The whatever culture

A new book says uncaring, punitive adults -- parents and professionals alike -- are responsible for an epidemic of checked-out, drug-taking middle-class teens.

By Corrie Pikul

Mar 1, 2005 | In his new book "The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence," Elliott Currie, an internationally recognized authority on youth and crime, says that irresponsible adults are responsible for the current epidemic of troubled, drug-addled teenagers. In an angry indictment of middle-class culture, Currie claims that punitive and uncaring parents, hands-off institutions and a societally pervasive "sink or swim" attitude are largely responsible for the problems suffered by many American teens. Woe is the teen that becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol, Currie says, because there is shockingly little support available.

Currie's conclusions are based on in-depth interviews with over four dozen white, middle-class young people who are, as he puts it, "suffering through a desperate period of their adolescence, or looking back at that period from the vantage point of a few months or a few years later." Many came from a separate study of teens in treatment for substance abuse that Currie conducted on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and others were students or former students of his. Currie feels that too much of our knowledge of adolescents come from adults, so in this book, he includes long, unedited passages in the teens' own words.

A professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine, Currie is also the author of "Crime and Punishment in America," a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Currie spoke with Salon by phone about parents who don't have time for their troubled kids, teachers who don't bother to help their floundering students, and teens who don't care about anything.

You write that troubled teens become jaded and often distrustful of adults and authority. How did you get these teens to open up to you?

I spent a lot of time developing a rapport with them. I've done a fair amount of that kind of work before -- I once worked with kids in a juvenile hall -- and over the years I have found that if you can convey that you really want to hear them out as opposed to preaching to them, then they open up.

Let's talk about this "crisis" of middle-class adolescence. Do teens have more problems today than they used to?

One of the things I try to argue in the book is that middle-class kids have always had it rougher than we nostalgically think. We've been in denial of the state of middle-class youth since back when I was a teenager in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There have always been more problems and pressures than we were willing to confront. Even scholarship has ignored them, has not tried to understand their problems and what causes them.

However, I do think there are several ways in which things have gotten worse: There are the school shootings, the emergence of white gangs as a suburban phenomenon (that existed when I was a kid, but not on a level they do today), and especially, the prevalence of drugs.

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