[Jennifer Burek Pierce] Sex, Brains, and Video Gam(BookFi org) pdf

  Sex, Brains, and Video Games

A Librarian’s Guide to Teens in the Twenty-fi rst Century

  

Sex, Brains,

and Video

Games

  

A Librarian’s Guide

to Teens in the

Twenty-first Century

  Jennifer Burek Pierce

  Chicago 2008 While extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of information

appearing in this book, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, on the

accuracy or reliability of the information, and does not assume and hereby disclaims

any liability to any person for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions in this publication. Composition by ALA Editions in Electra and Sans using InDesign 2 for a PC platform.

  

Printed on 50-pound white offset, a pH-neutral paper stock, and bound in 10-point

cover stock by McNaughton & Gunn.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American

National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed iences—P Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burek Pierce, Jennifer.

  Sex, brains, and video games : a librarian’s guide to teens in the twenty-fi rst century / Jennifer Burek Pierce. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8389-0951-5 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-8389-0951-5 (alk. paper) 1. Libraries and teenagers —United States. 2. Adolescence—United States.

  Z718.5.B87 2008 027.62'6--dc22 2007021926

Copyright © 2008 by the American Library Association. All rights reserved except

those which may be granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act

of 1976.

  ISBN-10: 0-8389-0951-5 Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1 s t

  For HS and MRB

  s C O N T E N T S t

  

  

  s A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S t

  In writing a first book, one learns how much the seemingly individual author depends on the support of others. Considerable thanks are due these friends and colleagues. Among them, Mary K. Chelton, my editor for a previous essay on adolescence, has proved a steadfast and gracious mentor in publish- ing and other scholarly endeavors. Thanks to her and to publisher Ed Kurdyla for permission to revisit the chapter on adolescent sexual and reproductive health information seeking, which Scarecrow Press published in early 2007. My gratitude to American

  Libraries editor and publisher Leonard Kniffel for

  many years of kind encouragement and advice, as well as his permission to include selected work first published in the magazine, is substantial. The patient and thoughtful encouragement of Laura Pelehach, my editor for this project, is likewise much appreciated, as is the attention of copy editor Cynthia Fostle. Beverly Goldberg and Andrew Ho provided feedback that helped me move forward with confidence, and Bethany Templeton’s untir- ing efforts in obtaining articles and corralling my errant citations were essential to completing this manuscript. Thanks, too, to Emily Pawley, who at Christmas 2005 told me to stir the mince pie filling and make a wish.

  s Introduction t

  s a friend and I planned a casual outdoor dinner one summer night, she offered the following head count: “We’ve got six adults, three kids, and possibly two aliens.” It’s not that she anticipated that the Mid-

A west might become a landing site for extraterrestrials

  “Aliens” was her label for the teens of the household, who were as likely to be lured away from home by a spontaneous call from friends or simply to avoid the gathering even without competing invitations as to join us for our traditional Memorial Day barbecue. It was said affectionately and with laughter, yet this characterization of teens reflected a certain amount of bewilderment—and tolerance—for the changes that were taking place in their lives. It implied questions like Who are these young people? It acknowledged the sometimes sudden and seemingly unpredictable changes in teens’ behavior. It suggested the difficulty of knowing what is going on in adolescents’ lives and minds. If this is how parents, present in their lives from the beginning, feel about adolescents, how are those of us who work in libraries, who may see teens only sporadically and for short periods, supposed to work effectively with them?

  This book seeks, perhaps ambitiously, to address these and other ques- tions about adolescent development based on contemporary research. It draws on the fact that many individuals are asking questions about adoles- cent development. While having the potential to inform library services to young adults, much of this research is itself relatively young and in formation, meaning that there are limits to the conclusions that can be drawn from it. This book acknowledges those limits and considers previ- ous norms of librarianship as they form a basis for contemporary services to young people. At root, then, this book explains what others who work with adolescents have learned from their professional activities, how that knowledge might revise our thinking about teens, and how to encourage new priorities and partnerships in youth services.

