Chapter 1

Introduction

Imagine an account of human life in the twenty-first century. The genre is science fiction, perhaps delivered in a futuristic novel or movie. The account is set in any city or town of the populated world. The main characters are all younger than twenty. They are the children and adolescents who inhabit the streets, the homes, and the schools of this typical community of tomorrow.

A Fable of Our Near Future

The scene opens on a bleak deserted neighborhood in the heart of town. It is daytime, just after working hours, and the place has emptied out. The sense of emptiness is not a great change from earlier in the day. From nine to five, some government offices and a few small shops provide a bit of life to the area, but it is a muted, confined life that mostly takes place off the street. Most of the area's stores and the oldtime movie theaters have been boarded up for decades. The remaining businesses, there only to serve the government workers, are barricaded behind steel grates that have been adorned with rolls of barbed wire. After the working day is done, nowhere is there an open eatery, a pharmacy, or newsstand.

Soon it is clear why. Roving bands of youth begin bringing a more vivid life to the neighborhood, though it is a macabre and chilling one. Some of the youths are crammed into cars that creep ominously around corners like big cats on the prowl. Others dart through the alleys or leap across the rooftops. The youngsters move in a quick, guarded pantomime, signaling each other by hand or by eye contact. Before long, taunts, gunshots, and screams punctuate the watchful silence. Then flashes of fire, smoke, the screeching of car motors and wheels, and the wail of police sirens bring the scene to a climax. Stretchers carry away three young corpses. No photographer comes to chronicle the grisly sight: such events have long since lost their news appeal. Next follows an uneasy calm. Then, before anything approaching a decent interval has passed, similar events unfold with a dreary predictability.

The scene now shifts to the outskirts of town. We are in a leafy residential area. But barricades and angry signs have taken away some of the idyllic suburban charm. The signs warn that only neighborhood residents and their announced guests are allowed access to the streets. Private patrols have established checkpoints to enforce the edict.

In any event, there is very little outdoor traffic among young folks in this part of town. Almost all the action takes place inside -- if one considers TV gazing, snacking, napping, and an occasional stony-eyed pass at homework to be "action." There is a listless, isolated quality to the activity. Even the phone calls that break up the monotonous silence lack the gossipy glee that one used to associate with teenage telephoning. So lethargic are the movements of the young people that we almost wonder if the scene is being shot in slow motion. Many of these youngster have a pale, flaccid, washed-out look.

Despite the overall pall, in one of the homes a genuine drama does take place. A boy of sixteen, three days away from his next birthday, quietly slips into his father's study and turns on the home computer. With a few taps on the keyboard, he opens the data base file where his dad has catalogued the family's collection of guns. The boys studies the size, type, and location of each gun listed. After some thought, and without bothering to turn off the computer, the boy walks to the hallway, opens a cabinet, and removes a thick single-barrel shotgun. He knows that the gun has been kept loaded for the purposes of instant household protection. Leaving the cabinet door open, the boy takes the shotgun down into the basement. After a ten-minute pause in which he neither leaves a note nor makes any other significant gesture, he ends his life with a shot to his head.

At the suburban high school the following day, there is some consternation at the news of the boy's suicide, but the feelings lean more toward sorrow than surprise. Suicides occur periodically, here and in every other suburb around. In the meantime, there are other happenings at school that demand more urgent talk and vigilance. The most pressing is the epidemic of knifings that is placing both students and teachers at daily risk. The sophisticated metal screening devices at the school entrances have done little to deter students from creating knife-like weapons out of sharp objects and using them against each other and the staff. Once a problem thought to be limited to students from the "tougher" parts of town, the knifings by now have no discernible link to students' social status or group identity. The girls are now as likely to do it as the boys.

A panorama of school life reveals an atmosphere that is in all other ways consistent with the sense of dread that emanates from the frequent knifings. Graffiti have been splattered everywhere, inside as well as out, easily defeating the token, halfhearted efforts of school officials to rub them out. Shaved heads, tatoos, and gaudy jewelry ornament most of the young bodies. The students wear a motley assortment of clothes or quasi-uniforms resembling degenerate war gear. The most popular T-shirts of the day bear a pair of boldface insignia, one written on the front and one on the back: "Sick of it all," and "Nothing to lose."

