“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.

Unlocking Knowledge of Those Impacted by Juvenile Justice System

“The real crime lies in how society views us.” 

This indictment by a young individual cited in a report by the Shelby County Youth Council in Memphis stings because it is true.

Activists of all ages in Shelby County have no illusions about dislodging deep systemic racism but they demonstrate increasing impatience about how minors are treated in the largest county in Tennessee.

Salina Shamsuddin with the Youth Justice Action Council did not mince words with me when talking about how grownups need to behave.

“It’s oppressive to call us children and kids because it has a negative connotation that is
not empowering to us so we’d like to be referred to as youth … Catching them [adults] and
standing up for ourselves is one of the biggest things that works and people really
understand they cannot treat us like this anymore.”

The Youth Justice Action Council (YJAC) centers its work on those directly impacted by the juvenile justice system in Memphis and developed 10 legal demands in its “Break the Chains” written petition and rap version . YJAC used these specific demands in its campaign to defeat the District Attorney and Juvenile Court Judge who tried many Black and Brown youth as adults.

Following this victory, the Youth Justice Action Council hosted a forum for the newly elected Judge, DA and County government officials. In small groups, two YJAC members shared their firsthand stories about the juvenile justice system and one of the other Council members facilitated. Adults were toldnot to interrupt or interrogate. Another one of the facilitators, Milana Kumar emphasized

“. . . the need to center on the experiences of systems impacted youth as opposed to just
recommendations. It’s harder to invalidate when they [DA and others] are faced with the trauma they have caused and cannot distance themselves.”

One Youth Justice Action Council representative serves on the five-member Shelby Countywide
Juvenile Justice Consortium, all appointed by the Mayor. This is not a token position. In fact, this repand the YJAC have credibility and clout plus strong rapport with the adult members.

“I don’t think we’ve ever made a decision that has not had a youth voice…They are our checks and balances. We are really led by them.”
– Rebecca Davis, Chair, Countywide Juvenile Justice Consortium

The Youth Justice Action Council (YJAC) is a youth-led organization that advocates for juvenile
system reform. It is sponsored by Stand for Children Tennessee, which advocates for improving
public education and for racial justice.The 100-year-old organization in Memphis, appropriately called Bridges USA that recently prioritized youth-adult equity and racial justice, provides the crucial structural support for this intergenerational symbiosis.

There’s a bit of disbelief that systemic change can actually happen. Even with the horrific murder by police of Tyre Nichols, the recent election fuels the determination of Salina, Milana and justice-impacted advocates to erase the superpredator view that sociologist Mike Males debunks in The Terrifying Plunge of Youth Crime .

The terrifying plunge in youth crime

By Mike Males | February 2023

Source: California Department of Justice

Why aren’t mammoth revolutions in youth behavior that make today’s teenagers a uniquely low-crime population that reduced gun deaths dramatically headlined in the news and studied excitedly in institutional forums?

Crime, gun killings, and arrest rates by youths have fallen faster in California than in any other state over the last three to five decades, a trend that apparently horrifies authorities and the news media across the political spectrum.

As California’s youth population age 10-17 grew and became more racially diverse (73% now are of Color), rates of criminal arrest plunged by 92% since 1995, and 96% since 1975. Teenagers under age 20 are now much less likely to be arrested than Californians ages 50-59, a stunning development that overturns decades of assumptions about crime and depresses major interests so much they won’t even talk about it. (One exception: the San Francisco Chronicle’s excellent “Vanishing Violence” series.)

Around 8% of the youthful arrest decline is attributable to the decriminalization of marijuana in 2010, which reduced arrests for all ages. The COVID pandemic’s shutdown policies may have reduced crime in 2020, but youth arrests continued falling during the return to normalcy in 2021.

