The whatever culture

What made you focus on troubled middle-class teens?

When the high school shootings took place, it almost seemed as if no one had ever thought about these things before. A major newsmagazine put the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre on the cover with the headline, "The Monsters Next Door." We were throwing up our hands and saying, "What is going on here? How can the kids next door do these horrible things?" One of the things I wanted to prove with the book is that we have a very good idea of how this can happen -- and the kids themselves can articulate that for us.

You talk about a state of the teenager's mind that you call "care-lessness." What do you mean by that?

"Care-lessness" is coming to a state where you really, truly don't care what happens to you -- you don't care whether you live or die. You don't care what happens to anybody else, either. I got that word from interviews with the kids. It came up again and again.

But isn't it characteristic for teens not to have a sense of mortality, to ignore the threat of death when they're doing dangerous things?

I'm skeptical of the notion that kids have an ingrown sense of invincibility. I think it's kind of true, but we lean on it too much. I think when you see a kid who is acting as if they have no sense of mortality, or believing themselves to be invincible, it's because they don't care. The kids themselves would bring out that distinction. "It wasn't just that I didn't think it could happen to me," they'd say. "It was that I wouldn't care if it did."

How do you justify the scale of your conclusions about the "crisis" of middle-class adolescence considering you spoke to a relatively small sample of teenagers?

I got to know these kids really well, and I interviewed them five or six times apiece. I developed a striking level of rapport with them. They come from all over the country (Florida, New York, California, Texas, etc.), and they are from all parts of the middle class. Some were quite affluent; some were children of police officers and department store clerks. When you have so many kids touching on the same themes again and again, you can safely say you're on to something.

There are a limited number of people you can get to know really well to do the kind of interviewing that I think produces the best work. That isn't the only strategy for learning: You can send out thousands of surveys to high school students, but their answers will be shallower and more structured. For example, there is an important annual survey that is done through the University of Michigan about drug use. It is cut and dried, and it doesn't really get into things like, How does it feel to get really wasted? Why do you [abuse drugs]? It's a much more distant kind of study. Of course, that type of research is very valuable. But that's not how you get to know what kids are really thinking about.

A major impetus for this book was that we do a lot of pontificating about what's wrong with kids, but the voices of the kids are missing. I feel quite pleased with the richness and complexity of the information that I got when I talked to kids.

You write that while our society assumes that teens with alcohol or drug problems must come from a lenient, overly indulgent family, the truth is the exact opposite.

There may be kids who decide to drink themselves into oblivion because people are too nice to them, but I haven't met them. I've talked to plenty of kids who get to that place in their life because people treat them badly.

It is not just the parental pressures to do well. It's growing up in a family where if you don't do well, you get thrown out of the house. And if you don't do better than everyone else in school, your parents tell you that you are a piece of crap. This combination of harshness and responsibility from adults has increased. The specific abnegation of responsibility for the child on the part of parents, schools, helping agencies -- that was a constant theme. I would argue that is new. On the level we experience it now, it's qualitatively worse than it used to be.

Do a lot of parents threaten to throw their kids out of the house?

An extraordinary number of kids in the book were thrown out of their home at least once. In addition, a study [by the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire] found that nearly one parent in five had threatened to throw a teenage child out of the house during the previous year. This seemed to be the default response of parents to their kids when things got really bad.

You note that the kids you spoke to were frustrated with social workers, therapists and counselors who kept emphasizing personal responsibility. You write, "Since it was generally assumed that people's difficulties in life were due to their own 'bad choices,' the job of the helping agencies was ... to offer them the tools to help themselves." In defense of the helping agencies, doesn't that response play into the ideas of developing self-sufficiency and empowerment?

Of course we want kids to ultimately become self-reliant and capable of charting their own path. But that doesn't mean you can set them loose and say "sink or swim." The "tools" that the treatment agencies give kids tend to be the moral exhortation to "look inside" themselves and "stop being a bad person," "make better choices." Those are not tools to negotiate the kinds of situations these kids face. In fact, the very notion that there is some tool that you can just give people and they can stand on their own two feet for the rest of their lives -- that is a very peculiar way of looking at human behavior and dealing with it as a society. You need social support and institutions that are there to help.

What are some better examples of "tools" that would actually help these troubled teens?

Effective and powerful education, so that they have some philosophical view of world challenges. Serious aftercare and follow-up programs, where they can get additional counseling after they come out of rehabilitation or an institution. We, as adults, have to help teens direct their own lives and become self-reliant. You can't kick them out of the nest and expect them to do that all by themselves. What I saw going on with the helping agencies mimicked what was going on in schools and family: Everyone was just shrugging their shoulders and looking away.

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