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While I was at the mall last weekend, I noticed something about the pre-teen fashion models photographed on the walls of The Gap, Structures, J.C Pennys. You'd expect these 11 year olds to have cute little smiles as they wore their back-to-school knapsacks or posed in a group shot of faked camaraderie. Nothing could have been further. The kids looked, well, grown-up. The girl models had lipsticked faces with know-it-all expressions; the boys had slicked-back hair and looked serious, not unlike my girlfriend's brother who works for Citibank. Inner emotions weren't making it to the surface. All the models shared a common attitude, though: world-weary, detached. Been there, done that.
Seeing the ads I thought, "What's their story?" The boys looked like miniature Ernest Hemingways, the girls like Lauren Bacalls ("If you want anything, just whistle"). The whole attitude was new to me, but I don't have much day-to-day contact with the pre-teen world; I'm sure teachers and parents wouldn't be phased at all. "Kids today are worldly," says Selina Guber, publisher of KidTrends newsletter. "Children and teens are wise beyond their years. The days of complete innocence are gone."
These sentiments are not entirely new. In The Hurried Child (1981) David Elkind argued that children were being forced to grow up too fast, citing the following stress-provokers: little league coaches, Judy Blume books, television (specifically, "Roots"). But these concerns seem quaint now. Today's world is fraught with more dangers than ever--teenage pregnancy, carjacking, guns in classrooms--and, when you think about it, maybe it's no surprise children are cynical. Innocence has a high cost nowadays. The old joke of the mother asking her 5 year old to get the condoms on the verandah (the son, "What's a verandah?") reflects larger social concerns today. In a world of AIDS, maybe it's good that "condom" has become something of a household word.
Is this toughened pre-pubescent attitude merely a response to social ills, as so often reported by Newsweek ("A Much Riskier Passage", 6/93) and the Utne Reader ("Today's Kids: Dissed, Mythed, and Totally Pissed", 4/94)? I'm skeptical of this. True, divorce and drugs are more rampant than ever, and the scars these leave are slow to heal, but this doesn't explain the cynicism of sheltered upper-middle-class suburban kids. Ostensibly, these kids have nothing to complain about--they attend private schools, have their own PCs. How are they disillusioned? Eleven-year-old sarcasm has to be more than a response to rotten life experiences, but what is it? And why did it happen?
Get Rid of Those Stuffed Animals
A good starting point for exploring the pre-teen attitude is to look at Sassy, the hugely successful magazine directed at pre-pubescent girls (the only magazine for pre-teen boys, Dirt, was discontinued last year). Sassy is fruitful to examine because it narrowly targets 11-13 year olds. TV shows like "The Simpsons" also appeal to this demographic but, because they don't do so exclusively, it's more difficult to isolate how pre-teen attitudes may be reflected and shaped.
Jane Pratt started Sassy when she was 25 years old, and she did so with the stated goal of "showing adolescent girls the things they wanted to know most about" which roughly translates to: flirting, guys, sex. Since its inception in 1988, the magazine has stayed true to its mission. It's addressed topics like how to kiss ("not too wet or too wide, and never with flavored lip-gloss") and the truth about boys' bodies ("the average amount of semen per ejaculation is one-quarter of an ounce"). In July 1994 Sassy tried out all the sunscreens; last month the "Zits & Stuff" column asked whether your makeup brush can get germs (It can. Beware.). The articles are chatty; authors go by their first names--"Catherine", "Margie", "Stacey". As one critic put it, Sassy has singlehandedly pioneered a new genre: pajama-party journalism.
When you read Sassy you can't help picking up the vague feeling that maybe your problems COULD be solved with the right pimple cream (I found myself washing my face a little extra-vigorously). This commodity fetishism can get sickening, especially when you consider it's shaping the impressionable minds of the next generation. But I have to admit. The article about minty and medicinal bath gells made me forget any inner Marxist ideals. The stuff sounds cool ("Take a bath with the exotic scent of jasmine, sandalwood and chamomile"). "You're soaking in it," goes the 1990s counter-culture slogan. I guess so.