We move down the corridors into the school's central offices. A counselor is calling a student's home about some apparently excused absences, only to find that the parent's letters have been forged. A young boy is in the principal's office for threatening his teacher with a gun. Three students are separated from their class after hurling racial epithets at a fourth. A girl is complaining that her locker has been broken into and all her belongings stolen. A small group of boys are huddling in a corner, shielding an exchange of money for drug packets. In the playground, two girls grab a third and punch her in the stomach for flirting with the wrong boy. Throughout the corridors and classrooms, a palpable spirit of disorderliness and disrespect reigns.

The camera moves away from the suburb, past the old business district shown before, and into a truly devastated part of town where the nonworking poor live. Here many of the children and most of the adolescents no longer may be found within the walls of any school, even at the height of day. Some have formally withdrawn, others have never enrolled, and others simply never show up. Instead, they inhabit a subterranean world of crime, illicit deals, marketing in banned substances and flesh. Some run drugs, some run guns, others traffic in their own bodies. Few have any adults in their lives who are able to function as parents or guardians. For many of these youths, the grown-ups of their world have disappeared through choice or through misfortune, swept away by drugs, by criminals, by cops, or by the health hazards of poverty. Of the grown-ups who remain, few have little use for these neighborhood kids who roam the streets looking for trouble. The exception to the grown-ups who are indifferent are the hardened adults who prey on the youths by enlisting them as foot soldiers in dangerous and exploitative assignments.

The young people in this neighborhood band together in leagues of mutual protection. These are the street gangs that provide the youngsters with a sense of collective security as well as an opportunity for voicing some youthful bravado. The sense of security is as false as the bravado. Many of the children in this neighborhood will not see twenty with life and limb intact. Many of those who do will be hauled away for long stretches in prison, where they will learn even more effective ways of wreaking havoc on society.

Our science-fiction tale could show all this by documenting the tragic loss of child after child in this devastated neighborhood. Some would lose their futures quickly, through a flash of violence, a drug overdose, a criminal bust. Others would lose their futures gradually, through a steady deadening of expectations and loss of hope.

The real shock, though, comes when the camera steps back to place this neighborhood in a whole-earth perspective. We see the metropolitan area (including the leafy suburb) that flows into the neighborhood, the country that surrounds the city, and the world that surrounds the country. It turns out that this devastated neighborhood is not merely a pocket of despair in an otherwise thriving society. In all the world, wrecked neighborhoods flow together like seas that crash against a few well-guarded, frightened islands of affluence where children lethargically spend their youth on snacks and electronic entertainment. The metropolitan areas are surrounded by rural landscapes that are barren of young people because nothing is left there to hold them. As the camera scans the world, it reveals many versions of the same scene: a homogeneous global village with neither the elevated culture nor the friendly intimacy that was associated with this phrase in more hopeful times.

Back to the Present

I am not a science-fiction author, nor do I have aspirations to create fables or yarns of any sort. Happily for the average quality of fiction writing in the year that this book will be published, I shall not continue in this mode. But if this may be a small bit of good news for our culture, it is framed by some larger news that is far more serious and that is very bad indeed. Unfortunately for our society today, we do not need a science fiction account to render the circumstances that I have portrayed.Every condition and event from the "futuristic" fictional nightmare that I have just sketched can be found in quantity throughout the world today.Moreover, the prevalence of such circumstances is fast increasing. In fact, all such circumstances have grown in profusion for the past fifty years or more, in a trend that only can be described as steady acceleration.

Anyone who listens to the daily news has heard about conditions and events identical to the ones that I have just invented. We may perceive such events as aberrations, isolated misfortunes either confined to special populations or caused by unusual circumstances. There still may be a sliver of truth to this comforting sense of reassurance, but it diminishes with each passing year.

