is currently in the midst of offering Project Outcome (https://www.projectoutcome.org/) in response to these issues. The Project, free to all U.S. and Canadian libraries, addresses many of the obstacles about outcomes that practitioners face in everyday practice: how measuring outcomes can help demonstrate community impact; a Project Outcome Toolkit; examples of how to apply the toolkit in the library.

PLA’s Project Outcome is not intended simply for the otherwise privileged service profiles of adult and children’s services but is as applicable (and urgent) for YA services. During this period in which public services of all kinds find themselves under ideological and fiscal attack from so many quarters, YA services (already limping from a weak basis in research) must find a way to document the value YA users find in what libraries offer.

Libraries can begin by developing curiosity about what our YA users experience in library services, in developing evidence about those experiences, and using that evidence to improve library offerings to sharpen our strike zones.

“Members” Now: Citizens Later?

America does not appear in the mood to broaden its notion of “citizenship” for the next while. This fight doesn’t end here, of course, but the current environment is a minefield of political kryptonite and recrimination.

For several years, however, I have been urging librarians to define YA users (within the context of the particular work librarians do) broadly and locally as citizens–not as psychologists (who define youth as “patients” or research subjects) or the different ways in which police officers, school counselors, or social workers variously define young adults for their own institutions.

I previously argued that libraries adopt and redefine the notion of “citizen” to include young people in localenvironments, outside and beyond the reach of formal or legal definitions, as citizens of their cities, towns, and neighborhoods. I advanced this argument to help libraries (as local institutions) become more mindful about youth in the here and now, instead of how Youth Development’s Grand Agenda does, fixated upon distant futures mired exclusively in privileged middle-class aesthetics and aspirations.

A recent study of African American youth demonstrates that a broader citizenship vision of youth may be asking too much of this adult culture. The study documents young people in public space peacefully observing a live performance. Immediately they became characterized by police, journalists, and judges as a flash mob, as terrorists.  These American citizens, exercising their right to a non-violent public gathering, their rights to their city, facilitated by the very digital tools we want them using, attract ire and punishment for simply raising anxiety.

“Citizens are afraid,” the sentencing judge proclaimed, “to go downtown because [name of city] children are terrorizing them.” Note who gets referred to as “citizens” and who gets denied. “I’m removing you from civilized society,” he said.

These are not unique circumstances, attitudes, or even consequences.

Perhaps I’ve chosen my recommendation poorly. Perhaps my timing is off or out of phase with national trends. In any event, this nation does not appear in the mood to explore more expansive or subtle definitions of citizenship. It’s certainly not in the mood to extend the idea for its young people.

If advocating an LIS definition of young adults as citizens appears untenable at present, then what vision ought the field create to represent its young adult users?

It’s an important question.

Fortunately, the work of Roberto Gonzales comes along at the right time. Gonzales, from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, recently published a provocative new study, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (University of California Press, 2016). Similar to the fears illustrated by the civil authorities referred to above, Gonzales explores the consequences of a society entangled in fear: this time it’s fear of immigrants. Another judgment follows: the destruction of the life chances of the 2.1 million youth permanently trapped, “undocumented,” by careening public policy.

Gonzales’ thesis is clear: a “double-edged” existence for youth without papers. These young people grow up in the United States. While they’re young, he finds, they experience a fairly normal community life – they attend school, practice their family’s faith, and develop social capital.

About the time they turn sixteen, however, due to no fault of their own–their worlds split in two. Without “those nine digits” (a Social Security number), and regardless of school success and staying out of trouble, they’re forbidden from enjoying the benefits of citizenship and encounter exclusion from legitimate employment, housing, and many realms of well-being, including obtaining a driver’s license. For these millions “illegality” assumes the defining feature of their lives.

Gonzales opens up something libraries can use in meeting their “free to all” responsibilities and professional obligations. While he rather conflates formal “citizenship” with “community membership,” libraries don’t need to. His key point highlights the fundamental unfairness current immigration policy holds for undocumented young people living in permanent uncertainty and instability–constantly vulnerable to being identified and deported to places they have never known.

Libraries do not need to reproduce “illegality” as the master narrative in serving young people locally. Libraries can define the notion of “membership” wide enough to include all youth, embracing even those reviled by national policy.

