The
State of the Adolescent Nation
The following is a sad, but
powerful look at how statistics paint a picture of life as an adolescent.
Statistics, they say, should be taken with a grain of salt. However, my
experience has pretty much painted me the same picture as these statistics.
It has amazed me through the years how few people who work with at-risk
and high-risk youth are unaware of the effects these dynamics and statistics
create in the lives of our youth.
I'm always astonished at
how well some of our teens have survived, considering the chaos and drama
that are daily occurrences in many of their lives. Kids who end up in
foster care or group homes, for example, may have some dubious behavioral
history behind them. However, based on where many of them "live,"
it's impressive they are functional at all.
We have
to remember that for many of these youth, we might be some of the few
healthy and caring people they've ever met and/or spent time with. We
are inheriting years and years of abuse and neglect, and turning that
around is a slow process at best.
So let's
take a look at some of these depressing numbers, and then I hope we can
work together to come up with ways to help these disadvantaged youth have
a happier and healthier life.
Educational
Woes
In 1988, 80% of all academic
honors and scientific awards in the United States went to foreign students,
a mere fraction of the student population. Our nation ranks at the bottom
of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic.
Since 1960, SAT scores have
dropped 80 points.
National Assessment of Educational
Progress reports:
44% of high school graduates
could compute the change that would be received from $3.00 for two items
ordered from a lunch menu.
Five percent of high school
graduates could make their way through college-level literature.
Fifth graders--50% said they
read 4 minutes a day, 2 minutes a day for 30% of them and none at all
for 10%. The same group of kids watched 130 minutes of TV per day.
Education
in California Schools
In a recently published report,
here is how California public schools are doing compared to the rest of
the country:
1st in number of students
9th in teacher salaries
18th in collecting state and
local revenues per capita
37th in high school graduation
rate
41st in per pupil expenditures
47th in revenues for public
schools per $1000 personal income
47th in students per computer
50th in students per teacher
50th in students per principal
51st (including Wash. DC) in
students per guidance counselor
51st in students per librarian
Every
day in America:
2,658 public school students
are corporally punished.
17,152 public school students
are suspended.
2,789 high school students
drop out.
It's important at this point
to look into some of these. The mandatory school system as we know it
is actually only about 100 years old, and is pretty much an invention
of Western society. As we'll study more in the section on the Hero's Journey,
most cultures, even America a hundred years ago, could not allow their
young to spend all day at school as they were needed at home or business.
John Taylor Gatto, former New
York City and State Teacher of the Year, also feels that it has been unhealthy
to remove children from the family for so long. He raises an interesting
point about having children removed from the family's needs and values
6-7 hours a day for 12 years. An interesting statistic he pointed out
was that in Massachusetts, after 100 years of compulsory education, the
literacy rate is actually 6% less than the turn of the century.
His main point on that matter is that people used to gravitate to whatever
education they needed, as needed, and that forcing everyone to learn the
same amount at the same time is an impossible task. He raises many other
interesting points regarding the educational system, and I recommend his
book Dumbing Us Down very much.
Family
Problems
The current divorce rate is
about 50%; half of all new marriages fail.
In the early 1920’s, the divorce
rate was only about one-fourth of what it is today.
In 1993, 84 percent of single
divorced parents with custody were mothers...
One-third of all kids born
since 1980 will live in a step-family at one point.
Only 4% of U.S. families fit
the traditional dad works/mom stays home stereotype.
50% of all marriages today
are remarriages for at least one person. Of these, about 60 percent will
divorce.
By 1997, 55% of single mothers
and 61% of displaced homemakers were living at or below the poverty line.
Single mother endured a poverty rate three times as high as the national
rate, and the poverty rate among displaced homemakers actually rose in
the 1990's, even as it fell in the general population.
More than half of divorced
kids have never been inside their father’s new home, and 42 percent have
not seen their father in a year.
The U.S. is only 22nd in infant
mortality among industrialized nations. Children of color have more than
twice the infant mortality rate as do white babies.
In 1960, for instance, a single-parent
household was over five times more likely to mean a household with a divorced
parent than one with a never-married person. By 1993, the proportions
were roughly equal.
More than one-fifth of white
women, one-third of Hispanic women, and more than two-thirds of black
women who bear their first child, are husbandless. One third of all births
in 2001 are from unwed mothers.
Since 1960, there’s been more
than a 400% increase in illegitimate births.
The
Media
The average American household
has its television on 6.7 hours a day. The average number of minutes per
week that parents spend in meaningful conversation with their children
is 3.5.