  The Purpose of Young Adult Services, Then and Now

  Library services to young adults should aspire to two fundamental objectives: to engage young people through meaningful and ap- pealing responses to their recreational and informational needs, and to simultaneously support good developmental outcomes. This dual pur- pose creates a balancing act for library professionals as they try to figure out what teens want while giving them what they need. These aims may appear straightforward, reflecting a common-sense approach to serving young people, and in fact, advocates of youth services have long espoused these aims. Think of Samuel S. Green’s description of youth services when he wrote, “I would also have in every library a friend of the young, whom they can consult freely when in want of assistance, and who, in ad- dition to the power of gaining their confidence, has knowledge and tact ₁ enough to render them real aid in making selections.” Yet what it means to carry out the work of, on the one hand, making the library a welcom- ing environment for teens, while on the other, helping to make them into reasonable and healthy adults, has varied considerably over time. A quick glance at the profession’s past offers examples of the ideas librarians have had about youth services that contrast starkly with our own.

  In the earliest years of the profession, librarians were concerned that their young patrons read too much and wanted the wrong sorts of books. The 1879 complaints of one Mary A. Bean against young people’s “craze for books” and “indiscriminate reading” were as laudable to her ₂ contemporaries as they are laughable to us. Bean’s concerns, now so far removed from the mainstream of professional librarianship as to seem nearly alien, were very much congruent with the thinking of her time. These were the early years not only of librarianship but also of psychol- ogy. It would be close to twenty-five years before the first full-length book on adolescent psychology would appear. Then, the author of Adolescence would become a prominent speaker at library and education conferences in the early twentieth century, cautioning librarians and teachers about the damage that could come about as the result of young people’s reading habits. To Bean and her contemporaries, adolescents were sometimes try- ing but not unsympathetic individuals who could be encouraged to like what was good for them by improving their taste from its youthful fixation on romances or adventure stories to an appreciation of the classics that showed real discernment. In other words, teens—who would not have been known by that name and instead were included in references to boys and girls—were unformed but educable, as long as they didn’t linger under the influence of the wrong sorts of books.

  Early youth services librarians in this country were not hostile to teens, only very much concerned with their well-being as reflected by their reading habits. There was dialogue about adolescent boys and girls and the ways their needs differed from those of younger children. Librar- ians strove to shape young minds in ways that would support the develop- ment of adult lives and careers, not unlike the way their contemporaries in Progressive Era reform worked to improve society by putting forward new ideas as well as bringing about actual changes in people’s living conditions. Despite these advances, pleasure in light reading remained largely suspect because of its apparent failure to contribute to enlightened thinking. There was the potential that frivolous or racy books would not only damage young people’s futures in this life but also damn them in the next. In 1895, George Cole warned librarians that

  

nowadays a child who can read will read; and if we do not lead

and direct his taste, the enemy, who is ever lying in wait for

poor, faltering humanity, will give the child abundant oppor-

tunity of the knowledge of evil; and this evil, whose knowledge

is death to the soul of every pure boy or girl, is crowding us at

₃ every corner of life.

  In the late nineteenth century, librarians working with young people seemed to bear an ominously weighty responsibility for their patrons’ fu- tures. Teens’ judgments were inadequate to the task of identifying their own recreational reading matter, and librarians became their protectors against books that threatened mind, body, and soul alike.

  Today, any librarian would say we now know better than Bean and Cole. We no longer worry that our books will corrupt young people or discourage them from seeking gainful employment by filling their heads with foolish thoughts. If teens read for pleasure, we’re delighted, whether they choose glossy magazines or a favorite title that we’ve enjoyed. We encourage them and protect their rights to a wide range of materials, as declared in documents as old as the 1953 Freedom to Read statement and as recent as the 2006 ALA letter opposing the Deleting Online Predators ₄ Act of 2006 (HR 5319, 109th Cong.).

  We’ve turned, over the years, from guarding teens’ tender minds to launching them into a brave new world of information and entertainment resources. This stance is intended to reflect respect for the young person’s growing autonomy as he or she wres- tles to create an independent and newly adult identity.