On the one hand, as public service agencies located in nearly every community, libraries can build upon this notion of local community “membership.” Library cards and access to materials and services don’t require “those nine digits.” Libraries don’t play favorites about where one’s parents were born. Libraries don’t place youth in untenable betwixt and between positions–sifting out only the native born for access to resources and respect.

On the other hand, however, neither do libraries appear interested in evolving away from constructing youth as “students,” or as undeveloped pre-adults (“Youth Development”), ever requiring the acquisition of particular and discrete “skills” for some distant future. Libraries currently do not exhibit any more interest in defining young people as present members of the local community than they did in exploring the notion of them as entitled citizens.

Community membership roots itself in the here and now, not in the speculative future. A community member contributes their current experiences to their local environment and is not ignored because they’re “only” a teenager. A community member participates in current library affairs such as serving on a Teen Advisory Group (TAG), for example, or on a library’s new building design team, or serving as a Summer Reading Program volunteer or library page.

These opportunities offer young people access to membership in ways that our nation’s immigration policy currently forbids.

We’re not likely to see our national organization provide the necessary leadership to wean libraries from viewing young people as developmental projects. So librarians at local, regional, and state levels must think through these questions themselves.

Envisioning young people as entitled and valued present members of their local communities offers a good place to start.

Are U.S. schools dangerous places for gun violence?

By Mike A. Males, YouthFacts
April 24, 2023

A number of mass shootings have made the United States’ K-12 schools the focus of the gun safety debate and often extreme “solutions” to prevent them. However, a straightforward risk analysis shows the chances of being shot or suffering any kind of gun incident, fatal, injurious, or otherwise, is far lower in a K-12 school per hour spent there than elsewhere in American society. Even assuming maximum risk, an American student or adult staff would have to attend school daily for 397 years to suffer even odds of a gun incident of any kind, and for over 200,000 years to risk personal gun injury or fatality, about the same risk as a resident of Germany. An American child is many times more likely to be murdered by guns at home than at school. Drastic measures such as arming school personnel and/or mass screenings of students using dubious psychometric instruments are unwarranted. Gun safety policy should be based on reasoned assessments of dangers, not emotional campaigns.

Highly publicized mass shootings have made K-12 schools in the United States the focus of intensive fear, media coverage, and proposed solutions to the country’s epidemic of gun violence. Commentators regularly state that students should be “terrified” of being shot in schools, parents should be afraid to send their children to school, and extreme measures including mass psychiatric screenings of students and hundreds of thousands of armed guards in schools at annual costs of tens of billions of dollars should be implemented.

Fears of school shootings began in the late 1990s and escalated with the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School. The numbers of school shootings, along with mass shootings in general, have risen beginning in 2017. From 2018 through 2021, 144 people died in 602 school shootings, broadly defined as all fatal, injury, non-injury, stray-bullet, and gun brandishing cases in or around a K-12 school (Reidman, 2022). This study covers July 1, 2021, through June 30, 2022, a period which includes the Uvalde, Texas, mass school shooting, which accounted for 43% of the student school shooting deaths during the period and which boosted the death toll from school shootings substantially above those of previous years. Despite these horrific occurrences, the hypothesis of this analysis is that schools will prove safer from gun violence than other areas of American society.

Should children be “terrified to go to school”?

The widespread assumption that schools are dangerous places for gun violence suggests that to be persuasive, this analysis must deliberately adopt assumptions and measures that make the above hypothesis affirming relative school safety harder to prove. To that end, this analysis incorporates the broadest possible definition of a school shooting, the maximum enumeration of school shooting victimizations, and the one-year period during which the most shootings occurred – all pessimistic, counter-hypothesis assumptions – to calculate the risks of experiencing a shooting in a school per hour spent there.

How much time do Americans spend in K-12 schools? In 2022, the National Center for Education Statistics (2022, 2022a) estimated that 55.7 million students, 3.6 million faculty, and three million additional staff were enrolled or employed in 130,930 public and private K-12 schools. At an average daily attendance of 93.2%, 55.3 million persons would be present in K-12 schools for an average of 6.64 hours per day for 167 days per year.

School shootings are defined by the School Shooting Safety Compendium compiled from 25 sources by the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS, 2022) as including “each and every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits

K-12 school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time, day of the week.” All shootings, including suicides and those of unknown intent, are included regardless of whether they occurred during regular school hours or involved school-related participants. This analysis counts all school shootings in the SSSC database from July 1, 2021, through June 30, 2022, victimizing persons under age 19, including all those whose ages are listed simply as “child” or “teen”, as student victims whether they were enrolled in school or not. The few victims of unknown age are apportioned to students the same as those of known age.

