When was teenager invented

For one thing, teenagers in big Eastern and Midwestern cities like New York and Chicago behave, on the whole, in a less specifically teenage manner than those in the rest of the country; they have less opportunity to take part in sports and to tinker with automobiles, and are more conservative in their dating habits.

For another, there is something artificial about the concept of the teenager; it would be more natural to divide the young into grammar-school students six through thirteen , high-school students fourteen through seventeen , and college students eighteen through twenty-one. Surely the thirteen-year-olds have more in common with the twelve-year-olds just below them in school than they have with the nineteen-year-olds in college, or even with the fourteen-year-olds just beginning high school.

But the statistics are mostly set up on a teenage basis, and since current usage leans that way, too, perhaps the main thing to be emphasized is the long, dark corridor between childhood and maturity.

Furthermore, most generalizations about teenage behavior are based on the results of polling—a complicated art, which has not been reduced to a science. These are rare, but lesser slips are not. There are close to 35,, families with TV sets. This was rather like omitting rice from a description of the Chinese diet, since listening to disc-jockey programs on the radio is one of the chief teenage stigmata.

Nor is the academic method of polling always foolproof. For almost twenty years, the Purdue Opinion Panel, which was founded, and is still directed, by Dr. Remmers, a professor of psychology and education at Purdue University, has been surveying teenage opinion. By now, it has established itself as the most authoritative academic group in the field. Yet a reading of a volume by Dr.

Remmers and a colleague named H. Not about the so-called processing of the material; the I. It is the material itself that makes one wonder. A glance down this lengthy list produces a feeling of dizziness. Although from No. And what seven-league boots of intellection could compass No. Another weakness of the academic mind in dealing with teenagers, as with other topics, is a tendency to substitute vocabulary for thought.

The eminent Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons has defined the three chief aspects of teenage culture as:. Compulsive independence of and antagonism to adult expectations and authority.

This involves recalcitrance to adult standards of responsibility. Practically anybody would agree with this summary, and practically anybody could have made it, though in less stately language: Teenagers are disobedient, group-minded, and unrealistic. These caveats having been registered, the time has come for field notes on teenage culture. Teenagers read a magazine called Mad, which ridicules the movies, television, advertising, and other aspects of mass culture.

Indeed, it is teenagers who have been mostly responsible for the fantastic success of the publication, which in a few years has built up a circulation of a million and now has half a dozen imitators, including Frenzy and Thimk.

But Mad itself has a formula. It speaks the same language, aesthetically and morally, as the media it satirizes; it is as tasteless as they are, and even more violent. So a Romanized barbarian might have rebelled against the decadence of Rome, and such, essentially, is the quality of teenage revolt today. Teenagers communicate extensively by telephone—an average of an hour a day, says Gilbert, and, among girls of sixteen and over, eighty minutes.

The Ohio State savants look suspiciously on the teenager who shies away from the instrument; perhaps he is insecure, or perhaps—even worse—he has no friends to call up. Children under twelve are the chief TV watchers. Teenagers now drink more than they did ten years ago. Matthew Chappell, of Hofstra College, reports that eighty-six per cent of all teenagers in Nassau County, on Long Island, drink, as opposed to sixty-four per cent in Racine, Wisconsin, and fifty-six per cent in Sedgwick County, Kansas.

Teenagers Go Steady more than they used to. Some observers see this trend as one more instance of the dominance of the American male by the American female, on the theory that Going Steady means the imposition of monogamy at an early age.

Still, since Going Steady obviously leads to a closer emotional relationship than miscellaneous dating, there is some reason here for parental concern, especially in the light of a survey of five thousand teenagers that Gilbert made in for This Week. The erosion of parental control has been so rapid that quite a few young adults whose dating was closely restricted while they were teenagers have kid brothers and sisters who enjoy almost complete freedom.