The truly bad news is that, in fact, all the news about the climate and prospects for youth development in our society is bad. As I shall show below, practically all the indicators of youth health and behavior have declined year by year for well over a generation. None has improved. The litany of decline is so well known that it is losing its ability to shock. We have become accustomed not only to the dreadful indicators themselves but also to their never-ending increase. As I recount the most recent facts and figures here, I am aware that they barely pack a punch anymore. Unfortunately, I also am sure that the data will be significantly worse by the time this statement reaches press.

Let us start with youth violence. Among teenagers living in the United States, homicide rates doubled in the decade from 1970 to 1980. After that, it doubled again in the next seven years; and by 1992 it had taken only five years to double again. "Today," reports the National Commission on Children, "more teenage boys in the United States die of gunshot wounds than of all natural causes combined." Girls, too, are joining in the mayhem, both as perpetrators and as victims of violence. Virtually every day now brings a newsstory such as the following:

A 13-year-old girl shot a cab driver to death to avoid paying a $6 fare, the police in West Palm Beach, Florida, said. The teenager was eerily calm during questioning, Sergeant John English said. "No tears, just cold," he said. "We're talking about a coldblooded, premeditated murder committed by a 13-year-old girl who shows no remorse. It's frightening."

I did not conduct extensive research to uncover this anecdote: I simply reached for the newspaper on the table next to me, confident that something along these lines would turn up. It did. Today, as I revise this section, I do the same, and I find the following:

Two children pulled a gun on a high school teacher in her classroom and stole nearly $400 collected for a class picnic. A 12-year-old who allegedly fired at a pursuer after the robber Monday was caught. A second child got away with most of the cash....The 12-year-old fired at the assistant principal before he was caught by police. A .357 Magnum was found in the bushes nearby.

(Now some more weeks have passed, and my manuscript is entering final production -- I have yet one more chance to recount the most recent news of youthful carnage. I do so sadly, with a sense that this will go on forever if we persist on our present path.) The date of this latest insert is Spetember 5, 1994. On page 6 of today'sNew York Times,the following story appears: "More sadness and disbelief in Chicago: Another eleven-year-old is accused of murder." The main subject of this story is a boy nicknamed "Frog" who has been arrested for beating an eighty-four-year-old woman with her cane, slashing her throat with a kitchen knife, binding her hands, and leaving her to die on her bathroom floor. The reason that the story's headline refers to "another" case is that earlier this week an eleven-year-old Chicago boy named Robert shot and killed a fourteen-year-old neighborhood girl. Robert's own life ended soon after that killing: according to police, he himself was executed by two teenage brothers in an act of vigilante justice.

But the catastrophes of this particular day are not confined to the urban streets of Chicago. Also on page 6 of the same edition we can read about a thirteen-year-old from High Bridge, New Jersey, who has just been accused of killing his longtime playmate, a "polite, shy, compliant" boy often. And it does not even stop there: according to police, two twelve-year-old boys from Wenatchee, Washington, have confessed to shooting a fifty-year-old migrant workereighteen timesin coldblooded sport. One final headline on the page announces what was perhaps the only accidental incident of the day; yet in context of the other killings, the news seems eerily prophetic: "Boy, 3, shot by brother, 5."

The current scourge of violence among the young is bad enough, but future trends look even worse. The most recent data show theyoungestgroup of teenagers to be the most violent the world has ever witnessed. That is, within theoverallincreasing rates of youth violence, by far the most dramatic increase is taking place among children in their preteens and adolescents in their early teens. For example, in a five-year period from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, murder among children ages fourteen to seventeen rose 124 percent. This does not bode well for the next few decades.

With growing frequency, children are killing -- and being killed -- at appallingly early ages. Among children between the ages of five and fourteen, murder now is the third leading cause of death in industrial countries. In the United States, a child dies of a gunshot wound every two hours. More children have been killed by guns in little over a decade than all the American troops that were killed during the Vietnam war -- though with far less public protest.