Corresponding national firearms death totals used to estimate dangers elsewhere in American society are tabulated by the Centers for Disease Control (2022) for calendar year 2021. Ideally, comparison of school shootings would be to the exact same time period, but 2021-2022 national figures are not yet available. Further, in keeping with the study goal of “stacking the deck” to maximize the impact of school shootings, 2021-2022 is chosen for school shootings to include the Uvalde mass shooting to maximize school victimization numbers, while 2021 is chosen for the national comparison even though preliminary projections indicate 2021-2022 gun mortality numbers will be higher. The analysis thus uses the most recent data available at this writing.

Based on these assumptions, Americans spent approximately 69.4 billion person-hours in K-12 schools in 2020-21. On a full-time annualized basis, then, American K-12 schools amount to a “nation” of 7.9 million people, between the national populations of Denmark (which suffered 84 shooting deaths in the most recent year) and Belgium (143). Assuming that the 72 total annual fatal shootings and 258 shooting injuries (including minor injuries) in 329 school firearms incidents in 2021-2022 represent the new normal, there would be 1.02 fatal and 3.75 injury shooting casualties per billion school person-hours. Focusing only on students, persons ages 5 17 spent 62 billion person-hours and, under maximized assumptions, suffered 44 fatalities and 175 injuries from shootings in schools in 2020-21. How does American school gun safety compare to other venues?

=Based on the most pessimistic assumptions from the highest year for school shootings and a broad definition that includes shootings originating off-campus and outside of school hours, a student or adult school employee would have to attend school every school day for 397 years to experience even odds of having a firearms incident of any kind – fatal, injurious, missed-firing, stray-bullet, or gun-brandishing – occur at their school. A student would have to attend school every school day (allowing for average daily attendance) for 208,000 years to risk being personally killed or injured in a shooting, and for nearly 1.2 million years to suffer even odds of being killed in a school shooting.

For all ages, 2.4% of total time is spent in a K-12 school, and 0.3% of all gun homicides take place in a school. Students ages 5-17 spend 12.2% of their total hours in school each year and suffer 3.0% of their gun homicides and 1.8% of their total gun deaths in or around the country’s K-12 schools.

These odds make schools among the safest places in the United States from shootings, fatal or otherwise. Per billion person-hours spent elsewhere in society other than at a K-12 school, the average American of all ages is 16.3 times more likely (including 7.3 times for homicides and 211 times more for suicides), and the average 5-to-17-year-old is 6.7 times more likely (including 4.2 times for homicides and 50.7 times for suicides), to suffer a fatal shooting.

However, the United States does not set a high bar for gun safety. How do American schools compare to the greater safety from guns found in other Western nations? Figure 1 compares firearms death tolls per billion person-hours for the United States and U.S. schools to those of Mexico and 18 affluent Western countries (World Population Review, 2020). While the United States ranks the worst by far for shooting deaths, its schools rank favorably with other Western countries as a whole. A person walking the hallways or campuses of an American school risks about the same odds of being shot as a person in Germany.

This risk calculation in no way diminishes the disturbing reality of school shootings or shootings elsewhere, mass and otherwise. Incomplete tabulations indicate that while U.S. schools are much safer from gun violence than elsewhere in American society, U.S. schools are much less safe from gunfire than schools in other Western countries. “The notion that school shootings are a uniquely American crisis" is difficult to dispute given their alarming frequency in the U.S. compared to the rest of the industrialized world,” World Population Review’s analysis concludes. Of 330 known school shootings worldwide in 2022, 288, or 87%, occurred in the United States (World Population Review, 2022), which has around 4% of the world’s K-12 students. The extent to which nations other than the United States keep complete records of shootings in schools is not known, perhaps because such shootings are rare in other countries. The paradox that American K-12 students are much safer from gunfire in schools than elsewhere in American society and at the same time much more in danger of shootings than students in other Western nations’ schools is the kind of innovative information that can yield powerful policy insights.

Conclusion

Americans who fear gun violence should be more frightened when a child or youth leaves a school than when they enter one. As other Western countries have shown, the shooting death of anyone, anywhere is a preventable tragedy, but we attach a special sadness to the death of a young person because of the greater loss of years and potential. It is because the shooting of a young person is a tragedy – especially in the quantity child gun victimizations occur in the United States – that the most accurate information and carefully designed policies must be applied to preventing them.