  The professional literature in our journals and magazines extends this theme in other directions. There are expressions of concern about incur- sions against young people’s rights to privacy: Should parents be able to review library records to see what books their child has borrowed? Does this change when fines or replacement fees are incurred? Can parents limit the materials to which their child has access, whether this involves books with content of which parents disapprove or R-rated DVDs? Is it a violation of professional ethics to allow parents, as at least a few librar- ies quietly do, to request special library cards that restrict their children to checking out material from the children’s collection? Should parents or guardians be involved in reference transactions? Many writers in the profession have argued that young people’s rights merit absolute defense; some have even suggested that it may be parents against whom teens need to be protected. The hypothetical situation of an abused young person try- ing to find help at the library is a specter that has been raised more than once. How could one argue with the idea of meeting young people on their own terms when the people most responsible for ensuring their well- being might harm them? These ideas about teens’ needs evoke a compel- ling image of the young person as independent, perhaps even abandoned by their traditional caregivers; lacking safe places and well-intentioned advisors; without resources . . . aside from what might be found at the public library. It’s more than a truism to say we’ve come a long way since the profession started; it is indisputably true, and it is time to evaluate the ways our professional actions serve teens’ needs and interests.

  The philosopher and poet George Santayana famously observed in his Life of Reason, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In librarianship, we credit ourselves with remembering in- formation history—times when people were denied access to materials thought to be sensitive or controversial and times when people were pro- hibited from using libraries because of their age, their national origin, their politics, or the color of their skin. In an effort not to repeat those dark times, we have articulated goals of providing services to all, including young people. We have statements of user rights, with names that echo our most foundational documents of national governance. We promote access to information and freedom to read in a Library Bill of Rights and similar statements supporting individual opportunities for access. There is training in serving the underserved. These and other activities show librarians’ commitment to connecting young people and ideas of many sorts and in many forms, of meeting obligations to young people that oth- ers have neglected.

  Yet this enthusiasm for equality of users and unfettered access to infor- mation overshadows other components of the profession’s past—chiefly, an awareness of the relevant expertise of other fields. When psychologist

  G. Stanley Hall published his two-volume work Adolescence in 1904, some ₅ have argued, he invented both adolescence and adolescent psychology.

  Librarians were among those who considered the advice of the first ado- lescent psychologist as they grappled with efforts to serve and to guide the young people who entered their facilities. As the twentieth century wore on, efforts to understand teens persisted. A writer for Publishers’ Weekly in 1929 observed, “Of recent years the adolescent girl has been much in the public eye. Her psychology, her behavior problems, her needs, all have ₆ been discussed at great length.” Librarians of that era were encouraged to follow these discussions. Together, the American discovery of adoles- cence and the reform impulses of the Progressive Era engaged librarians’ interests in finding ways to support young people’s development.

  Many ideas about youth services put forth by Progressive Era librar- ians, among whom even Bean and Cole could be numbered, would strike few of us as truly progressive. Yet as the Progressive Era unfolded, these librarians did something right in seeking out the ideas and advice of those whose research in the social and behavioral sciences would contribute to their ability to work effectively with young people. They understood that their own professional training could and should be supplemented by those who had other kinds of information about teens. They believed that their work with adolescents would be improved by seeking out ideas beyond the boundaries of their own field. Educators and psychologists were among the experts these professionals consulted, but these librarians also monitored prominent general-readership magazines that from time to time published commentaries about young people and books.

  It has been argued that providing library services in a dynamic con- temporary environment is most appropriately guided by the profession’s core values and enduring principles. While the profession’s past and present values are far from irrelevant, I argue that professional service to young adults is far more complex than the ideals we espouse as librarians. To work toward the ends of engaging youth and encouraging their well- being, librarians must have an informed understanding of adolescence. More than personal memories of that sometimes strange and awkward time, librarians’ sense of what it means to be an adolescent should derive from contemporary research that offers changing and even challenging perspectives about our young clientele. More than knowledge of cur- rent young adult titles, the latest teen enthusiasms, or even the library and information science research literature should inform a young adult librarian’s professional practice. The work of other disciplines is essential to understanding teens in the twenty-first century, and it can help us as we think about the issues involved in balancing our efforts to connect with teens and to support their transition into adult life.

