Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Youth today are far better than youth of the past

A few years ago, when we lived in Bakersfield, I wrote an opinion piece on how teenagers seem to be handling things really well, despite the environment being saturated with explicit and implicit messages that were all about but sex, sex, and more sex. I am not sure if I would have even completed high school in such an environment!

In other ways too, I find the youth to be far better--in general--than the youth of the past, and agree with Christopher Ferguson's observation in the Chronicle of Higher Education: According to several significant indicators, today's youth are actually faring much better than did other recent generations: They are less violent, less suicidal, less likely to use drugs and alcohol, and less likely to experience teen pregnancy (despite a small increase in teen pregnancies in 2006, they remain much lower than in 1991). But why doesn't anyone seem to know that?

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