The unreasoning panic over school shootings to the exclusion of broader gun violence concerns damages effective policy and endangers young people. Gun-rights activists’ campaign to arm school officers and teachers is particularly alarming. If just a fraction of 1% of the hundreds of thousands of personnel armed with assault weapons who would be installed in schools at costs of tens of billions of dollars annually under gun-rights proposals turn out to be mentally or criminally disturbed, children would be in far more danger of being shot in school than they are now. Indeed, unwarranted shootings of other officers, adults, students, and themselves by armed school officers already have occurred. That policy recommendations like these are gaining traction results from vast overestimates of the dangers children and youth face in schools and misallocation of limited resources available to ameliorate gun violence.

The failure to set rational priorities means more people, including young people, will be shot.
The small fraction shot in mass school shootings by young peers are granted such high-priority
status for grief and policy remediation that the vast majority of child victims who are shot at
home by grownups are treated as unimportant and unworthy of mention. The FBI’s tabulation of age of shooter by age of victim shows more than three-fourths gun murder victims under age 12 were shot by adults ages 25 and older; just 5% were shot by peers under age 18, fewer than are shot by grownups age 50 and older (OJJDP, 2022).

Why are schools relatively safe? That, even in a country with staggering gun fatality, American schools suffer gun violence levels comparable to those found in Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Belgium appears to relate to one commonality: like other Western nations, and unlike other American venues, American schools are almost all gun-free. Straightforward mathematical analyses of state gun-law strictness, proportions of households with guns, poverty levels, and gun death rates by type consistently show that gun proliferation and poverty levels are the major predictors of firearms homicide and overall gun death rates. Domestic violence inflicts a much higher gun violence toll on children than shootings in schools.

The clear desire of political, interest-group, and major-media commentators and authorities to avoid the uncomfortable implications of these realities shows the gun debate is more about advancing partisan agendas than protecting young people. While it is unarguably true that school shootings are tragic and deserve outrage, the exclusionary fixation on them has produced extremist “remedies” that would increase, not decrease, danger to students. We do not need hundreds of thousands of assault-weapon armed vigilantes roaming school hallways and campuses. We do not need mass screenings of tens of millions of students using dubious psychometric scorings (see Ferguson, Coulson, Barnett, 2013, 2011). It is long past time to move into a realistic era of reasoned assessments of real gun violence dangers and scientific responses.

References

Center for Homeland Defense and Security (2022). Data map for shootings at K-12 schools.
https://www.chds.us/ssdb/data-map/ 

Centers for Disease Control WONDER (2022). Provisional mortality statistics, 2018 through last
month. https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd-icd10-provisional.html

Education Week (2022), Education Statistics: Facts About American Schools.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts-about-american-schools/2019/01#:~:text=How%20many%20schools%20are%20there,for%20Education%20Stati
stics%20(NCES).

Ferguson, C.J., Coulson, M., Barnett, J. (2013, 2011). Psychological profiles of school shooters:
Positive directions and one big wrong turn. Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations, 11:1–17. At:
https://www.christopherjferguson.com/ProfilesSS.pdf

National Center for Education Statistics (2022). Digest of Education Statistics, Tables 201.10,
208-20, 213.10. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_208.20.asp?current=yes,

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_213.10.asp?current=yes,

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_201.10.asp?current=yes

National Center for Education Statistics (2022a). Schools and staffing survey.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass0708_035_s1s.asp

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) (2022). Easy access to the Supplementary Homicide Reports: 1980-2020.
https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezashr/asp/vic_selection.asp

Reidman, D. (2022). Naval Postgraduate Center for Homeland Defense and Security. K-12
school shooting database. https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings

World Population Review (2022). Gun deaths by country, 2022.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-deaths-by-country. School shootings
by country, 2022. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-shootings-by-
country. Total population by country, 2022. https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries

“Listen to us:” Youth Are More Resilient Than We Deserve

Wynter, 14, demands “listen to us.” Hunter, 14, answers the question “The best thing about being young my age is… ‘Having friends and learning more and more stuff in school.’ “Your childhood is something you’ll never get back,” says 12-year-old Trinity, “And I feel like you’re an adult for a long time, way longer than your childhood.” (1)

Kids today have every justification for dwelling in fear and gloom. But they aren’t. Instead, they’re demonstrating a resilience that this society does not deserve.

