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

[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).