The Plight of Young People Today
THE plight of young people? Isn’t it true that in most parts of the world young people have never had it better? Yes and No. Today’s young people may have more materially than previous generations, but they suffer unique pressures as well. Statistics on youthful crime, and suicide in developed countries, show that money is not buying happiness for today’s youth. Here are some examples—
Loss of Self-Esteem
Chicago researchers surveyed 1,331 teenagers in the 1960’s and a similar group in the late 1970’s and 1980. Their conclusion? “Over approximately an 18-year period the self-perceptions of American teen-agers apparently have become decidedly less positive.” The study describes today’s teenagers as being less secure than before, with lower ethical standards. About one fifth of them say that they are empty emotionally and confused most of the time, and that they would rather die than go on living.
Why the change? This letter from a 19-year-old illustrates one major reason: “I come from a broken home as many of the youths do in today’s society,” writes Robert. “The whole family was always fighting and bickering. Very little love, if any. Each individual going his own way. Very little parental guidance through the difficult stage of adolescence. It was very hard for me. With no discipline and no upbuilding remarks on my accomplishments. Instead criticism was given. It led me to feel unloved, rejected, very hurt and unhappy and not knowing why. I grew up as a vine on a picket fence. When I wandered off the fence, there was no one there to guide me back on the right course.” Robert’s story is all too common today.
Political disillusionment has also affected youths. “In my heart, I believe the world will not last another five or 10 years,” says a young street fighter from Amsterdam. “We have come to the stage where we refuse to take responsibility for a system we do not approve of.”
What is this creating in youth today? Basically, a sense of alienation—a feeling that nobody cares if they live or die. Add to this alienation a feeling that the world has no future, and the results can be frightening.
Suicide “Epidemic”
Perhaps the ultimate expression of alienation and loss of hope is suicide. Not surprisingly, the suicide rate among young people in many Western countries has been climbing steadily. “The number of children who threaten and attempt suicide has increased,” says Dr. Cynthia Pfeffer, a Cornell psychiatrist. “Studies in the nineteen-sixties indicated that no more than ten per cent of the children sent to outpatient clinics showed suicidal behavior. In a recent study I did, thirty-three per cent of the children had suicidal ideas.”
Suicide is a leading cause of death among American teenagers. In 1978, for example, 3,500 youths between 20 and 24 killed themselves, more than twice the number who did so 10 years earlier. Even these horrible numbers merely scratch the surface of youthful despair. “Suicide attempts outnumber actual suicides among young people by fifty to one,” reports Dr. Calvin Frederick of the National Institute of Mental Health.
Youthful Crime Wave
Not all alienated teenagers commit suicide. Some commit murder instead. “The most murderous group of Americans are in the 18-to-22 age group,” according to a recent report. “In 1979, says the FBI, they accounted for 25% of all murder arrests.” Similar accounts come from other lands—urban youth gangs in Brazil, classroom violence in Japan, juvenile delinquency in India.
The problem is not merely the number of crimes committed by youths today. The real problem is spiritual. As Scotland Yard chief Gilbert Kelland put it: “There is very little moral shame when they get caught . . . Morality has gone out of the window.”
Youngsters have always committed crimes. But usually they expressed remorse when caught. However, more and more of today’s troubled youth don’t seem to know that their crimes are wrong, nor do they care. How else do you explain why two Cleveland teenagers paid another youth $60 to murder their father “because he wouldn’t let us do anything we wanted to do, like smoke pot”? Leaving their father’s body on the floor of their home, they took his credit cards and paycheck and went on a 10-day spending spree.
No Sense of Values
The evidence that young people today are growing up with no real sense of values is not usually so dramatic. Most young people, after all, are not cold-blooded murderers. But even the ordinary youngsters in affluent suburban schools show disturbing changes from their counterparts of a generation ago. Writing of the new generation, a retired schoolteacher notes that in class discussions “quick, easy responses are given based on rationalizations and clichés that show little thought, little regard for human life . . . an unhealthy cynicism, distrust, intolerance of ideas, values and universals.”
How tragic to let a generation of young people grow up with few ideals, little sense of nobility, or even of right and wrong! And yet that is happening all over the world. “There is a sense among today’s undergraduates that they are passengers on a sinking ship, a Titanic if you will, called the United States or the world,” said a recent study by the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education. “Today’s fatalism fuels a spirit of justified hedonism [living for pleasure]. There is a growing belief among college students that, if they are doomed to ride on the Titanic, they ought at least to . . . go first class, for they assume there is nothing better.”
If you are a young person, do you feel that the older generation is too quick to point accusing fingers at you? After all, what reason do youth have to put faith in this system of things? Today’s youth have grown up in a generation of political scandal. Why should they seek to better a world that seems hopelessly corrupt? After a big dinner, youth in affluent countries can turn on the TV news and watch people starving in poor countries. They can listen to politicians who justify the expenditure of billions of dollars for weapons instead of food. Why should youth support a world order with such warped priorities? Why should they put faith in a world that seems more and more determined to blow itself up?
But suppose the world really could be changed? Suppose the threat of nuclear war could vanish, along with famine, sickness and political corruption. Wouldn’t life be far more meaningful in such a world? Impossible, you say? Certainly man’s record of self-government gives no reason to hope for such a world, but what if the change were made by another power? As a young person, would you be interested in that kind of world?
[Picture on page 4]
Suicide is a leading cause of death among American teenagers