Just look what we’ve been putting them through recently:

• A post-pandemic return to national childhood poverty rates
• Massive social and educational disruptions during Covid
• Universal live shooter “lockdown” drills brought on by a gun fetish
  culture and hundreds of fabricated “swatting” scares in schools across the
  nation
• Massively exaggerated moral panic and anxieties about youth mental
  health
• Banned book campaigns
• Seldom acknowledged daily violence and exploitation many face at
  home – at the hands of parents and caregivers

And what do they have to look forward to…

• Growing neoconservative austerity systematically eviscerating public
  infrastructure – especially public schools and libraires
• Women’s rights to self-determination evaporated by Supreme Court
• A Hunger Games future of environmental devastation

We don’t deserve the resilience they display.

Amid the fear mongering they’re exposed to daily, through metal detectors, lock-down drills, armed police on campus, and the psychology profession constantly pressing claims about its newfound youth market. Still, there are some recent reports offering a counternarrative to cruel
public policy and mercenary surveillance “experts” in “security” and “mental health” fields.

What the New York Times reported in its younger teen focus group is mirrored not only in resilience but the dramatic upswing of political activism of older teens. Today’s teenagers are mobilizing for sane gun control, for humane immigration policy, for identity and gender equity, and for a viable planet upon which to grow old.

The new PEW Research Center’s “Connection, Creativity and Drama: Teen Life on Social Media in 2020,” also documents positive outcomes reported by youth themselves:

• 80% report greater social connectivity
•  71% report feeling more confident in showing creativity
• 67% connect with people who support them

While moral panic fretting proliferates, evidence illustrates how these technologies overwhelming facilitates pro-social youth behaviors. Yes, it’s true and should be more widely acknowledged, that during the early days of the pandemic the federal government responded admirably and swiftly to poverty, particularly to child poverty. Federal government action aimed to avert economic catastrophe and, in the process, rolled back more than half of children in poverty. (2)