New York teenagers are, oddly enough, less sophisticated, or at least less advanced, in regard to sexual behavior than their country cousins. They average 1. Girls outside New York begin dating at fourteen, New York girls at fifteen. Teenagers are surprisingly ignorant of the Bible. Three-fourths of the Catholics did go to church, but their scores on the Bible test were not appreciably better. Teenagers are not much interested in political issues.

In , Gilbert found that only two out of every five college students eligible to vote planned to do so, and other investigations have shown that this lack of interest is even more pronounced among their immediate juniors. In , the Purdue Opinion Panel invited teenagers to express themselves, anonymously, on whatever problems were bothering them, and of two thousand-odd letters received, just one mentioned the atomic bomb.

Little more than half the electorate bothers to vote, even in important elections, and a survey that Professor Samuel A. The Stouffer survey also showed that a good part of the Bill of Rights is rejected by a high percentage of American adults.

What is puzzling—or would have been puzzling a generation ago—is that in teenagers these illiberal opinions do not appear to be connected with any strong belief in the capitalist status quo. Quite the contrary, as Gilbert sadly observes in his book:. The results. Assuming that those questioned were neither socialists nor anarchists—an assumption warranted by their views on civil liberties—one is inclined to conclude that American youth is as cynical in the fifties as it was idealistic in the thirties.

Conformism also plays some part. Teenagers—male—devote a good deal of their energy working on and driving hot-rod automobiles, but by no means all teenage males are hot-rodders; the expense alone precludes that. Some months ago, a Michigan hot-rodder, feeling that Gilbert had abused the term in one of his weekly columns, set him right:.

Do you know what a real Hot-Rodder is? A Hot-Rodder is a young, irresponsible hoodlum from the ages of 15 to I know differently. A Hot-Rodder is a hobbyist whose mind turns to automobiles. He is an auto enthusiast who. But while there are, of course, thousands of teenagers who are sufficiently well off or sufficiently resourceful, or both, to assemble and maintain a hot rod, probably more than half of the actual owners of such cars are elderly males of twenty-five or thirty.

Usually there is a constellation of five or six teenagers revolving, like planets, around each car, the older boys helping the owner with his endless tinkering, the younger ones running errands. The owner and his satellites all ride around together in the car, take their dates out in it, and collectively belong to one of the scores of hot-rod clubs that have grown up in the last half-dozen years—largely through the efforts of Petersen and of Wally Parks, who is the editor of Hot Rod and the president of the National Hot Rod Association.

The two men started the Association in , as a rehabilitation measure; hot-rodders were racing on the public highways, getting arrested and getting killed. The members of some of the clubs actually patrol the roads, looking for motorists in trouble.

It makes an impression. Teenagers are the most assiduous moviegoers in the population, and their tastes are taken seriously in Hollywood. They even have their own special kinds of films. A moral peculiarity of all these films is that it is never quite clear how the audience is supposed to feel about the dramatis personae, since everybody, admirable or despicable, behaves the same way—tough, sexy, jive-talking, and generally hopped up.

Looking back now, I realise how extraordinarily lucky I was to have been young at that moment: there was no Aids to worry about, the Magic Bus left London for India once a month, money was just money, not the all-consuming god it has now become, gun crime was non-existent, and places to live in the centre of London were easily affordable.

We were free to experiment with life, love and ideas and that, I believe, should be every teenager's right. Out went the whiny, free love Woodstock generation of the Sixties and in came Dirty Harry and Bodie and Doyle, characters who stamped all over people's rights in order to see justice done.

In keeping with the heroes of the time, teens desperately tried to cultivate beards and moustaches, but usually ended up with stupidly long sideburns. The hard-man image of the screen was, to a certain extent, countered by the advent of glam rock. Bowie was in his Ziggy Stardust phase, all feathercut hair and make-up. Marc Bolan wore mascara. The lead singer of Mud clad himself in a skin tight, one-piece, golden trouser suit. Followers of the hard-man screen cult were "lads".

