Kids and grown-ups

[koganbot]

I sent these comments to Mark, tangentially related to his Michael Jackson piece; are on a subject that's probably been studied a bit, historically and sociologically, but I don't know any of the studies.

Barrie wrote Peter Pan before the coinage of "teenager," though I don't know if he wrote before the phenomenon was taking place. I haven't read Jon Savage's book on teen. Hardy Boys novels in the 1930s, that were aimed at 11-year-olds more or less, did seem to assume that 16- and 17- and 18-year-olds mainly socialized with chums their own age. I assume that the growth of mass education at the high school level has something to do with this.

When did "young adult" fiction begin? Little Women was published in the late 1860s, Tom Sawyer in 1876, and Huckleberry Finn in 1884, and I assume that their target audience was youngsters, though I'm sure adults read them too. Actually, Wikipedia lists The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), Oliver Twist (1838), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), Great Expectations (1860), Alice in Wonderland (1865), Little Women (1868), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Heidi (1880), Treasure Island (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Kidnapped (1886), The Jungle Book (1894), and Moonfleet (1898) as early examples of the genre, though the genre hadn't been named yet (and I'd question whether either of the Dickens belongs; not sure about Monte Cristo, either). Wiki probably could have added, "Plus a lot of crap." [I read a shitload of G.A. Henty's boys adventure novels the year I was 10 and living in Rome and the nearest good English-language library was the one at the British consulate. I wonder if I were to read them now how they'd hold up. I enjoyed them or else I wouldn't have kept reading, and though I noticed and didn't like their racist and colonialist attitudes, I didn't think I should condemn the whole thing for coming from another time and having bad beliefs.]

Huck Finn is relevant here because among other things it's an example of a friendship between a man and a child, and Jim, the adult, is the only adult in the novel who doesn't patronize, exploit, or abuse Huck. (Moonfleet is interesting because, at least in the movie (I never read the book), that's what the child thinks it is - a friendship with a man he's been sent to stay with - and he never learns otherwise, though the movie makes it obvious from the get-go that the man is really the child's father.) I wonder how prevalent such friendships were back then, in literature or life. They seem nonexistent now, though maybe I'm wrong about that. In modern-day life, adult-child/adult-teen relationships have the adult in an official or quasi-official role: parent, older sibling, uncle or aunt, baby sitter, parents' boyfriend or girfriend, friends' parent, guardian, teacher, coach, counselor, therapist, social service worker, social service volunteer (in something like the Big Brother and Big Sister programs), pimp, supervisor. At a halfway house I know of, teens are assigned adult mentors. There may be a class difference here as well. High school dropouts are likely to get jobs (some potentially illicit, e.g. drugs), and the job is where teens and adults might hang together as more or less equals. And the burnouts/sk8ers who stay in school are nonetheless much less likely than the preps and jocks to center their extracurricular activities around the school, so they're more likely to get jobs or to hang out and party in situations that involve adults.

But anyhow, a straight-up adult-youngster friendship with no "official" role for the adult will seem weird, because it's rare (or at least it's officially rare). Outsiders may immediately assume that something sexual or otherwise illicit must be going on, which sometimes may be true, but why should it be the first thing one thinks of? The thing is, if a youngster is getting abused or exploited in a friendship the youngster can get out of it more easily than if the youngster is getting abused or exploited by an adult who's in an "official" role. And conversely, if the youngster is getting abused or exploited or otherwise neglected or failed by his or her primary caregivers, an adult friend may be more willing to listen and tell the child not to put up with the abuse, or anyway may seem more approachable, than one in an "official" role. Or maybe the kid simply wants another adult perspective from what he or she is getting at home. And the adult friend may give wiser counsel or be more inclined to counsel the youngster how to take effective action than a friend the youngster's own age. (Well, this is all hypothetical. It's not like there have been studies, or anyone has collected statistics.)

My experience is that kids and teens tend to find adults boring when the adults are doing grown-up things with other adults (as opposed to interacting with the kids in kid-related stuff such as sports or bedtime stories).

Actually, to contradict slightly what I said above, when I was in my late teens in the early '70s I actually did know a couple of people my age who had friendships with an adult or two, sometimes with sex involved, and I've met a few people subsequently who told me that back when they were teens they'd had adult friends and sometimes sexual relations with them.

When I was fourteen or so there was a math teacher at my high school who invented a warfare board game - he created massive boards for it - and some of us would play the game after school, the players including college students and adults as well as teens. (He called the game Crisis but we nicknamed it Grunge, I have no idea why.)

Ever since my 20s, through being in bands and putting out a zine, I met a few kids in their mid teens, and corresponded with several more, though I wouldn't say any of that turned into friendships. Jessica and Moggy were in their late teens when I first "met" them via ilX and poptimists.

Obviously, Michael Jackson's fame and $$$ made his relationships with the youngsters he knew (and with everyone else) out of the ordinary.

My gut feeling is that Jackson was guilty at least of fondling, but that feeling is based on prejudice not on knowledge, and I'm not proud of the feeling.

Is the concept "teenager" a good one?

When are adults and youngsters in situations where they're allowed to be equals? Should they be?

I'm friends with an Orthodox Jew who says that religious services are all ages and kids wander in and out, whereas the Reform Jews will shunt youngsters off into separate instruction. He thinks the Orthodox way is better, has more of a sense that everyone's involved in the same community.

Where the family unit breaks down seriously or the kids seem unsupervised, my guess is that ad hoc family-type solutions sometimes arise, kids staying a lot with neighbors, etc. (or with street gangs).

I wonder what other cultures do.

