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Trashing Teens

Sat, 2008-07-05 18:49 — ABN

Psychologist Robert Epstein argues in a provocative book, "The Case Against Adolescence," that teens are far more competent than we assume, and most of their problems stem from restrictions placed on them.

Psychologist Robert Epstein spoke to Psychology Today's Hara Estroff Marano about the legal and emotional constraints on American youth.

HEM: Why do you believe that adolescence is an artificial extension of childhood?

RE: In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring "children" well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isn't an adult until age 26.

The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.

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Comments

Sun, 2008-07-06 04:35 — Robyn

Our education system was

Our education system was formed during the Industrial Revolution and based on a factory model. The whole point was to "level off" the masses and alienate children from the world around them, thus ensuring their efficacy as members of a society based on mass production.

Consider this quote from William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906:

"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual...

"The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places. . . . It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world."