Any urban medical intern can bear witness to the carnage wreaked on those who have been on the receiving end of the terror. On weekend nights, hospital wards in many of our cities and towns resemble battlefield clinics. Doctors and nurses care for once-healthy youth who, if they survive at all, will bear crippling impairments for life. Young people who witness this mayhem also are deeply affected. Speaking to Congress in the spring of 1994, a fifteen-year-old girl proclaimed through her tears:

It is so bad that I am scared to leave my house in the daytime or evening. A friend of mine got shot and killed. He was standing right beside me when someone came up and shot him 17 times....I have realized that something tragic doesn't only have to happen to bad people. It can happen to you.

The vast majority of children who have been gunned down were shot by other youngsters. This grim fact in itself signifies still another grave problem. What happens to a young person's future once he has killed someone? (Orshe:girls are rapidly catching up to boys in their readiness to commit violence.) Or, for that matter, what happens to a young person who hashelpedto kill someone? Another disturbing present trend is the doubling ofjointly committedmurders among teenagers during the past five years. Because such systematic violence among the very young is a new phenomenon, we do not know much about the ultimate fates of those who participate in such terrible activities. What kinds of social relationships will these children be able to have? What kinds of self-identities will they construct for themselves? To what purposes will they dedicate their future lives?

Whether they find themselves on the giving or the receiving end of the terror, many children are now preoccupied by it. Their daily energies are focused on avoiding, dispensing, or protecting themselves against violence -- often through the same deadly means. The rapid rise in youth gangs is a response to this grim reality as well as a further feeder of it. A large portion of today's younger generation is growing up with the belief that they must either get a gun or fall victim to one. A fourteen-year-old from Washington, D.C., testifies:

Guns have been part of my life since I was 12 years old. That was when my friend Scooter was killed with a gun. Since then, four of my friends have been shot and killed on the streets. One of them was my friend Hank. I heard gun shots. Then, right after that, I saw Hank lying on the ground. He wasn't dead yet, but he was lying there, twitching. It was a terrible thing, terrible, to see someone you know, someone who used to make you laugh, lying there, dying right in front of you.

Homicidal violence is only one of the fatal dangers that children are turning to with ever greater frequency. Many young people who are not busy destroying others are doing it to themselves. Some are doing it indirectly through substance abuse. Others are doing it more directly and more purposefully than ever before.

Thirty years ago, our adolescent suicide rate was 3 per 100,000, already high by traditional global standards. Now it is 11 young people per 100,000, while adult rates have stayed pretty much the same. A 1993 survey found that 20 percent of high school students had made a plan to commit suicide and that half of these students had made an actual attempt. The study also reported that these percentages had doubledin just three years.After accidents, suicide is now the leading cause of youthful death in our society. It has maintained its grisly lead over homicide even as the latter races to catch up. There can be no plainer indication of youthful demoralization than suicide.

The less fatal indicators of youthful decline are just as discouraging. Each year over a million teenage girls throughout the United States become pregnant. A large and steadily rising number of the births resulting from these pregnancies take place outside of marriage. Largely because of teenage pregnancies, almostone-thirdof all babies born in the U.S. population at large have unmarried mothers. Many unwed teenage mothers receive a temporary emotional uplift from the natural delights of parenthood, and some manage to draw upon their extended family resources in order to raise their children responsibly. But generally the long-range consequences for both mother and baby are highly problematic. Indeed, in recent years some prominent social analysts have identified the rising numbers of unwed teenage births as one root cause of the societal disintegration that has threatened many of our communities.

Drug use among the young stabilized a few years ago, though at a dangerously high level. Some recent unpublished indicators suggest that some forms of drug use may be increasing again. As for other types of juvenile crime, they all have continued to rise without respite. I have noted the data on youth violence earlier. Teenage robberies, muggings, and vandalism also have grown by leaps and bounds during the past three decades. The number of young people serving prison time for criminal activity rises yearly with relentless predictability. Vast populations of teenagers today consider jail to be a dreary inevitability, something unavoidable that one adjusts to, almost like regular visits to the dentist. The average age of criminal offenders gets younger and younger with each passing year.