That was then. This is now. With the pandemic viewed largely in the rear-view mirror so is anti-poverty assistance. No, we don’t deserve youth’s current resilience. We certainly didn’t pay
for it. And until we obey young Wynter’s admonition to “listen to them” all we offer is hopes and prayers.

~~~~~~~~~~~

1 Ariel Kaminer, Adrian J. Rivera, and Margie Omero, “12 Teens and Tweens on America Today, New York Times,
26 March 2023, page 12.

2 Matthew Desmond, “The High Cost of Being Poor,” The New York Review of Books, 20 April 2023, pp. 55-57.

Los Angeles’s Astounding Youth Trends Terrifying Everyone

Photo by Yingchou Han on Unsplash

Amid the dire commentaries about youth currently dominating public forums, the real question we should be asking is: how are supposedly reckless, impulsive, risk-taking teenagers achieving such strikingly low rates of drug overdose, suicide, and violent crime that afflict grownups?

In fact, increasingly racially diverse younger Millennials and Generation Z are bringing astonishing improvements in youth behaviors. They are not the “teen-agers” adults have long disparaged.

Guns

Start with guns, dominating news after every mass shooting. Commentaries feature the statement that “guns are the leading cause of (external) death among American children.” This is true in L.A. County, where 68 teens died by gunfire in 2021. What no one mentions is L.A.’s teenage gun toll has hovered at half-century lows over the last five years, down 85% from 470 in 1990 and 161 in 1975.

Further, while commentators endlessly clarion a small increase in teenage gun homicides during the COVID pandemic (up from 57 in 2019), none mentioned that gun deaths among parent ages leaped even more – from 119 to 196 among ages 30-39, and 53 to 101 for ages 40-49.

Bizarrely, commentators either dodge the big question – who is shooting kids? – or lie (“just kids killing kids”). The real answer is too disturbing: “The biggest reason guns are the leading death cause for American children and youth is because American grownups are shooting them.” If taken seriously, that would upend the entire gun debate.

The FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report showing age of victim by age of murderer for over 3,000 Los Angeles homicides since 2010 show only 17% of the suspects in gun murders, and 12% in total murders, of victims under age 18 also were under 18. Grownup shooters age 21 and older murder many more kids and nearly all adult victims.

L.A. is on the leading edge of vanishing crime by youth. Over the last half-century, LA’s youth (five in six of whom now are of color) reduced their criminal arrests by a staggering 96%, from 108,298 in 1975 and 63,177 in 1990 to 7,935 in 2019 and 3,344 in 2021 (no, these are not typos).

While the press trumpets “surges” in “youth violence,” the latest (2021) L.A. law enforcement statistics report arrests for violent felonies for their age groupings: 20-29 (8,449), 30-39 (7,387), and 40 and older (6,995). All teens under age 20: 1,198. Violence arrests among juveniles have fallen by 85% over the last generation. The popular, unscientific myth that teenagers’ “undeveloped brains” render them innately impulsive and risky is being demolished by teens themselves.

Drugs, suicide, pregnancy, dropout

The Centers for Disease Control’s latest tabulations of fentanyl (synthetic opioid) deaths in Los Angeles County from 2020 into 2023 contain a shock for those believing teens are the crisis: Ages 20-29 (899 deaths); 30-39 (976); 40-49 (629); 50-59 (528); 60 and older (277). Ages 19 and younger? 136.

The CDC’s figures on suicide and suspected suicides in Los Angeles since 2020 are similar: ages 20-29 (426), 30-39 (429), 40-49 (380), 50-59 (384), and 60 and older (623). All ages under age 20: 109.

Unfortunately, commentaries repeat scary-sounding but meaningless cliches (which fooled even the astute late comedian George Carlin) like, “suicide is the third leading cause of death among teenagers.” That’s not because teens are uniquely vulnerable to suicide (just the opposite), but because teens rarely die from big killers like heart disease, cancer, and Covid-19.

We can lament the tragedies afflicting young people that still happen without scapegoating, stigmatizing, and abandoning fact, fairness, and context. The crusade across the nation to blame every social crisis on youth may invoke tones of caring and concern, but it is ugly and dangerous, spawning policies that threaten teens’ rights and social media access they use to reduce risks.

Births by L.A. mothers under age 20 (still mostly fathered by men 20 and older) plunged from 24,746 in 1990 to 2,751 in 2021. High school dropout rates among local 15-24 year-olds plummeted by 71%, while college enrollment and graduation rates rose by 62%.

Why did these dramatic improvements occur?

America did something right after all, but no one knows about it. Research by ChildTrends, economist Rick Nevin, and we at YouthFacts and the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice show teenage behavior trends closely track levels of child poverty and its hazards, like children’s toxic lead exposure. What we mislabel as “adolescent risk” actually results from economic and environmental conditions, not adolescents’ allegedly innate recklessness.

Since the early 1990s, the Earned Income Tax Credit and related government transfers have slashed youth poverty levels by 80% while Environmental Protection Agency regulations reduced lead in children’s blood by 95%. The EITC, EPA, and teens themselves are America’s biggest crime fighters.

Unfortunately, revolutionary improvement and comparative safety threaten the scary image of teenagers interest groups and media need. The Centers for Disease Control’s latest survey trumpeting a teenage “mental health crisis” finds the proportion of 12-17-year-olds reporting depression and anxiety has risen sharply over the decade. Authorities and media commentators are rushing to blame social media. Several in Congress propose banning younger teens from online platforms.

Bans like that potentially are dangerous. The Pew Research Center’s detailed 2022 study found large majorities of teens saying, “social media gives them some level of connection… reassures them that they have people to support them during tough times, and… makes them feel more accepted.”

It is much more likely that teens are more depressed because their parents are more depressed, suicidal, drug-abusing, and abusive. Adult depression has tripled in recent years. The same CDC survey found the proportions of teens reporting violent and emotional abuses inflicted by household adults have doubled and quadrupled, respectively, since 2014. More than half of teens report emotional abuses by parents, several times more than report bullying at school or online.

More depressed and anxious teenagers – especially LGBT youth, the most bullied by parents – are a normal response to more troubled grownups and oblivious authorities indulging the luxury to evade distressing realities teens cannot escape.

Humbly acknowledging crucial adult contexts and treating teenagers objectively would mean giving up the unwritten rule Americans apparently value more than safety: blaming powerless outgroups for mental illness, suicide, drug addiction, crime, and violence, stigmatized as evidencing weakness and deficient morals. We should eagerly acknowledge and understand this dynamic new generation, not lie about and fear it.