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I've been in various forms of online fandom since I was 16-17, and mostly gravitated toward making friends who were older than me - it was the only way I could, for all the reasons you listed, and I didn't entirely fit in with my peer age group. It's about 50/50 now, and I do still know quite a few teens (as well as people I met when they were in HS and are now in their 20s). IME a shared geeky interest tends to override all in terms of online social interaction.

[koganbot]

I remember that back in the day (summer of 1987, to be exact) I called the postpunk indie and fanzine world "a lonely hearts club," rather too derogatorily - actually what I said was that it was half lonely hearts club, half explorers club. I was definitely a part of the club, though I was refusing to align my tastes with the club.

I knew nothing about "fandom" (still barely know anything 'cause I know it will take time to explore and I haven't felt I had it), though actually it was probably under my nose and I didn't see it as soon as I discovered Factsheet Five: I assume there's a line of descent from sf zines to fandom, though maybe I'm wrong. (I'm assuming that "sf zines" were mostly a male thing and "fandom" mostly a female.) Mike Gunderloy of Factsheet Five had started with an sf zine. Probably sf zines are in the ancestry of a lot of things. A ding ding ding bell-going-off moment occurred on freakytigger's bertha da rockcrit thread when dubdobdee discovered that Paul Williams, founder of original '60s rock mag Crawdaddy, had had an sf zine when he was fourteen. Metal Mike Saunders (two years older than me) began publishing his rock criticism when he was 16 or so (he coined the genre term "heavy metal" when he was 18); Jon Tiven (a year younger than me) had his own mag and was publishing in national magazines around age 14 or so; he and I were in the same Sociology Of Literature And Art course in fall semester of our freshman year (though we never really knew each other) in 1973. I knew I was smarter than he was but it still didn't occur to me to start my own magazine or try to get into any of the national mags. I tried New York in 1973 and again in 1974 but I ended up back at school and so the time I finally stuck in New York was after I graduated in 1977. My guess is that I wasn't ready to tangle with adults until then, when I was 23. And didn't convince myself until 1986 that I was and always had been a critic.

My guess is that if Taylor Swift hadn't been a 16-year-old outcast kid with a record contract who had a MySpace page in 2006 she'd have been a 16-year-old outcast kid without a record contract who had a MySpace page in 2006.

In WMS #9 in the mid '90s I got three high-school seniors to write out social maps of their high schools. One was the daughter of a friend; the other two (Sarah Manvel and Liz Armstrong) I found (Sarah) or was found by (Liz) through the zine network.

So there's something happening through zines and fandom and now messageboards etc. that's compensating for what the overall culture doesn't seem to know how to do: to stop the oversegregation of teenagers. (If my hypothesis is right, that there is such segregation.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

What-calls-itself-Fandom was zine culture and an offshoot of SF in the early 80s, yes - the prototypical canon was original-series Star Trek. Japanese doujinshi (fan comic) fandom started independently at around the same time, first with parodies and gag takes then romance/erotica, centred around the popular boys' manga series of the day. Girls' manga is a thriving market in Japan and now here but the core of Fandom has always been "boy" stuff (in a grosso modo way, it's mostly girls and women seeking or attracted by alternatives to mainstream female/het/romantic narratives). Western media fandom moved to the internet at around the same time everyone/thing else did, but J-fandom remains in great part print-based.

If Star Trek was the Elvis of Fandom then Harry Potter was the Michael Jackson. Given which it ought to be possible to calculate... something, I guess. XD

I don't think the overall culture thinks teenagers are oversegregated or is interested in stopping them from being so. I don't know if most teens prize the ability to hold one's own with adults on the adult sphere's terms, but I did (not in a street gang way... or maybe it is the same thing). I do admire the kids who were self-publishing at 14 or whatnot; I didn't believe I was capable of that degree of organization until I was in my mid-20s. I was building my own websites, blogging, and participating in discussions, but I didn't try to run anything. OTOH my sister (who has a degree of drive and discipline I don't) ran a large-scale Harry Potter roleplaying site for her peers for about a year, when she was 13. She's currently the chief wiki editor and contributor for her favorite band.

[koganbot]

I basically had no idea fandom existed until dubdobdee analyzed it - among several thousand other things - in The RISE and SPRAWL of HORRIBLE NOISE (and Part Two). I really am clueless.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

That wiki list conflates a lot of different types of youth-lit, obviously: the dumas is interesting, because it fits more into a category of book which was written for grown-ups but became "children's classics" (cf pilgrim's progress; gulliver); my guess is that the versions of dumas that became books-for-kids would have been shortened and simplified; this was a standard practice in 19th-century publishing (and actually a pretty good idea was has gone out of fashion rather; it will happens a little with classics that have gone out of copyright)

the "idea of teen" probably emerges with rousseau's "emile", and later goethe's "young werther" (real title: young emo) -- the term juvenile delinquent dates back to the 1810s, and savage dates the phenom of "what to do with our mardy youth", as a newspaper editorial discussion point, to round the 1870s -- the word "teens", as one writers' shorthand for urban gangs, to the 1890s

i'd forgotten there's a section on p.pan in savage's book, so am glad you brought it up!!

[koganbot]

They definitely were still shortening books when I was a kid, though what I remember was their shortening young adult books into picture books. There was a picture-book version of The Black Stallion that I thought was terrible, being outraged at their eliminating all the interesting parts of the text (I'd read the original, basically by age seven or eight being able to read everything). As I recall, the movie, which came out when I was an adult, was as bad as the picture book. I couldn't imagine how anyone could engage it even as a movie. Seemed all sepia-toned and static. But I was probably also disconcerted that Alec Ramsey seemed like a little boy, whereas when I'd read the book at age eight he'd been older than me, lithe and intense (as my mind pictured him).