But the vast bulk of the decline is due to young people themselves. Violent crime rates among youth are down 75% over the last three decades, homicide arrests have fallen by 85%, and gun killings among youth have fallen by 72% — despite 1990s predictions of coming “hordes” of dark-skinned “adolescent super-predators” and scary recent headlines of a nonexistent youth crime “surge.” The crime plunge has saved the state over $10 billion in juvenile incarceration costs alone since 1995, with eight of 11 juvenile facilities closed already and the Division of Juvenile Justice slated to close altogether in July 2023.

California’s 35 Democratic-voting counties show larger declines in crime by youth, but both are down more than 90% since the early 1990s. Since the early 1990s, youth arrest trends have fallen by 90% in San Francisco, 90% in Siskiyou, 91% in Orange County, 92% in Los Angeles, 92% in Sacramento, 94% in San Diego, 94% in Santa Clara County (San Jose), 94% in Alameda County (Oakland), 95% in Fresno, 96% in Sierra County, and 99% in remote Mono County. California’s large urban counties had declines of 80% to 90% in violent crime rates among youth. In the early 1990s, California’s major counties suffered 500-600 firearms homicides among teenagers per year; in 2020-21, in a youth population 600,000 larger, around 150 per year – a rate decline of 80% to the lowest rate in at least 50 years.

The silence indicates a bad faith in institutional America, not only in protecting the profits of youth-crime industries from law enforcement to juvenile justice, treatment facilities, and prisons to sensationalist media, but an ego-flattering psychology that insists that adolescents are reckless and adults wise and mature. It’s time to abandon the 19th century myths that have governed crime discussion and move into the amazing opportunities the 21st century youth revolution offers.

Response to CDC’s “Teen Girls ‘Engulfed’ in Violence and Trauma” Report

MaryAnn Harlan | February 2023

I see we are at the stage in the media narrative where we are once again worried about our girls. On Feb 13th the headline at the Washington Post declared “Teen Girls ‘engulfed’ in Violence and Trauma, the CDC finds”. I don’t mean to make light of the CDC data on Youth Risk Behaviors because there is concerning data. But as someone who investigated media narratives about girlhood I couldn’t help but heave a heavy sigh. Are we really back here? It seems we are.

What was interesting is that after the first few paragraphs about an uptick in experiencing sexual violence the article focused on the mental health findings; significant increases over ten years in behaviors that could be considered symptoms of depression and suicidal thoughts and actions. It was left to the reader to correlate the uptick with the increase in suicidal ideation and depressive behavior. And that isn’t the correlation the article went on to make.

I was particularly frustrated by the gendered analysis. Girls, according to the WaPO expert, are more attuned to their feelings and therefore more likely to self-report depressive symptoms. Boys are more likely to “mask” symptoms and be aggressive. Not to mention, according to the
same quote, girls are more likely to be vulnerable to social media. Except the report didn’t actually ask about social media. So, we don’t really know if this is why girls are reporting higher rates of attempted suicide based on CDC’s data or that boys aren’t.

It is convenient to focus on girls’ emotions and so-called capacity to name their depression. But it ignores larger issues that CDC’s survey doesn’t address. Others will address some of these issues related to the actual questions, the stats, and what is missing from CDC’s report and problematic data, but I worry about the narratives the media creates.

Narratives about girls at risk quite frequently ignore race, class, age, geography, gender identification (beyond the binary), sexual orientation, disability, etc. As we saw the last time the girls at risk media narrative dominated the headlines, the imagined girl is generally white and middle class, not to mention able-bodied and cis. Monies, policies, programs flow into “fixing the imagined girl’s problem and left behind are girls who don’t fit this narrative.

Furthermore, it doesn’t take into account girls, or frankly all youth’s, own capacity to state what they need, to articulate what their actual problem is and act on it. The narrative becomes embedded in popular narratives, news articles heavily reliant on anecdote, after school special type plot lines on television and in books, popular nonfiction, and parenting advice. It is nothing short of disinformation using imagined girls as props. And I guess I am left asking who benefits from this narrative? Because that is in my estimation the real danger to youth.