  

W H O I S A Y O U N G A D U L T ?

A GLOSSARY

  

Toward the end of a recent ALA Conference panel for young

adult librarians, one practitioner brought up this question: Who is

the young adult? The problem, she observed, was that different

people seemed to describe entirely different age groups when

using the phrase librarians have adopted for patrons between

the ages of twelve and eighteen. What was a young adult librar-

ian to make of this confusion? she asked. How were young adult

librarians to know when someone talking about young adults

was actually talking about young adults? This librarian was cor-

rect in noticing that the people who are called young adults don’t

always belong to the group whom she intends to serve; further,

the young clientele of young adult departments may be given

different names as well.

  Those outside of library and information science (LIS) who

work with young people have different vocabularies that reflect

the history and norms of their respective fields. Many other dis- ciplines, including public health and psychology, refer to the group we call young adults as adolescents. Adolescence has been divided into three phases—early, middle, and late—to ac- knowledge the developmental differences between a thirteen- year-old and an eighteen-year-old. Still, there may indeed be instances when other fields use our preferred term or the co- hort that an individual writer describes includes teens as well as slightly older individuals; however, the surest assumption when someone outside the profession uses young adults to describe a group is that this person refers to individuals who are no lon- ger of middle school or high school age. To these and other re- searchers, young adults are eighteen and older; in other words, they are those who have rather recently gained legal status as adults in the United States. The combined newness of their sta- tus as adults and their age relative to others in the cohort makes them young adults.

  

Librarians’ choice of the term young adults came about in

1957 after years of using a variety of terms to talk about teens. The early journal literature of the field discusses services for “in- termediates” and “older boys and girls.” Although it has been contended that the term teenager came about as the result of ₇ marketing and advertising campaigns following World War II, variations on that phrase were in use as these early profession- als sought to work with teens. One occurrence was a 1922 sex education pamphlet that spoke directly to its audience of teens. Margaret Edwards, recognized as a key figure in the develop- ment of modern young adult services, disliked the word. One can hear both the newness of the expression and Edwards’s disdain for it: “‘Teen-agers,’ besides being a bit undignified, may sound patronizing or scornful and does not seem to include the more mature sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds.” Her assessment of the terminology for labeling her young clientele seemed resigned to its inadequacy: “Who are young adults? They are people in their ₈ teens for whom there is no adequate nomenclature.” Nonethe- less, the label has endured, and in recent years, its long-stand- ing meaning seems to be on the verge of changing, as tweens, or preteens, have become a market for young adult books.

  Professions Invested in Adolescence: Information Sources and Potential Partners

  Who are these people with interests in teens and their develop- mental outcomes? What information do they have that can help us to help teens? Researchers in a number of disciplines have sought to learn more about young adults as media consumers, computer users, health-care recipients, and even simply as growing and changing individ- uals. Similarly, educators share some of our concerns about young peo- ple’s literacy. These fields are identified and described briefly in order to offer an overview of information sources that may be useful to librarians. In some cases, practitioners in these fields may be potential partners for librarians who want to draw on content-area expertise to support outreach and other programming for young adults.

  Communication researchers are strongly interested in teens’ involve- ment with mass media. Their definition of mass media encompasses tele- vision and radio, magazines and newspapers, the World Wide Web and video games, and even movies, music, and blogs. These researchers use diverse methods to see what programs and pages attract teen attention, what teens make of the media, and what effects media consumption has on teens. The processes by which media create their effects are also of sig- nificant interest. Consequently, communication researchers know about what media teens turn to and what their brains make of the information available through all sorts of communication channels.

  Additionally, some communication researchers focus on interper- sonal communication, or the interactions that occur between two people or sometimes small clusters of individuals. These researchers can deter- mine patterns of expression and barriers to effective communication. As aspects of teens’ distinctive development become recognized, scholars of interpersonal communication have begun to consider the implications of cross-generational conversation and related issues.

