IN THE 1930's TEENS WORRIED ADULTS
by
gulping goldfish. Now it's worries of adolescent sex and drugs that keep parents awake at night. Are teens really growing up so much faster now? Some excerpts from our coverage over the years:
Most baffling of man's seven ages is adolescence. A few years ago a commission of the Progressive Education Association undertook to find out what makes adolescents tick.
From Betty, Paul, Mary, Joe
Feb. 3, 1941
Neither war, rationing, nor the advent of the atomic age had altered U.S. teenagers' preoccupation with malted milk, two-hour telephone calls and jukebox music. All had kept right on jiggling. But with draft boards apparently locked up for good, and the bubble-gum market bullish, teen-agers were now devoting more time to the complicated business of acting their age.
From Reeny Season
Mar. 31, 1947
In the continuing war between science and religion, the issue last week was sex. From Science's corner, Anthropologist George Peter Murdock of Yale threw out the challenge.... Murdock saw five advantages in encouraging the young folks (with 'social control') to let their glands be their guides.
From Sex Before Marriage
Feb. 13, 1950
During the past year, authorities have become aware of a tremendous and frightening spread of narcotic addiction among teenagers. In one New York court alone, during 1949, there were 41 narcotics arrests of youths between 16 and 18; in 1950 the figure jumped to 161. And there is no telling how many others are using narcotics.
From "High & Light"
Feb. 26, 1951
Teen-agers laugh at parents' fears that rock 'n' roll is a menace to morals. They regard it merely as a 'revved-up version of the Charleston or Lindy hop.'
From Bobby-Soxers' Gallup
Aug. 13, 1956
Worldly, interesting, informed and even intellectual when barely out of childhood, young kids all over the U.S. are pulling down the entry age to teendom.
From "On the Fringe of a Golden Era"
Jan. 29, 1965
Even some of the teen-agers themselves, especially those in college, are uneasy about their almost unlimited new sexual license.
From Teen-Age Sex: Letting the Pendulum Swing
Aug. 21, 1972
Each year more than a million American teenagers will become pregnant, four out of five of them unmarried. Together they represent a distressing flaw in the social fabric of America.
From Children Having Children
By Claudia Wallis
Dec. 9, 1985
What should the boomers tell their children about marijuana? Should the parents be candid about their own pot use when young?.
From Kids & Pot
By Lance Morrow
Dec. 09, 1996
Teachers, like parents, have always faced the tension between roots and wings: how to keep kids safe and grounded; how to let them stretch and fly. But after so many shocking headlines, the adults are edgy and tempted to try to stamp out teenage rebellion and cruelty and popularity contests altogether.
From A Week In The Life Of A High School
By Nancy Gibbs
Oct. 25, 1999
Being a teenager these days is as effortless as being a Renaissance Man during the Renaissance. These kids have no idea how hard it is living in an era that has outgrown grownups. They just... I dunno. Forget it. Whatever.
From Power Children
By Mark Katz
Nov. 15, 1999
Ecstasy use is growing. Eight percent of U.S. high school seniors say they have tried it at least once, up from 5.8% in 1997; teen use of most other drugs declined in the late '90s.
From The Lure Of Ecstasy
By John Cloud
Jun. 5, 2000
It seems as if everywhere you turn these days--outside schools, on soccer fields, at the mall--there are more and more elementary schoolgirls whose bodies look like they belong in high school and more and more middle schoolers who look like college coeds
From Teens Before Their Time
By Michael D. Lemonick
Oct. 30, 2000
Perhaps the most pressing question about Worth the Wait is the one that has dogged the abstinence movement from the start: Does it work? Though a major federal evaluation of 11 programs is due out early next year, no study has yet confirmed the merits of the just-say-no approach.
From An Rx For Teen Sex
By Jodie Morse
Oct. 7, 2002
Half the students age 10 to 24 questioned in a 1999 study by the Centers for Disease Control said they had consumed alcohol in the preceding month.
From How To Manage Teen Drinking (The Smart Way)
By Jeffrey Kluger
Jan. 13, 2003
How did a risque item popularized as a tool of seduction by Monica Lewinsky become the de rigueur fashion for eighth-and ninth-graders?... There's nothing skimpy about what girls ages 13 to 17 spent on thongs last year: $152 million, or 40% of their overall spending on underpants. Do their mothers know?
From The Thing About Thongs
By Claudia Wallis
Oct. 6, 2003
Now that MRI studies have cracked open a window on the developing brain, researchers are looking at how the newly detected physiological changes might account for the adolescent behaviors so familiar to parents: emotional outbursts, reckless risk taking and rule breaking, and the impassioned pursuit of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.
From What Makes Teens Tick
By Claudia Wallis and Kristina Dell
May 10, 2004
Photos and Graphics
By almost any important measure, the report was bursting with good news: teen birthrates are at record lows; teen crime rates are plummeting; kids are swearing off cigarettes (the smoking rate for high school seniors is the lowest it has been in 29 years), staying in school (87% of young Americans now earn high school diplomas) and getting much of the basic health care they need (immunization rates are high, for example, with 90% of kids getting vaccinated against hepatitis B and a record 81% against chicken pox).
From The Kids Are All Right
By Jeffrey Kluger
Jul. 26, 2004
In the past, people moved from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood, but today there is a new, intermediate phase along the way.
From The New World of Internships
By Lev Grossman
Jan. 16, 2005
For fun, teenagers drive to the outskirts of this largely white, working-class community and get wasted. Another favorite activity? Sex.
From A Snapshot of Teen Sex
By Claudia Wallis
Feb. 7, 2005
Nobody knows how many cutters are at large, but psychologists have been conducting surveys and gathering data from clinics, hospitals and private practices, and they are shocked by what they are finding. According to one study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, from 14% to 39% of adolescents engage in self-mutilative behavior.
From The Cruelest Cut
By Jeffrey Kluger
May 16, 2005
TIME set out to study what life at 13 is like in 2005, what has changed and what hasn't, what helps 13-year-olds and what haunts them--and where they see themselves headed. In a TIME poll of this age group, in which 501 were surveyed online, two-thirds said being a teenager is harder for them than it was for their parents.
From Being 13
By Nancy Gibbs
Aug. 8, 2005
The appearance of so many gay adolescents has, predictably, worried social conservatives, but it has also surprised gay activists, who for years did little to help the few teenagers who were coming out. Both sides sense high stakes.
From The Battle Over Gay Teens
By John Cloud
Oct. 10, 2005
Internships are changing. Once a summer-long tryout for hooked-up college juniors, internships are going younger, longer and more serious.
From The New World of Internships
By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
Sep. 21, 2006
Curfew has never been a popular term with teens. But lately the C-word has retailers and even law-enforcement officers looking for synonyms to describe the way many malls like the St. Louis Mills have started ejecting teens at 6 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays unless they're with a parent or guardian.
From Bye-Bye, Mall Rats
By Julie Rawe
Jun. 28, 2007
Home | 