But this only captures part of the magazine's tone. The major attitude conveyed in Sassy's pages is, well, sassyness: an urbane, all-knowing hipness. It's the New Yorker monocled spectator along with a lot of free-floating hostility toward anything hyped or posed. Sassy's photo shoot of Woodstock '94 highlighted the preppys who wore tie-dye; the blurb next to an 11 year old Australian guitar player mocks, "C'mon! Check out this picture! The kid's practically in diapers and they've got him looking like he's some rock veteran!" An article about flirting implied how silly the whole boy/girl meeting ritual is. And a pop quiz asks readers what to do when a "very smart boy you've been looking to snag" is coming over. Do you a) Do a quick dust-and-sweep job; b) Toss your stuffed animal menagerie to the back of the closet and light some incense; or c) Put on some obscure ambient music, rearrange your bookshelf so every classic book you own is visible and leave out your worn journal out on your bed so he'll see how sensitive you are? (The answer: "b".)
This answer really bugged me. It's one thing if an NYU co-ed smokes up her apartment with incense, another if it's a 11 year old still sporting braces. Doesn't this affected sophistication corrode the idealism of childhood? I liked stuffed animals. And what's wrong with a little innocence when you're 11 years old, the average age of Sassy readers? When I was in junior high I had slumber parties where my friends and I talked, stayed up late, watched that two-hour marathon of "Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island"; the world seemed like a good place and, as conceived by Aaron Spelling, it was. Then, of course, things change. You go to college, enroll in introductory philosophy, hang out with the guy in your dorm who has the Pink Floyd "Dark Side of the Moon" poster, and you learn it's all a crock. The process is common enough to be a cliché: every cynic is a disillusioned idealist. But Sassy readers worry me because in their fashionable hipness they're skipping over that initial stage of innocence. If you're a cynic at age 11, what do you do for the rest of your life? How do you grow?
The Culprit: Television
Criticizing Sassy may not get at the root of the problem, though. After all, Sassy doesn't create this attitude of young sophistication; it only responds (or to use a stronger word, "exploits") it. But what caused the sensibility in the first place? To answer this we should look at television. However cliched it is to rag on TV--with books like Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television crowding bookstore shelves--the fact is, television is hugely influential. It's not just a great force in modern life; it virtually is modern life. As Columbia communications professor Neil Postman writes, it's hard to overestimate TV's impact on American culture and, more specifically, on childhood.
Two qualities are relevant here: TV's access and its adult content. It may seem obvious, but it's important to observe that TV watching requires no special training. Sounds and images can be decoded by anyone, and because of this, viewers as young as 4 or 5 can watch TV. Adults may watch shows on a slightly higher level. We might catch the Lou Gehrig parody when Homer Simpson says he's the luckiest man in the world; kids are more likely to watch on an I-like-it-when-Bart-writes-"Eat-me"-on-his-candy-valentines" level. Unfortunately, because TV rarely rises above this "Eat me" level, most of its messages get across to kids, particularly those with adult content. The evening news highlights Menendez patricide and Bobbit castration; "Cops" shows police officers roughing up suspects; daytime talk shows violate social taboos that haven't even been invented yet. Take PBS, so-called "good" television. Those black-and-white documentaries with real footage of World War II battles have got to horrify an impressionable kid. As Postman writes, "Before television, information was made available to children in stages judged to be psychologically assimilable. ... But today television presents information in a form that is undifferentiated in its accessibility, ... it does not make distinctions between the categories `child' and `adult.'"
TV may affect kids in another way, and this has to do with their pre-adolescent years. In his famous "Eight Stages of Man" psychologist Erik Erikson observes that as 11 and 12 year olds develop physiologically, they start separating themselves from the world of their parents and asking "Who am I?" This stage, "Identity vs. Role Confusion," is turbulent: kids are beginning to feel their oats, find out who they are. Yet television may make it even more confusing because at a time when kids need a little order and coherence, it only offers fragments. TV "populates" the self, to use Kenneth Gergen's phrase; the information it supplies is non-linear, eclectic. Consider the role models TV offers: Oprah. Tom Brokaw. Candice Bergen. Henry Rollins. Bobcat Golthwait.