  Health researchers may be in schools of medicine or public health, in departments of nursing or specialty fields. There are also federal, state, and municipal health departments that collect data and carry out programs to ensure the public’s well-being. Collectively, these researchers and practi- tioners produce a simply astounding body of literature each year. Among the massive number of publications, there are articles concerned with ensuring teens’ healthy development. Some of these materials address ba- sic health-care matters such as access to doctors and clinics, while others focus on the reproductive and risk-taking behaviors that tend to distin- guish teens from younger children. Based on behavioral assessments and other research, these studies identify the kinds of health information that young people need and also consider teens’ information-gathering prac- tices. This results in a rich body of literature that can enhance librarians’ efforts to offer teens meaningful and appropriate materials that address their developmental needs.

  Since G. Stanley Hall argued that adolescents were a distinctive population who were undergoing a sort of rebirth that resulted in emo- tional and intellectual turbulence while the processes of change worked themselves out, psychologists have been interested in teenagers. In the twenty-first century, researchers in adolescent psychology have consider- ably more tools at their disposal than did the field’s pioneers at the start of the twentieth century. One specialized research area is neuropsychology, which examines “the relation between brain and human cognitive, emo- ₉ tional, and behavioral function.” Some neuropsychologists use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other new technology to capture images of the brain that provide insights into which parts of the brain are active or changing at different times. Other kinds of studies are also contributing to a changed understanding of adolescence. Because much of this research is still new, researchers sometimes find themselves reporting observations that contradict previous thinking, but they are not yet able to provide specific recommendations that might guide our interactions with teens. Nonetheless, the recent and ongoing work in psychology significantly re- vises the theories of Piaget and other developmental psychologists whose models have been used to explain youth development.

  Education research, like the research undertaken in psychology, em- ploys a range of methods and comprises numerous special areas. Some work taking place includes scrutiny of newer genres, like graphic novels, as means of encouraging reluctant readers. Some researchers are consid- ering the effects of video games on young people’s cognition. These find- ings regarding literacy and learning are of potential use for librarians.

  These are some of the fields on which LIS practitioners can draw in their efforts to provide meaningful and appropriate services to young adults. The studies conducted in these areas alternately build on and re- vise what we know about young people. Given the nature of the revisions that are suggested by this research, though, understanding what is taking place outside the profession is increasingly important if we are to work to- ward ensuring the well-being and healthy development of the teens who visit our libraries. It has been observed that youth literature is a vast and interdisciplinary field; this turns out to be true of working with young readers as well.

  Understanding Adolescence, Here and Now

  There is increasing attention to youth development, and there are many efforts to follow the emerging understandings of young people, not just in academia but in the popular press as well. Magazine covers and news stories call attention to the ways that young people in the twenty-first century differ from previous generations, if not because of what these teens and tweens know and do, then because of what is newly known about them. A glance at newsstand offerings shows publications like Harper’s and even the New Yorker joining the conversation that oth- ers, including Newsweek and the Washington Post, have made a recur- ring feature in recent years. There are discussions of how the brain grows and changes, whether girls’ and boys’ brains harbor sex-linked differences, teens’ sleep patterns and alertness, and the social environments in which adolescents operate, including online activities carried out through social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. One 2006 New

  

Yorker cover showed a back-to-school-destined youngster, head filled not

  with the once-conventional subjects of reading, writing, and mathemat- ics, or even the only-just-finished summer vacation; instead, this young man’s brain was divided among adolescent preoccupations like Scarlett Johansson, AOL Instant Messenger, and manga, with a relatively small allocation for algebra lurking beneath the current, buzzy, electronic sub- jects. Inside, the magazine contained stories on the Mozart effect and in- fants’ acquisition of knowledge, plus cartoons on adolescent ennui. That same month Harper’s—best known as an intellectually left-leaning com- mentator on politics and current affairs—presented a print panel on the effects of video games on young minds. Occasionally the library literature provides a glimpse of these issues, too. It seems to be acknowledged every- where that young people form a distinct culture because of what happens in their heads.