What Gangs Can Teach Us

By Anthony Bernier | February 2023 

Back in them bad ol’ 1990s, when we were being taught to fear anyone who “looked like” a “gangster,” I worked at an “inner city” library. We were learning the language of “zero-tolerance,”gang injunctions and enhancements, immediate suspensions, and criminalizing something we used to call “ditching school” but now were taught to refer to it as “criminal truancy.”

The library was an example of the city’s separate-but-equal “inner-city” civic infrastructure – code for low-income immigrant and minority neighborhoods. The dilapidated building sat precariously at end of a cul-de-sac, butted-up to the side of a freeway embankment, at the dark end of a freeway underpass. It was so hidden that the police couldn’t find it! On Friday nights, the “Big Top” gang discovered that the parking lot was a great party spot. It was. Secluded from the street, the freeway screaming just feet away, they could play their music loud and not bother anyone. I wish we had a place like that when I was young…

The partying was one thing. But staff would arrive on Saturday mornings to busted beer
bottles everywhere and the side of the building, pathetic as it was, covered in graffiti.

The library’s administrative impulse here, almost by policy, and certainly reaction, was to call the police – even if they couldn’t find the building.

Then would come the lights and sirens, helicopters, and kids getting busted (if not
worse).

I honestly don’t know where it came from, but a different idea dawned on me. It just
seemed like a reasonable thing to at try.
I got this big piece of scrap cardboard, and wrote this [verbatim]…

Come on, you guys.
The little kids come in on Saturday. Do you want
them to think of Echo Park like this?

I taped the sign to the front door.
The next morning, staff came back into my office and says, “you gotta see this.” We
walk out to the front of the building and saw new tagging.
But rather than the usual stuff, this one simply said, in huge letters, “Big Top, sorry.”
And they never tagged the library again.

The point of the story is obvious.
Objectifying young people, like objectifying anyone, rarely brings about positive
outcomes. This is the lesson we never read or hear about in popular media.
Administrations treat kids like someone who sees every problem as a nail because all
they have is a hammer.
All we did here was ask.

American journalists, politicians, and interest groups left to right agree: It’s okay to lie about teens.

Mike Males | February 2023

Ninety-nine percent of the tens of thousands of news stories and commentaries on teenagers, suicide, and drug overdose lie. The willfully create a false impression.

UCLA Health is cruder than most, posting the flat lie that “suicide rates (are) highest among teens and young adults.” Other commentators are more subtle, dodging the disappointing truth about “rates” and instead reciting the scary-sounding but grossly misleading: “suicide is the third leading cause of death among teens.”

That’s meaningless. Of course an external cause like suicide, along with accidents and homicide, would be leading death categories for teens, since teens rarely die from major natural causes like heart disease or cancer.

It’s understandable that press reporters and the late comedian George Carlin might confuse “high rate” with “leading cause.” But it is astonishing that UCLA’s famed Child and Adolescent Psychiatry unit would be so ignorant and indifferent regarding basic suicide facts that such a mistake could remain posted.

In the 1980s, authorities caught psychiatric hospitals grossly sensationalizing suicide to scare parents into filling overbuilt hospitals with teenage patients. Of course, UCLA Health took down my complaint within hours – but left their false posting up. That’s typical of American attitudes. Lying about teens is ok; correcting lies is forbidden.

Look for yourself. Every article on “teen suicide” and most on drug abuse (especially fentanyl) contain the meaningless “leading cause” claim but universally omit the much more relevant, contextual fact that teenage rates of suicide and overdose are much lower than adults’ rates.

Table 1 details the important and most recent statistics no one else will present. It combines high-schoolers with higher-risk 18-19 year-olds and includes only immediate, not chronic, deaths.

Even with these conservatisms, adults of ages to be parents to teenagers are twice as likely as teenagers to commit suicide, 7.5 times more likely to fatally overdose on drugs, including 6 times more likely for fentanyl, and 15 times more likely to fatally binge-drink. Teens comprise 13.4% of the teen-adult population but account for only 5.6% of suicides, 1.5% of drug overdoses, 1.8% of fentanyl deaths, and 1.1% of binge-drinking deaths.

