I entered my teens in the late 1950s. I can still remember my mother saying that her teens were the best years of her life. That was such depressing news to my ears. My early teens were mostly awful for me. Not objectively bad, and I never considered doing anything harsh or irreversible, but they were not happy days for sure. Fortunately, in my case, mother was dead wrong. Things got much better as soon as I entered college and only declined for a period when my drinking got out of control as I approached 40 years of age. On the whole, life has not been bad at all. Fortunately, I didn’t listen to my mother back then (mother is not always right) and simply believed that things would get better.

It also struck me that my teen cohort seemed okay. Among the neighborhood kids, many of whom faced less than bright futures, all seemed normal for the most part. I never heard of anyone needing therapy or medication for a behavioral issue or winding up in juvenile court. The girls didn’t get knocked up and the boys didn’t run off to the military to avoid their parental responsibilities or stay out of the slammer. My neighborhood was far from the American dream, only cold water flats and families struggling financially, but there was this patina of normality. Sure, there were hierarchies and we picked on one another but never to the point where suicide became the preferred option. Nor did I ever hear of any kid being sexually abused by a Priest, parent, or some adult figure. In fact, our parents didn’t seem to be worried about our well-being in the least. Most often what I would hear hear after school as a young kid was ‘get the hell out of the house and don’t come back until the street lights come on.’

Obviously, bad things happened as was evident by the revelation of widespread abuse of boys in the Catholoc Church that emerged a generation or two down the road. In my day, though, there was wall of denial and slence. Problems within families were not discussed nor displayed for public consumption, and certainly not litigated. The authorities gave parents wide leeway over how children were to be raised even when their methods were highly questionable. A whack to the backside was considered good discipline, no matter what that Doctor Spock said. Nor were there the legion of mandated reporters (professionals required to report suspected child abise) as there are today. As a result, the incidence of child abuse and neglect were manageable, if not ignored.

When I worked for the State Human Services agency at the start of my professional career, I saw the numbers of reported child abuse neglect and abuse explode as if the world were falling apart. In my day, teen problems were assigned to isolated delinquent children and bad seeds. Minor infractions in school or with the police often were dealt with informally, not with heavy-handed zero tolerance policies. When I almost got in trouble with the law, I just called my good friend whose dad was a cop. He took care of it for me. Now a teen might end up with a record. Not a ‘Leave It To Beaver’ world but quite innocent on the surface.

Today, we seem to do far more to protect our children and teens. Yet, they are neither safer nor happier, or so it seems. The State Education Department in Wisconsin just released the results from the annual Youth Risk Behavior Study. The results suggest that a whole generation of young people are very stressed and unhappy, with many on the verge of self-harm . Respondents reported the following:

ALL FEMALES

Persistent Anxiety …………….. 52% 66%

Feelings of Depression ……….. 34% 46%

Self-Harm Ideation …………….. 22% 32%

Considered Suicide ……………. 18%

Almost 60% said that they had experienced at least one episode of depression, anxiety, self-harm or suicidal ideation over the prior year. The rate of depression, in fact, has risen by 11 percentage points alone since 2011.

All this strikes me as a lot of unhappy kids. The numbers caused me to look back to my childhood. Sure, we had challenges. I started working at age 14 and went to an academically demanding boys high school where the Catholic Brothers whe ran the place would whack you if you stepped out of line. Your parents then would whack when you got home if they learned that Brother had whacked you earlier that day, which you never confessed voluntarily. I was okay on the ball field but not as good as many others, which left me with feelings of inadequacy. I was also just a bit younger and naive compared to others in my peer group, thus was subject to constant teasing. And getting to second base with those of the female persuasion was considered next to impossible. What am I saying … totally impossible. So, we made due with looking for the ‘promised land’ only in the reflection off highly polished shoes the girls might wear at the sock hop. You were never going to explore those forbidden areas in reality. At least I wasn’t.

In all these bad numbers, there are a few hopelful signs. Though about one-in-five girls report being more or less forced to have unwanted sex, the overall proportion of girls having sex has fallen in recent years. Teen pregnancy rates have also fallen and then stabilized in the recent past. Likewise, the use of alcohol was at the lowest rate since the question was first asked in 1993. These numbers fly in the face of prevalent impressions of kids out of control and high schools as modern day versions of sin city. Then again, there are all these debates about whether stationing police in high schools is a good or bad thing, and aparently the law is called in to deal with unruly teens on a routine basis. Again, I cannot recall the cops ever being called to schools in my day, or perhaps I just wasn’t paying attention.

It is impossible to compare one generation with another and I may be glossing over problems from my early days. It was the 50s after all where cyber-bullying was not feasible and drugs were something that you heard about happening in the really big cities. I cannot assert with any confidence that my sense of warmth about ‘the good old days’ is warranted or a function of distorted recollections. I did have my share of bad moments, even despairing moments, especially when my mother insisted these would be the best days of my life. Damn good thing there were no guns in the house when she said that.

I’m on the left, before I realized pro sports were an impossible dream! This was in the area between our 1st floor flat and the ‘three-decker’ next door. We played at ‘war’ and ‘‘cowboys and indians‘ endlessly in and among the tenaments where we lived. And we would play games for hours in the streets. One just involved a tennis ball and hitting it off some steps across the street on the other side of these bushes. We created a whole baseball game oy of our imaginations with a ‘home run’ happening if the ball cleared those same bushes in back of us. We did amuse ourselves.

Today, kids have so much more and so much less. As I’ve said before, I would see the younger generation when they were debt-ridden college students. By then, they would be angst ridden about future prospects, focused on how they might get by in life. My college years were a challenge (I would work 11-7 in a hospital many a night before heading off to classes) but I loved them. I never worried all that much about the future. There was an implicit assumption that all would get better. My cohort would be okay. Life for all of us was on an uptick. We often talked not about survival but on reforming society to make it a better place for all. Self-delusion can be an incredible narcotic.

Optimistic me graduating from Clark University!

As inequality has increased in America and our culture wars and political divides tear us apart, we have lost something … hope! You can endure a lot; you can be poor but still happy; you can see the worth of trying hard and rising from little, but you need hope. Take that away and you see the rampant epidemic of despair and defeat you find among today’s teens. It doesn’t have to be this way.