  Librarians must attend to these conversations that are taking place in a range of venues. In fact, the diversification of the places where such information can be found—it is no longer only the province of scholarly journals that demand a technical vocabulary—has increased the acces- sibility of evolving ideas about adolescence. Information and ideas about young people’s development are crucial to developing services and pro- grams that are in tune not only with teens’ sense of their own needs but also with the findings of experts who are able, through the distance of time and objective research frameworks, to provide perspective on why teens behave in particular ways. The conclusions that can be drawn from skillful research are sure to change as time passes and more is learned through the replication and refinement of studies, but we should not wait for the definitive word before engaging these ideas. It is time for more than a few people in LIS to recognize the importance of such projects; it is time for the community of youth services practitioners to begin evaluat- ing the conclusions that scientists and other scholars are forming so that we can apply the latest knowledge to our own work with young people. In the end, doing so may mean raising our own questions about young adults in addition to considering others’ answers.

  This book examines the ways in which the perspectives of other fields that investigate the conditions and the outcomes of U.S. adolescence can speak to our aims of working with young adults in libraries. It strives, where appropriate, to use empirical research to answer questions about the nature of young adulthood. It calls attention to matters that should raise questions about our assumptions about teens and our resulting prac- tices. It points toward change, but identifying all the elements of that change is beyond its scope. Instead, it outlines key areas of interest, gives attention to leading scholars and their work, and recommends resources that librarians might enjoy and find informative. In all this, it suggests _NOTES further ways of thinking about the beings librarians call young adults.

  

1. Samuel S. Green, “Sensational Fiction in Public Libraries,” Library Journal 4

(1879): 345–355.

  2. Mary A. Bean, “Evil of Unlimited Freedom in the Use of Juvenile Fiction,” Library Journal 4 (1879): 343.

  3. George Watson Cole, “How Teachers Should Cooperate with Libraries,” Library Journal 20 (1895): 115.

  4. American Library Association, Freedom to Read statement, http://www.ala

.org/ala/oif/statementspols/ftrstatement/freedomreadstatement.htm; American

Library Association letter opposing the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006,

http://www.ala.org/ala/washoff/WOissues/techinttele/dopa/DOPA.htm.

  5. Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  

6. M. A. Ashley, “Sex O’clock in America,” Publishers’ Weekly, October 26, 1929,

2077.

  

7. Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York: Avon

Books, 1999).

  

8. Margaret A. Edwards, The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts (New York:

Hawthorn Books, 1974), 16.

  9. Neuropsychology, APA Journals (journal description), http://www.apa.org/ journals/neu/description.html. s C H A P T E R O N E

  Myths and the

American Teen

t

  umerous ideas about American adolescence prevail in the twenty-first century. The picture created by these images is not always clear, though. Teens are said to be so technologically adept that they are capable of

N

  electronic multitasking with ease, astonishingly pro- miscuous yet overprotected, overscheduled yet unprepared for intellectu- ally rigorous testing, and more. Their youthful virtues and vices receive, if not the sort of outcry that has arisen in the past when teens evinced values and behaviors that differed from their parents’ ideals, then certainly a fair amount of media attention. Not all contentions about youth cohere, nor do the portrayals always stand up to scrutiny. Some media outlets turn our attention to the extremes of youth culture, and others offer researchers’ more subtle perspectives on the same activities. Sometimes a phenom- enon will seem to be genuine, based on media depictions of real young people and supported by experts whose advice may speak to parents and teachers but less so to librarians. Yet it is equally important for librarians to understand and apply emerging research on adolescence in their service planning, collection management, and other work with teens. Our abili- ties to welcome young people into our facilities and to engage their inter- ests can be enhanced by other professionals’ information about teens.

  Most librarians would acknowledge that whether because of media reports or actual interactions, our views of adolescence are changing. We think of young people differently in part because teens think of themselves differently. Market researchers in the late twentieth century were among the first to observe this trend, to which they gave the acronym KGOY: Kids Getting Older Younger. This label reflected the idea that the toys that once sold to twelve- and thirteen-year-olds were sitting on store shelves. Preteens spurned Barbie as a baby doll and turned their at- tention and consumer power to things like cell phones and music. Some of our recent questions about what it means to be an adolescent in con- temporary U.S. society emerged from concerns about how to sell things to teens. However, researchers with less commercial interests also sought to understand the implications of a maturing and technologically inflected adolescence; they have been slower to enter the marketplace of ideas, less vociferous in contending for our attention.