Then there are the quieter indicators of apathy and indolence among today's youth, seemingly less ominous in individual cases yet calamitous for society in the aggregate. Teachers everywhere complain of a host of behavioral problems among the students that they encounter today. At the time of this writing, compulsive teenage gambling is reaching epidemic proportions among many sectors of the population. Accompanying the gambling is a cluster of deviant social and personal behavior, including petty theft, heavy borrowing, habitual deceitfulness, and irregular sleeping hours.

Even apart from those who are caught up in gambling and other obsessions, many of today's young people are having great difficulty separating day from night. School counselors complain that this generation of youth has "sleep problems" of a magnitude rarely before seen. So many students are arriving late these days that high schools have arranged clinical sessions to treat chronic oversleepers. Colleges are having trouble filling first-period classes, and students complain when required courses are scheduled early in the day. Many professors refuse to plan morning meetings with students, since so few show up. I have heard freshman-year deans say that some students spend the greater part of their first college year sleeping until noon.

In general, our students are less literate, and far less mathematically competent, than students were a generation ago. Over a half million students a year drop out of our nation's high schools, usually with no good alternative in sight. A majority of our high school students cannot locate Greece on a world map, cannot compute the exact proportion of their spending money that goes for school lunches, and have never read a hardcover book that they were not forced to read.

And how do our young people spend their free time? During the week, the average U.S. child watches between four and five hours a day of television. This is during the school week, when there are only about six or seven waking hours available (aside from meals, bathing, dressing, and so on) for discretionary activities. On weekends and vacations, with more time on their hands, American children on the average watch TV betweenseven and nine hours per day.With this in mind, it may not seem surprising that childhood obesity rates have increased some 98 percent during the past fifteen years. "Children today are less physically fit than ever before in our history," according to one major national health organization.

None of these indicators of decline -- neither the illegal behavior, nor the educational failings, nor the wasted time and human potential -- is confined to young people living in disadvantaged conditions. Today's disaffected and demoralized youth are widely distributed in our affluent suburbs as well as in our impoverished "underclass" neighborhoods. I shall make the case throughout this book that, although the problem may have different manifestations in different economic conditions, it is fundamentally the same problem with the same source.

Parents and teachers in communities of all types say that children's problems are becoming steadily more serious as well as more difficult to correct. One fifty-year comparison of teachers' concerns, widely cited in the media as well as the Congressional Record, claimed that in 1940 teachers worried mostly about gum-chewing and other "disorderly" conduct among their students, whereas in 1990 teachers were worried about violence, drugs, and dishonesty. Because this comparison was not made in a systematic manner, I do not wholly trust the data, and so I do not formally cite it here. But a well-designed study of parents' and teachers' observations over time was conducted between 1976 and 1989 and published in November 1993. The results showed behavioral declines for children of all ages and both sexes during the study's thirteen-year period. In 1989, according to parents and teachers, children were far more likely to "destroy things belonging to others," to "hang around with others who get into trouble," to do poorly on their schoolwork, to be "underactive," "whining," "sullen," "stubborn," and "irritable." More children were lying and stealing; more were being held back a year at school; more were friendless; and more had chronic though minor physical problems such as frequent stomachaches. Fewer children were participating in sports or other healthy outdoor activities, and fewer had found any activity in life that truly engaged them, including their education.

The data that I have cited here pertain to the United States. To its credit, the U.S. federal government keeps good records of social indicators even though it has not been able to do much to stem the decline that these indicators reveal. But problems exist also in places where records are less well kept. The crisis that I discuss in this book is spread throughout the world today. We hear of the most vivid stories through the media: sport murders of children by other children in Britain, rampant drug use and prostitution among runaway youth in South America, drunken youth riots across Europe, skinhead gangs throughout Germany, an epidemic of teenage suicide in Japan, a rising tide of violence, theft, and gang membership everywhere. And, as in the United States, there are less dramatic stories as well -- stories that may be even more foreboding in their commonality. Young people in Europe are "mired in the mud," in the words of one British social scientist. They are dejected, they have given up; they are pursuing all the wrong goals; or they have no goals at all. There is a vacuum where there should be a tangible grasp of the present and a hopeful reach for the future.

