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ANOTHER VIEW
Surveys show the ’70s are over and
kids have changed
EXTRA! EXTRA! The big news of the past decade in
America has been largely overlooked, and you’ll find it shocking. Young
people have become aggressively normal.
Violence, drug use and teen sex have declined. Kids
are becoming more conservative politically and socially. They want to
get married and have large families. And, get this, they adore their
parents. The Mood of American Youth Survey found that more than 80
percent of teen-agers report no family problems — up from about 40
percent a quarter-century ago. In another poll, two-thirds of daughters
said they would “give Mom an ‘A.’”
“In the history of polling, we’ve never seen tweens
and teens get along with their parents this well,” says William Strauss,
referring to kids born since 1982. Strauss is the author, with Neil
Howe, of “Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation.”
In an article in the latest issue of City Journal (www.city-journal.org),
published by the Manhattan Institute, Kay S. Hymowitz writes:
“Wave away the smoke of the Jackson family
circus, Paris Hilton and the antics of San Francisco, and you can
see how Americans have been self-correcting from a decades-long
experiment with ‘alternative values.’ Slowly, almost imperceptibly
during the 1990s, the culture began a lumbering, Titanic turn away
from the iceberg.” Adults are changing, but kids seem to have
changed most — and they may comprise the new “greatest generation,”
as Tom Brokaw called the World War II cohort. “What is emerging,”
writes Hymowitz, “is a vital, optimistic, family-centered,
entrepreneurial, and, yes, morally thoughtful citizenry.”
That’s trouble, I believe, for the Democratic
Party, at least in its current anchored-to-the-’60s version. It’s
possible that John Kerry will win in November because of the war in
Iraq (though the smart money is on George Bush), but the long-term
trend is clear. College freshmen who call themselves liberals
outnumbered conservatives by about three to one in 1971; now the
figures are roughly even. “Young voters are also more supportive of
President Bush than the public at large,” writes Hymowitz.
The changes in politics are rooted in changes in
values. Last year, the rate of teen pregnancy dropped to a record low.
Better birth control is not the sole explanation; the proportion of
teens who had intercourse fell from 56 percent in 1991 to 46 percent in
2001. Kids don’t want casual sex; they want families. Harris Interactive
reports that 91 percent plan to marry and, on average, they’d like three
children.
Already, Generation X (born between 1965 and 1979) is
more traditional than its parents. “The number of married-couple
families, after declining in the ’70s and ’80s,” writes Hymowitz, “rose
5.7 percent in the ’90s.” More brides are taking their husbands’ names,
and in 2000, the number of women in the workforce with infants dropped
for the first time in decades. A study by Yankelovich found that 89
percent of Gen Xers think modern parents let kids get away with too
much. Twice as many Gen-X mothers as baby boomer mothers (born
1946-1964) spent more than 12 hours a day “attending to child-rearing
and household responsibilities,” according to a new survey by Reach
Advisors, and roughly half of Gen-X fathers spent three to six hours
daily on such tasks, another big increase.
Meanwhile, student marijuana use, which rose sharply
in the 1990s, is on the decline, as is binge drinking. The juvenile
murder rate fell 70 percent between 1993 and 2001; burglary is down 66
percent. Schools are safer, too.
What’s going on here?
Hymowitz offers four explanations:
1) A “rewrite of the boomer years,” with young
people reacting critically to the world of sexual experimentation
and family breakup and “earnestly knitting up their unraveled
culture”;
2) The trauma of 9/11, which has made kids more patriotic and turned
them inward toward the comfort of family;
3) The information economy, which has given young people greater
faith in their own chances to succeed, especially through
self-reliance and entrepreneurship; and
4) Immigration, which has produced what she calls a “fervent work
ethic, which can raise the bar for slacker American kids, as any
higher schooler with more than three Asian students in his algebra
class can attest.”
Whatever the reasons, the change in young people and
their parents is very, very good news — which is precisely why so much
of the media is ignoring it.
James K. Glassman
8 July 2004
http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showfast.html?article=40424
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