Youth and Crime: The Road to Whatever

Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence. Elliott Currie is a professor of criminology and an expert on youth and crime. Currie is convinced that the modern institutions of family, education and American culture are disenfranchising an entire generation of young people and causing them to care less and less about themselves, their futures and the consequences of their actions.
Comments on article "Youth and Crime: The Road to Whatever"
Name Views and CommentsDate
-S- For a book that I am being forced to read, it is okay. It serves its point in an academic setting, but for pleasure reading, it isn't worth your time. The professor said "Read it like a novel." It isn't. Its a textbook. 11/8/2008
Thomas M. John The book's contents may be descriptive of the majority of teenagers in Currie's selected demographic (the middle-class teenager, I guess), but as a father of a teen who is having great difficulty, I am at a complete loss to be able to draw a connection between what the author purports to have discovered and the reality in my own home. If anything, my child has been the subject of an extreme opposite sketch compared to what Currie describes. I cannot identify a single episode of "punishment or rejection" except one or two detention episodes levied by the school after quite a lot of what I would call total disregard on my child's part for school basic rules ( how about showing up at class or doing homework once in awhile?) and decent treatment of teachers? Call me crazy, but just the way kids are talking to teachers now and get away with it would have brought me a trip to the principal's office when I was their age. Punishment and rejection as Currie puts it were way more common in my age (I am 53) than for either of my children. I bet I could even prove that statement. I do not see the rigidity in my community that Currie suggests is there. I see blatant allowance of just about any behavior except the very worst. As for punishment and rejection in the home? Our kids were endlessly praised, we focused entirely on the positive. We raised our son and daughter using the same principles. It seemed to work great for one and not for the other. Hard to take this book's contents and understand the individual reality from it. Doesn't help a bit. I'd much enjoy speaking with this author to challenge him to identify the ways in which our own child suffered any of the dynamics he is referring which would have lead to the situation she is currently in. 1/9/2006
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