Harris Hyman is a widower in his late fifties. His two youngest children (out of seven) are teenagers who live with him in Portland, Oregon.
Portland, Oregon. Last Monday night my youngest daughter was promoted from Hosford Middle School. The ceremony involved about 200 truly fine boys and girls, kids who are doing an amazing job of finding their way in an extremely difficult world. It is we who have made this world difficult, and with this difficult world around them, they put on their best clothes and gave a delightful presentation of hope for the future.
I write this after a year of reading about "Today's Youth" and "The Disintegration of the Family" and how everything is going to Hell. I write this in a city where we have collectively refused to support the education of our children. I write this in a jaded atmosphere where we must have more and more bizarre entertainment, masked as news and sociology. Out of this craziness, these young people sound an extraordinarily optimistic note.
My daughter is a very gregarious person, and a lot of her friends congregate at our house. Her friends are bright and friendly and voluble and tell me a lot about themselves, both in what they say and what they don't say. Well, what you hear about the kids and the families is true, more absolutely true than you may realize. However, it is nowhere near the whole truth. My daughter carefully pointed out that our impressions about youth come from stories about the outstanding ones: the best and the worst. The vast middle is unknown to the adult world. "You haven't a clue about us," she says.
Most of all, the kids are smart, street smart. They know a whole lot more about everything than we ever realize. They know who they are and who we are. They understand relationships with a depth that constantly surprises me. They understand ambiguity. The concept of the school advocating sexual abstinence at the same time it hands out condoms is found to be quite reasonable, not an incomprehensible mixed message. "We are always getting mixed messages", they say, able to process them with little trouble.
DRUGS! is a war cry among parents and teachers. It gives a sense of fear and anger and evil. Statistics describe our children as frenzied drug users. They show that most hard drug users have started on marijuana. These statistics are true, but incomplete. Look at the middle majority group. Most adolescents have sampled drugs, just as we all sampled alcohol and dope. Their drug use ranges from the presidential ("I tried it once but didn't inhale") to party use - part of a bowl every couple of weeks in company with peers - to serious flirtations with the drug culture.
The flirtations bring some to the "dope fiend" stage: totally stoned out and preoccupied with the drug culture, uninterested in food, family and school. They enjoy the trip immensely; it removes them from our messy world of hypocrisy and tension. Then after a couple of weeks or a couple of months or maybe a year, they come back. They do come back, almost all of them. They realize that our "real world" culture - bad as it is - is the place where they must live and work. The handful that don't become food for the news magazines.
The kids are also into the companion evil, sex. The statistics are probably biased toward the prudish; I believe that somewhat more adolescents are "sexually active" than the surveys indicate. But what does sexually active mean? The expression carries an aura of hedonism and promiscuity. Many kids have experimented with sex, or "slipped" into an incident. Then most of them stop and postpone sex. Some engage in a few more experiments with other partners before giving it up until they can begin a more serious and mature relationship, and a few have love affairs for a while. The kids have respect for their own sexuality, an almost frighteningly vast knowledge of human biology, a strong fear of STD's, and tend to be very, very careful. A few of them become careless or unlucky and a few of them have intentional "accidents". These children are on the outside with abortions (an ugly solution to an ugly problem) and early, difficult parenthood. Most of the rest stumble through their experiments with little help from their parents.
This attitude of cautious experimentation is true of boys as well as girls. Biology has teen-aged boys running at a far more intense sexual pace than girls, but they share the same world view and care about the girls as persons. This is because they are friends. Actual friendship between individuals of opposite sex used to be extremely rare; I grew up thinking of females as an alien species. Today's kids are amicable comrades. Boys and girls like and respect one another, and also dislike one another without regard to sex. This is a promise of a future of true equal opportunity and an end to objectification.
The young people have developed new strengths and wisdom but they're not perfect. As sharp and aware and verbal as they are, few read well and fewer write well. Still fewer have a well developed mathematical intuition. They have little sense of history. Their questioning everything can often be nihilistic. They are impatient and often out of touch with the rhythm of the world. They live on the edge and some of them slide over. But they do know where they are.
I realize that these impressions are anecdotal, picked up from casual discussion, but I am left with the undeniable feeling that we are not giving them what they deserve and need. The ones who venture to the edge and beyond and then come back need our "benign neglect," and the ones who cannot return need our serious help, not bumper stickers. They are all smart enough to give our sloganeering their benign neglect.
The valedictorian at another daughter's high school graduation made everyone uneasy with, "Some of you think that all we've learned in high school is sex, drugs alcohol and cars. Well we have. And we've also learned about friendship, money, power, caring, consideration, fear, anger, love, limitations and responsibility."
LISTEN CAREFULLY TO THIS YOUNG WOMAN!
©1995 Harris Hyman. Please contact Harris Hyman by email.
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