  This book responds to shifting cultural ideas about adolescence by ex- ploring some of the contemporary research that likewise seeks to change the way adolescence is understood. This chapter highlights a few particu- lar claims that are promoted by the media and that will be examined fur- ther in the chapters to follow. These ideas might seem counterintuitive, yet recent research indicates their sense and their ability to help us make sense of the adolescents whom we try to work with in our libraries.

  MYTH 1

  Teenagers Are All But Adults

  News reports relay complaints about so-called helicopter parents who seem to hover over their adolescent children instead of al- lowing them to be independent. The idea that a young person who drives, works part-time, and is on the cusp of legal adulthood isn’t capable of making certain decisions independently strikes some commentators as incongruous. Yet research in multiple fields indicates (while not denying that parents can be overinvolved in teens’ lives) that every adolescent isn’t exactly an adult-in-waiting. New information about brain development and awareness of changing societal norms are two factors that have influ- enced researchers’ thinking about adolescent development.

  Of all the ways that ideas about adolescents are changing, perhaps most significant is the recognition that adolescence is in fact a time of profound change, intellectually and in other respects. Once psychologists believed that teens had acquired fundamental cognitive skills by the time they entered middle school. These days, psychological and sociological research raises the threshold at which young people transition to adult capabilities. New research has found more extensive brain development ongoing during the adolescent years than much prevailing psychological theory had suggested would be the case. One now often-cited idea is that the brain doesn’t fully mature until a person is in his or her midtwen- ties. There are individual variations, certainly, and these generalizations are not meant to imply that teens are incapable of reasoned behavior or thoughtfulness. Instead, many researchers think teens still benefit from active adult involvement in their lives: young people make increasingly challenging decisions while they are in the process of developing sound skills of reasoning and judgment. Professionals in multiple fields are giv- ing their attention to the implications of these findings.

  Although the research getting the most attention pertains to teens’ brains, sociological observers see the environment in which young people mature as more demanding, too. It also has been observed that “as young people adapt their lives to a more complex world, it becomes more dif- ficult to say at which point they have reached adulthood. There are more paths to be taken through life and few maps to guide youth on the in- creasingly complex transition to adulthood.” ¹ For multiple reasons, then, concepts of adolescence and maturity are becoming extended.

  

H E A L T H Y C O M M U N I T I E S ,

H E A L T H Y K I D S

When the Urban Library Council conference met at the Chicago

Public Library in early December 2005, keynote speaker Dr. Fel-

ton Earls of Harvard University advocated envisioning neighbor-

hoods as “small democracies to produce healthy environments

for . . . children to grow up in.” Doing so, he argued, was a step

toward ensuring that adolescents would experience fewer risks

to well-being as they mature.

  “If you want to understand something about human devel-

opment in urban environments, you have to come to Chicago,”

Earls said. His research, which shows a complex interaction be-

tween neighborhood environments and health, cautions against

stereotyping and easy generalizations. Earls and his research

team sought to explain apparently unrelated illness and mor-

tality rates, ultimately finding patterns related to the strength of

neighborhoods. He noted that socioeconomic factors alone did

not account for a “growing disparity” within the city and cited

instances of neighborhoods that were poor yet cohesive and

  

middle-class neighborhoods that were experiencing problems

related to lack of parental supervision of teens.

  Healthy neighborhoods possess a quality Earls refers to as

“collective efficacy,” meaning that residents work together for

their mutual well-being. “Libraries have to help us stabilize this

fragile system of how people become active in their communi-

ties,” he said. “But young people have to identify themselves as

citizens.” Producing healthy and successful adolescents, then,

means working with all members of a community.