By the time the average American
kid reaches age eighteen, he will have spent 22,000 hours watching television,
double the time he will have spent in classroom instruction and more than
any other activity than sleeping.
66% of American households
have a TV set on while they are eating dinner.
Advertising Age reported in
1992 that the average teenager who works part-time generates an income
of about $6000, most of it disposable.
An average kid in America spends
five or more hours a week seeing television commercials. By the time he
is 21, he will have seen one million commercials,
For every child born in America,
a television is made. Connoisseur magazine reported in 1990 that 250,000
children were born each day and that same number of TV sets were produced
each day.
By the age of 16, the average
American kid will have seen 200,000 acts of violence on TV. 33,000 of
those will have been acts of murder.
The number of stories on the
nightly news that concern crime, disaster, or war comprise 53.8% of the
broadcast. The percentage of air time given to public service announcements
is .7 percent.
Americans watch 250 billion
hours of TV annually. The number of videos rented daily is 6 million,
while the number of public library items checked out daily is 3 million.
By the time a kid graduates
high school, he will have spent more time watching TV than he ever spent
in school all together.
The average American kid will
spend more than two years of his entire life watching commercials.
Of all the sex portrayed on
television, 85% is among unmarried couples.
Crime
and Violence
In 1993, boys ages 15 to 19
were more than six times as likely to be murdered as were girls the same
age, and they were 20 times more likely to kill someone else.
Between 1960 and 1992, during
those years, rape increased by four times. Murder doubled, property crimes
triples, robbery quadrupled and aggravated assaults quintupled.
Sixty percent of rapists, 72
percent of adolescent murderers, and 70 percent of youngsters in state
reform institutions are products of single-parent homes.
The Children's Defense Fund
reports in its State of America's Children Yearbook 1994 that "between
1979 and 1991 almost 50,000 American children were killed by guns. More
American children die from firearms on the killing fields of America than
American soldiers died on the killing fields of Vietnam."
Nearly one million adolescents
between 12 and 19 are victims of violent crimes each year. Teens are twice
as likely to be assaulted at 20 year olds. Adolescent homicide rates are
the highest ever.
In a Harris poll, 60 percent
of teens said they could get a handgun; one-fifth claimed to be able to
do so within an hour, and more than a third said they could get one by
the end of the day.
According to a 1991 study by
the Centers for Disease Control, approximately one in twenty-five high
school students carries a gun.
Eighty-five percent of male
convicts are fatherless.
Since 1960, the teen suicide
rate has risen 200 percent.
Only 13% of juveniles who have
violated probation go to juvenile court as a result.
The increase in juvenile arrest
rates since 1981 has been greater for females than for males.
Only 14% of white juveniles
arrested for drugs were detained, while 40% of black youths were detained.
Each
Day In America
5,388 children are arrested
237 children are arrested for
violent crime
420 children are arrested for
drug abuse
13 children and youths under
20 die from firearms
6 children and youths under
20 commit suicide
11 children and youths under
20 are homicide victims
And
a few others...
The average college student
in 1991 consumed over 34 gallons of alcohol a year, or 430 million gallons
total. This is enough to fill 3500 Olympic sized swimming pools, roughly
one for each college or university in the country. Most intake is from
beer; just short of 4 billion cans per year. College students pay $5.5
billion out of pocket money a year on alcohol, which is more than they
spend on textbooks, and is more that the cost of running college libraries.
More college students in America will die of cirrhosis of the liver than
will ever get doctorates in Business, Management and Communication combined.
Over ninety percent of the
U.S. population now lives inside fifty urban aggregations.
The top consumer of "Gangsta
Rap" are white teen boys.
The
Results?
For those of us working with
at-risk and high-risk adolescents, as well as any other children affected
by the above dynamics, we certainly have our work cut out for us. Many
of the children we work with have been involved in these unhealthy situations
their whole life, which means we are trying to change years and years
of training in whatever time frame we've been given.
I have even more statistics,
but I sense the point has been made. What has been even more interesting
to me throughout the years is that almost all of these statistics are
led by America, and mimicked by some of our Western counterparts. Basically,
many of the destructive elements our children are dealing with have been
created by our modern society, much like many medical maladies we hear
about recently.
Very few other cultures through
other times had any of these types of statistics. Essentially, for example,
there has never been a 50% divorce rate for anyone, so we have no precedent
on how to handle that. We have the dubious honor of having more adolescent
violence, drug and alcohol usage, gang problems, teen pregnancy, crime,
etc., than anyone else on the planet. Kind of makes you think, doesn't
it?
Discussion on The State
of the Adolescent Nation is included in the Adolescent
Mind and Hero's
Journey workshops.
