Published: Vancouver Sun, 21 Oct. 2000, Op-ed column
By DEBORAH JONES/Squamish, British Columbia
As a woman driver, I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, wanting neither the risk nor the company. But as a mom, occasionally when I see a vulnerable-looking youngster on the street, I stop.
That’s how, on a recent morning commute to work, I found myself with a carload of teenage girls, and why, ever since, I’ve been thinking about the parallel universe inhabited by too many teens. It’s a scary universe in which teenagers are increasingly learning about life from other teenagers, instead of adults.
I stopped my car because I figured the kids were going to a nearby school. I could perform a small favour and be free in minutes. Easy. I was likely thinking, “better me than some stranger,” meaning a dangerous stranger, not merely a strange mom. If my own teens hitchhiked -- which I hope they never do -- I’d want someone to give them a safe ride. In the back of my mind lingered recent reports of attempted child abductions, and a concern for feckless girls.
The kids piled in, in a fug of cigarette smoke. Once underway, they said they were going much father than I expected. I glanced at them, really not wanting them in my life for that long. Sixteen, max, I figured. “Aren’t you in school?” I asked. “I am,” allowed one. Hmmm. “So where are you going?” I manoeuvred around a parked truck. “To the hospital,” said another. Oh. Well. People should visit sick friends and relatives. I could put up with them. A while later I ventured, I hope nobody’s really sick.” “No, I’m having an abortion. They’re coming with me,” said one girl.
Several thousand kilometres away in St. John’s, some other teenagers were in hospital this month, too. A bunch of kids from Dover and Hare Bay, 300 kilometres northwest of the Newfoundland capital, had attended drinking parties that stretched over two days. Apparently they found a bottle of green liquid, thought it was moonshine, mixed it with pop and quaffed it. It turned out to be poison. Sixteen-year-old Chris Mongraine and 17-year-old Neil Oram died. About a dozen other teens were treated in hospital.”
“They both were just typical teenagers,” Jim Payne, manager of a Dover fish plant, said at the funeral for one of the boys. “They all like to dip into the stuff they’re not supposed to . . . It was a freak accident that could have happened anywhere.”
Typical. Freak. Could happen anywhere. You could plug those same homilies into almost any teen-related disaster.
I don’t buy the “kids these days are bad” line. I heard it a generation ago; my grandparents likely heard it in their time. It was as trite then as it is now. I’ve spent considerable time in schools, as a parent and as a reporter, and I know the vast majority of kids are great.
But I’m not Pollyannish. It’s clear, from the numbers, the news and casual observation, that the unfortunate minority of kids are in deep, deep trouble.
The common factor between my hitchhikers and the Newfoundland drinkers is the absence of responsible adults.
Was there not one adult in the life of the teenage girl hitchhiking her way to an abortion? Someone who, if advice about abstinence from sex or at least contraceptives failed, could at least ensure she didn’t stand on the road with her thumb out on her way for an abortion?
Was there not even one adult in Dover and Hare Bay aware that a bunch of teens were on a two-day drinking binge?
This week Statistics Canada reported that in 1997 some 42,161 Canadian girls between the ages 15 and 19 became pregnant; more than 50 per cent of them had abortions. The good news is that the number of pregnancies declined slightly since 1994, the record year. The bad news is that for every 100 teenage girls aged 15 to 19, more than four of them became pregnant.
The over-all crime rate among kids aged 12 to 17 has dropped, Statistics Canada also reports that the rate of youth violent crime increased 77 per cent over a decade. The good news is that less than five per cent of kids aged 12 to 17 were charged with a federal offence in 1997; the bad news is that’s nearly five in 100.
Statistics present one part of the story. Individual tales are another. Take, for example, the story of Reena Virk, killed after a beating by her peers in a Victoria park in 1997. Look at Jaimie Dufour, a Grade 12 student who left her school in Whistler because she was bullied, and whose parents this week launched a landmark lawsuit against the Howe Sound school district, alleging that school officials failed to protect her. Earlier this year Hamed Nastoh, 14, committed suicide after being bullied at a Surrey school.
Meanwhile, Azmi Jubran filed a human rights complaint with the B.C. human rights tribunal about the bullying he allegedly suffered at Handsworth school in North Vancouver. This week, there’s another sensational news story about teenagers, this time a pair of 19-year-olds, who pleaded guilty to extortion charges that factored in the suicide this spring of a teacher.
Unfortunately, none of this is new -- William Golding penned Lord of the Flies in 1954 -- but some observers warn of a dangerous change in the way we adults are raising kids, and caring for teens in particular.
We’ve heard, ad nauseum, concerns about the impact on children and on families of divorce, the demise of the extended family, of both parents working flat out to provide for their families. There are concerns about violence in movies and video games. All of these affect the lives of our youngsters. But Vancouver psychologist Gordon Neufeld believes there is something more at work here, what psychologists call kid culture.
“Children’s culture is a relatively new phenomenon in civilization, which some researchers say has been with us for 50 years,” said Neufeld.
The term refers to a world in which youngsters model their behaviour on each other, rather than by watching adults. Previous generations spent more time with their families, in community or religious groups or in the workplace. Today, teenagers mature in a kind of suspended childhood in which they associate largely with their peers in school and social activities.
“They’re taking their cues for what to do, how to be, how to dress, how to act, from each other,” said Neufeld, who calls this trend the “flat-lining of culture that basically spells the end ot society as we know it. Society is able to reproduce itself only when it can pass culture down from generation to generation.”
Neufeld urges adults to get more involved in the lives of youngsters. It’s good advice.
Personally, I’m going to make even more of an effort to spend time with my own kids, from baking cookies to playing board games. I fear that as we adults rip through our frenetically busy lives, we’re leaving too many youngsters on the side of the road.
As for the hitchhikers, I decided to deliver them to the hospital without comment. It was out of my way, and the girl having the abortion knew the detour made me late for a meeting. “Why did you take me all the way here?” she asked me as she got out of my car. Choked, the only answer I could offer was, “If you were my kid, I’d want somebody to give you a ride.”
Copyright Deborah Jones 2000
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