Adolescent Angst

One in four 15 to 16-year-old boys have carried a weapon in the past year, and 19% of boys of that age have attacked someone intending to hurt them seriously. Nearly half of all 14 to 15-year-olds have knowingly broken the law; either they have stolen or tried to steal something, vandalised property or shoplifted. By 16, half of all kids admit to "binge" drinking.

These are some of the findings of a Joseph Rowntree Foundation report published today, based on a survey of more than 14,000 teenagers. It is exactly the kind of material that feeds a rightwing moral frenzy which perceives the country as being in the grip of social meltdown, epitomised by lawless youths. This kind of demonisation of teenagers is precisely what the authors of the report wanted to tackle in a careful analysis of the factors which lie behind anti-social behaviour. But it will be the shocking results - rather than the combination of failure at school, family conflict and the poor neighbourhoods which produce them - that will get the headlines. The authors themselves admit to being shocked by the survey, particularly the levels of violence. These will be seized upon and slotted into a narrative of gang culture and lawless teenagers which has already been widely publicised.

Alongside this demonisation of adolescence is a very different theme - the intense vulnerability of teenagers. This weekend, the grainy CCTV pictures of Amanda Dowler were released in yet another attempt to jog memories for clues about the disappearance of this 13-year-old on her walk home from school in Walton-on-Thames. There is something painfully poignant in all the images released of Amanda: she powerfully evokes the combination of child and emerging adult. Yet Amanda's disappearance has not provoked the same degree of national outrage and anxiety as that of Sarah Payne. It is as if once you are an adolescent, you forfeit the child's unqualified entitlement to protection.

Adolescence - perhaps more than any other stage of life - triggers huge ambivalence. We are riven with fearfulness - of them and for them. We leap erratically from punitive judgment to intense, impotent protectiveness. The government has offered plenty of the former in recent weeks in a bid to placate the rightwing panic, with plans to fine parents of unruly children. Corby in Northamptonshire has even embarked on an after-9pm curfew of the city centre for all children under 15 in an attempt to control rising street crime.

These are draconian measures designed to calm the fear which drives the debate on adolescence: the fear expressed in Natural Born Killers and Lord Of The Flies - that the socialisation of our children has failed and we have created monstrous human beings who toy with human pain for their sport. Sir John Stevens, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, described to the Daily Telegraph the "wild children" who do not seem to understand even the most basic human decencies, and quoted an instance of teenagers who robbed and mugged a young child with cerebral palsy and laughed as the child cried.

The fear that we are simply not doing very well at bringing up our teenagers goes beyond criminal behaviour: it includes the shocking rise in suicides, particularly among young men - up from 7 to 17 per 100,000 between 1970 and 1998; the increase in eating disorders, which now affect one in 20 young women and are fast approaching epidemic proportions; and the fact that 100,000 youngsters run away from home every year. Britain is making a worst fist of raising teenagers than any other European country: our teens have the highest rate of pregnancy and drug use, and are second only to the Danes in alcohol consumption.

E ven if your teenager is still eating, and hasn't yet broken the law, the assumption is that for around six years, parents and offspring are locked into intense emotional conflict which can be broadly summarised as girls in screaming matches and boys retreating into a sulky silence. Two new books* attempt to provide some help, warning that not only are the problems getting worse, they are also lasting longer - with the spread of higher education and high property prices, young adults are staying with their parents well into their twenties.

Too often, the assumption from left and right is that if an adolescent goes off the rails, it is due to the inadequacies of the parents. The left favours a bit more emotional literacy, while the right argues for parents to impose proper discipline. But what if we have created a culture which is uniquely ill-suited to adolescents? Where the process of individuation is acutely painful, and which many never negotiate, leaving them with confusion and conflict for the rest of their lives? What if the adolescent finds unbearable the struggle and pressure towards success in an increasingly unequal society? Can it be any surprise that many teenagers are baffled by the double-edged attitudes towards sex, flavoured with both prurience and judgmentalism?

One of the most extraordinary characteristics of the mess we are making is the complacent assumption that whatever we are doing as parents, it's a lot better than what our parents and grandparents did. Bizarrely, we have latched on to a completely unjustifiable claim to progress as we swiftly dismiss our parents' emotional illiteracy and their inability to communicate. Emotional connection has become the only important ingredient of parenting; changing society seems an impossible task, so we have shifted our energies into changing the relationship between child and parent.

Anthony Giddens, in his 1999 Reith lectures, welcomed the arrival of democracy in the family, in which relationships were now based on emotional intimacy rather than economic ties or sense of duty. His gloss seems overly optimistic. Emotional intimacy is proving a very volatile and unpredictable foundation for stable, secure relationships. Sustaining that kind of intimacy requires a greater degree of emotional maturity than most people have the time or inclination for. Nowhere does that show up more starkly than in the parenting of adolescents.

Get Out Of My Life... by Tony Wolf and Suzanne Franks (Profile Books); The Terrible Teens by Kate Figes (Viking). Youth At Risk? is published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
m.bunting@guardian.co.uk