Not only do commentators omit these crucial realities omitted from discussion, they peddle exactly the opposite impression that teens are riskier than adults. This blatant misrepresentation contains more cruelty than concern. Teenagers who suffer at-risk parents are afforded no attention, sympathy or official help. No one advises teens on administering Narcan to parents who overdose on fentanyl – a family crisis eight times more likely than a high-schooler overdosing.

Major interests evade high adult rates of suicide and overdose, especially among White middle-aged men, because mental disturbances and addiction are deeply stigmatized in American culture, especially by medical and psychological authorities. The American prejudice is to pretend suicide and drugs afflict only powerless groups, like youth.

These unreasoning bigotries hamper reasoned solutions to America’s social crises, evident in staggering suicide and overdose tolls. We should learn why supposedly “impulsive” teens have such low rates of suicide, not inventing bogus measures to scapegoat them.

Table 1. Deaths from suicides and suicide-suspected deaths, drug and fentanyl overdose, and alcohol overdose, average annual rates per 100,000 population by age group, 2020-2022 (provisional).

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023.

Why do libraries continue to strike out with young people?

Anthony Bernier | January 2023

The answer to the question why libraries strike out with young people is simple: libraries envision young people merely as information consumers, and many still believe that libraries are about books.

And we wonder why young people make libraries the butt of jokes.

When libraries privilege only certain materials and experiences over young peoples’ own ways of being, we must recognize that institutional behaviors, institutional priorities, and institutional agendas keep these institutions in severely compromised positions.

In acknowledging library visions of youth only as information consumers, for instance, youth allies should ask the whereabouts of school newspaper collections. Where the playbills and programs of annual school plays, sporting events, or extra-mural competitions? Where the archival collections of youth-created, podcasts, murals, or zines? Where the manuscripts of valedictorian speeches or debate champions… or youth poets, filmmakers, journalists, and authors?

Increasingly, and to unprecedented degrees, young people enact their own literacy practices through producing what I call “fugitive literacies.” Youth bend and shape new and ever-cheaper communications affordances and skills into literary vocal cords of their own.

Yet, despite all the ethical huffing and puffing librarianship does about commitments to “intellectual freedom” and “information access” libraries institutionally ignore youth-produced literacy enactments.

Youth produce these cultural contributions not through national publishing houses, but locally in small lots, often in one-time offerings, non-sequential, or non-serial, and often fleeting productions. The library world’s dismissive term for this cultural production is “ephemera,” a synonym for not-very-valuable; a synonym for “we don’t care about this stuff.”

Implicitly, it means that we don’t care about those who produce it, either.

I refer to the manifestations of these new literary vocal cords as “subversive materials that engage fugitive literacies.” I invoke such normally pejorative terms as “subversive” and “fugitive” to reflect how our institutions marginalize them.

One highly unusual example of a cultural institution taking youth culture seriously appears at Harvard University’s Hiphop Archive. Although focused on Hiphop itself, rather than on its creators, the collection inherently acknowledges the young voices who, since the 1970s, created an artform rivaling jazz as an American contribution to global culture.

“Mission: The Hiphop Archive and Research Institute’s mission is to facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture, and responsible leadership through Hiphop.”

Fugitive literacies, by nature, capture the ephemeral and fleeting. Yet they document not only the lives of young people as they live them in the present, but offer contributions as well to the larger culture – if only libraries would take them seriously…

For further thinking on the neglected status of youth-produced writing and cultural production, read Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti’s book: Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation.¹

Part of our job, as youth allies, should be to reverse the depths of this neglect and deploy the formidable skills and resources at our disposal to elevate the many ways in which young people document their world and ours.

¹ Douglas, K., & Poletti, A. (2016). Life Narratives and Youth Culture. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.