Robert Epstein, in an interview for Psychology Today, thinks teenagers are simultaneously too controlled and too free. They need to be with adults and treated like adults. Excerpts from the interview:
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. ....Psychology Today: Trashing Teens
.... We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense. ....
We have completely isolated young people from adults and created a peer culture. We stick them in school and keep them from working in any meaningful way, and if they do something wrong we put them in a pen with other "children." In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil. Many cultures do not even have a term for adolescence. ....
Teens in America are in touch with their peers on average 65 hours a week, compared to about four hours a week in preindustrial cultures. In this country, teens learn virtually everything they know from other teens, who are in turn highly influenced by certain aggressive industries. This makes no sense. Teens should be learning from the people they are about to become. When young people exit the education system and are dumped into the real world, which is not the world of Britney Spears, they have no idea what's going on and have to spend considerable time figuring it out. ....
Are you saying that teens should have more freedom?
No, they already have too much freedom—they are free to spend, to be disrespectful, to stay out all night, to have sex and take drugs. But they're not free to join the adult world, and that's what needs to change. ....
I just wanted to thank you for your article and to point out that I explore these issues in great detail in a new book called The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, which includes an extensive chapter on young people in the Bible. It also includes a foreword by renowned psychotherapist Albert Ellis, who calls it "one of the most revolutionary books I have ever read." Dr. Joyce Brothers calls it "profoundly important." If you're interested in teens, I hope you'll check it out. For further information, see: http://thecaseagainstadolescence.com.
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