Growing Up the Hard Way, Growing Up the Easy Way

Throughout the world today, young people grow up in a enormous range of conditions. Some young lives are spent "ducking the bullet," to borrow Milbrey McLaughlin's memorable phrase. These children risk their safety by walking down to the corner or home from school. They discover dread at an early age; violence is always on their minds. When asked to draw a picture for an art class at school or tell a story for an English class, a likely motif will be someone getting shot. Some of these children also have abusive parents, in which case their lives are as risky at home as when they are out on the streets. Some children have no functional parents at all. They have no one in their homes or their communities who takes the time, or has the ability, to guide them, to protect them, or to offer them advice, direction, solace, or nurturance. Some are seen solely as means of profit or pleasure rather than as children to be raised. Even their friendships turn out to be mean and exploitative.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, there are many children in the world today who have privileges that were once reserved for royalty. They are well fed, expensively clothed, and securely protected from harm. They possess their own bedrooms that overflow with playthings, and constant entertainment fills their lives. They have parents devoted to giving them the best of everything. Little is demanded of them beyond their own enjoyment of life. If they want something, it is theirs for the asking -- especially if they ask strenuously enough.

The extremes seem to indicate separate worlds of childhood that are destined never to intersect. The young people who grow up in these disparate conditions look as if they are on diverging tracks, some headed for disaster, others for lives of luxury and ease. At first glance, this looks like an old story, a tale of two societies, one underprivileged, the other overprivileged.

If this indeed were the entire story, it would be appalling enough. It would mean that a significant portion of our youth population has been consigned to a present that is certainly bleak and a future that is likely so; whereas others in their cohort are drowning in ease and excess privilege. Although not a new story, it is a sorry one, and it grows more unacceptable with each passing year. Modern communications have made it impossible to shut out images of children with little to show but angry and hopeless eyes.

Yet this stubborn plight is only part of our present predicament. The conditions for growing up in one place these days have a great deal to do with the conditions for growing up elsewhere. Economically, culturally, and informationally, the world is growing closer together at every moment. In an era when modern media have created an almost universal human awareness, children's separate worlds have joined together.

The problems of youth cannot be isolated in today's world. The conditions may be more severe -- in fact, literally more lethal -- in places where children are murdered daily than in places where children drift aimlessly through schools and shopping malls. I do not mean to blur this distinction nor to understate in any way the tribulations of our most disadvantaged children. Butallthe complications of growing up in today's world have debilitating effects on the minds and morals of the young. Further, the problems tend to merge into one another, as the secure spots of yesterday become threatened, from within and from without, by the same types of destructive youth behavior that have decimated our inner cities. The problems arise from the same cultural vacuum and feed one another as soon as children gain awareness of how others in their society live. It may be possible, for a while, to barricade suburban streets against outsiders, but there are no walls that can block out the state of the world in a modern society.

The glaring spectacles of underprivilege and overprivilege feed a similar cynicism in the minds of young people from every sector of society. For a society concerned about the character of its children (and any society that is not concerned about this is surely on its way to oblivion), it is untenable to abandon certain members of its younger generation while heaping unearned entitlements on others. What message does this impart to growing children about what it means to be a person, or what it means to belong to a community? About personal and social responsibility? About the values and ideals of their respected elders?

Nor are there any barricades that prevent a culture's beliefs and practices from shaping the growing minds of children everywhere.The mistaken beliefs that guide our childrearing practices are as prevalent in affluent communities as they are in poor neighborhoods. What is more, a diminution of standards and expectations for young people has occurred in every corner of the modern

Excerpted from Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools by William Damon
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Greater Expectations Nuturing Children's Natural Moral Growth

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