  MYTH 2

  Teens Hate Their Parents

  When I worked as a young adult librarian, there was a par- enting resource book that routinely provoked laughter in the department. It was called I’m Not Mad, I Just Hate You. Although the book focuses on mother-daughter conflict, its title seemed emblematic of parent- adolescent conflict. Everyone recognized that irrational yet deeply emo- tional conflicts developed between parents—or authority figures gener- ally—and teens. Despite the sense of recognition that develops around the idea of difficult relationships with teens, most problems are not perva- sive and the vast majority of teens see their parents as supportive. Parents, in fact, typically enhance their teens’ abilities to cope with discomfort during adolescence.

  For example, a study about young people’s proneness to worrying found that when teens confided in their parents, they were less likely to report concerns about peer pressure and popularity. Additionally, teens who talked with their parents reported feeling less worried than those ₂ who turned to their peers. Elsewhere, surveys have found that teens do speak with their parents about issues like sexuality and regard them as a preferred source of information about these sensitive matters. Similarly, parents have been found to be very influential in the personal decisions teens make. Overall, statistics indicate that nearly 80 percent of teens be- lieve they have good relationships with their parents.

  A library director whom I have interviewed was adamant about the threats parents might pose to their children; she insisted on the need to protect children’s borrowing records and other library activities from parents who might not act in their children’s best interests. Recognizing that the situation she feared is not typical seems like an important step in understanding the lives of the young people we serve. Librarians need to consider how they might protect children at risk without assuming poten- tial malice in all parent-child relationships. Finding ways to encourage dialogue between teens and parents, instead of assuming disconnection, would reflect the types of efforts other professionals invested in young people’s development are making.

  MYTH 3

  Adolescents Lead Unhealthy Lives

  It’s not hard for a reasonable individual to suspect that adoles- cents’ health is jeopardized by multiple sources. With their still- developing abilities to make sound decisions, they may fail to negotiate difficult situations, such as peer pressure to experiment with illegal drugs or to be a passenger in an intoxicated driver’s car. News reporting on the serious problems of bulimia and anorexia abounds. Then there are the less dramatic matters, such as diets that increase young people’s risk of diabetes through poor food choices and weight management.

  In many respects, though, teens are in good health. Recently re- leased federal statistics show that teen pregnancy rates have dropped, for ₃ example. Additionally, adolescents die at lower rates from car accidents, suicide, and homicide than do their slightly older, newly adult peers. The same trend is true of drug use, alcohol consumption, and cigarette smok- ing. Current public health data acknowledge variations by sex, race, and ethnicity but show teens also tend to be more likely to have health insur- ₄ ance than those who have achieved status as legal adults. This research holds true for young people between the ages of twelve and seventeen, with sometimes dramatic differences between their health status and that ₅ of young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. While public health professionals continue to strive for gains in all age groups’ health and well-being, they find that at least in comparison to those who are only a few years older, teens seem healthier. Enhancing teens’ health remains an important goal.

  MYTH 4

  Teens Are More Technologically Savvy Than Adults

  Teens’ predilections for technological devices are well docu- mented, yet the question of how well they navigate electronic information remains. Another way of considering this matter is to ask what the benefits are of being able to manipulate equipment if the information it conveys is less than perfectly understood. Scholarly studies report that teens’ attention is fragmented by their efforts to manipulate multiple elec- tronic devices at the same time, that they have weaknesses when it comes to evaluating the materials they retrieve online, and that basic mistakes— like spelling—can prevent younger users from finding what they want on the Web. While teens may have a facility for text messaging and an incli- nation to multitask, there are real areas of weakness in their technology skills. Librarians’ skills and enthusiasm for understanding young people’s technological aptitudes are well suited to addressing teens’ weaknesses in managing the information they obtain electronically.

  MYTH 5

  

We Can Understand the Interests of Twenty-

First-Century Youth by Paying Attention to the

Entertainment Media Marketed toward Them

  A great deal of writing, past and present, supposes a common youth culture. From Disney and other animated films to MySpace, it is often assumed that young people consume certain media products that result in common understanding and shared cultural references and reflect enthusiasms that aren’t necessarily shared by adults. These assump- tions are true, up to a point. Researchers have come to recognize that the national and international popularity of works like the Harry Potter books or other top-selling media is the exception rather than the rule. There is increasing cause to doubt the extent of tweens’ and teens’ core entertain- ment interests.