Followers of glam rock were labelled, simply, "poofs". Which leads me on to another key characteristic of the Seventies. They were fantastically un-PC years. I remember warming lavatory seats for prefects at school. I remember being thrashed by a Wellington boot-wielding monk who was finding it hard to teach me respect. Seat belts were for wimps.

Filtered cigarettes too. And you were not a proper lad unless you smoked. As is the case in prison, cigarettes, for impoverished teens such as us, became currency. I once bought a stereo system off a chap at school for a packet of Number 6. We would resort to smoking anything that could be rolled up in a Rizla paper when the fags can't use that word any more had run out. I remember once smoking the contents of a spice rack apart from the peppercorns, of course with quite spectacular results.

Many pub conversations in the Seventies - about women, immigration, homosexuals and a host of other subjects - would today result in you having your collar felt by some diversity-trained copper. It was a decade devoted to machismo. It was to be crushed, culturally at least, by the advent of the New Romantics in the Eighties and of soppy films like Endless Love and The Blue Lagoon. The other overwhelming impression I had as a teen in the Seventies was just how awful the country was.

Those contemplating giving unions more power today should look back to the endless strikes of that decade, and to attempts by the Callaghan government to make up for lost productivity by squeezing the middle classes until they bled. Of course, I was not politically aware, but I do remember the poor quality of life, the absolute desperation of my parents and my friends' parents, as they tried to make ends meet. One of our friends, unable to afford a car any more, used to ride his horse the five miles to work.

It was a time for keeping your head down, for avoiding hard work if this meant moving into a more punitive tax bracket, or for leaving the country. Which is exactly what my parents did, so that they could afford to pay for our continuing education in England. Thanks for the memories, James Callaghan.

She says: The Eighties was the decade of the Sloane Ranger, and being a teenager then was all about conforming socially, sartorially and snogging-wise. All that consumed me was my despair over what a buttoned-up bluestocking I was. How mortifying it was, aged 16, never to have been kissed. I moved in circles of breathtaking privilege, where life was one long house party and black tie ball. Sloanes spend their lives in pedigreed packs, staying in the same skiing chalets and midge-ridden castles in Scotland, and they're all vaguely related and constantly guffawing about who is doing what to whom.

I didn't hail from any relevant clan, but because my parents are eccentric and oldfashioned, I was deemed off beam enough to fit in. And yet I always felt the chill of the outsider because I was so square, shy and self-consciously uncool. I knew the form - that at a houseparty you left a tip by the bed for the maid or the mother if the family had fallen on hard times, and I knew how to entertain the batty old great aunt before Sunday lunch.

But I was dying inside because I was always the good-value, well-behaved friend and never the sought-after, slutty girlfriend. Those fresh-faced, floppy-fringed, achingly effortless Etonians like David Cameron and rising star Nicholas Rowe the actor who played Young Sherlock Holmes were both friends of mine, yet didn't look on starchy old me as girlfriend material as I pranced about in my white winged-collar shirt, white lace tights, full taffeta skirt and black patent pumps.

They were far too busy smoking with, and snogging, leggy, hair-flicking thoroughbreds who wore strapless dresses from Monsoon and who never suffered anything as suburban as self-doubt. Jeri Walker JeriWB says:. Ken Dowell says:.

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February 18, at pm. Nice work in dovetailing historical trends into a narrative. February 22, at pm. Holistic Wayfarer says:. August 23, at pm. Daedalus Lex says:.

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Register now and explore The Archive. The Sketch 17 October The Sketch 18 September The Tatler 1 December This enthusiastic celebration of youth seems to fade from our newspaper pages as we roll into the next decade, the s. We begin to see much more stereotypical and familiar representations of the teenager as difficult, grouchy, and generally problematic.

West London Observer 3 March My son, who was fourteen a month ago, used to be reasonably obedient and straightforward.

He confided in me and we were best of friends. Daily Mirror 28 February He still needs that assurance. Daily Mirror 21 December How do I deal with a seventeen-year-old girl who seems content to let the pleasures of life pass her by? I feel now is the time when she should be having fun with people of her own age, not sitting by the fire with a book.