If it's true that kids are acting like miniature adults, the stakes are high. Childhood, after all, is a time of temporary innocence. This innocence is destined to be lost; that's a healthy part of maturity. But TV and Sassy may corrupt this innocence earlier and more severely than other childhood corrupters (like older brothers) because the images they show are so real and so extreme. To the extent that childhood is a temporary refuge of innocence and that pre-teen youth culture shows a total absence of this, it seems like we have a major problem. Child-like wonder is being killed off; bored, urbane cleverness is reigning supreme. Everything Gatsby saw in the green light at the end of Daisy's dock is being replaced by the love of kitsch, the know-it-all smirk. If this is true, let's fight it! Let's get a Sassy bonfire going!
But is this analysis correct? Do we really have cause for alarm?
The Kids Are All Right
The Who said it best in their 1979 album; the general idea here is that 11 year olds are not cynical; they're poseurs, wanna-bes. Kids may look rough-and-weary, but it's a facade. Scratch the surface and you'll find the same sweet vulnerability as in the good old days. Even the most vocal social critics of preteen culture--Neil Postman and David Elkind--admit kids are pseudo-sophisticated, but these two seem to forget this in their dramatic "childhood-is-defunct" conclusions. Posing may have noxious effects of its own, but it seems flawed to admit kids are faking and then treat faking the same as the real thing.
The examples of pseudo-sophistication are everywhere, but let's focus on the two biggest: rap music and "90210 Beverly Hills". The funny thing about rap is that most listeners are white yet most performers are black (Vanilla Ice, a white rapper, was cool for about a week and a half). I'm sure a lot of sociology majors are, at this very moment, writing earnest theses about what this means for race-relations in America, and I wish them the best. But most of the information I've picked up which, admittedly, is highly unscientific (talking to people at busstops, reading zines) suggests that white "wiggers" listen for reasons having little to with race. As stated by The Source magazine, the self-proclaimed authority in hip-hop music, whites listen 1) to get pumped up and 2) to look cool. This latter begs the question, of course: what's cool? Rap critic Upski offers "hard-core." As she writes, "The white audience wants blacker, realer, more hard-core stances. They want to show how much they've gone through." So they want to show struggle, be hard-core. This is no problem for some kids; they truly are hard-core. But what about sheltered upper-middle-class kids? How have they struggled? Growing up in a California suburb, I admit I was pretty angry when Tower Records sold out of the new "Journey" album. Hey, fight the power.
In a chapter titled "Ways of the Badass," UCLA sociologist Jon Katz observes how kids sometimes try to present a fake toughened image. "In the privacy of their bedroom, they may practice a hard look in the mirror," he writes, "but when they enter a store to buy cigarettes, they may feel it impossible not to wait in line politely and even finish the transaction by accidentally muttering `Thanks.'" This applies to suburban kids pretty well, I think. We may see them sneer and snarl in their baggy pants, dancing to the hip hop on MTV's "The Grind", but I'll bet major bucks that deep down they're happy, naive kids.
Although this is not for the weak of heart, "90210: Beverly Hills" also allows you to peer through the facade. The glimpses can be wrenchingly painful. Over its five seasons "90210" has exhausted every possible love triangle short of homosexuality; in the kids' senior years of high school (when I stopped watching) it was Dylan and Brenda, then Dylan and Kelly, then back to Dylan and Brenda. Between flings, everyone confided in Brandon who worked at the Peach Pit, the local diner. This is all standard adolescent fare. What makes "90210" interesting is how mature the characters look (judging from facial hair, I guess) but how, at the same time, they talk like 5th graders (Brenda on Kelly's bimbo-ness: "If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is a duck". Dylan on Kelly's beauty: "You could be covered from head to toe in burlap; you'd still be gorgeous.").
Dylan may be the most pseudo-sophisticated of the 90210 bunch. At first glance he comes across as a guy quietly carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. His father is a boozer; his restaurant almost has to file for Chapter 11; a car bomb meant for him kills his housemaid. Dylan may allow himself to furrow his brow, but he's not phased. It's as if those James Dean sideburns give him wisdom beyond his years. And you're about to buy it. You're about to say to yourself, "Hey, if my maid got car-bombed, I'd be freaked. Dylan's playing it cool. He is truly a better man than I." But then, unexpectedly, Dylan will say something so stratosphereically immature it jolts you. In one season finale Dylan decides to make a clean breast of his infidelity to Brenda so, with Kelly (his new love interest and Brenda's best friend) he sets out to drop the bombshell on Brenda yet, at the same time, convince her to remain friends. Right there you know this is a fool's errand. It doesn't take a lot of insight to know that most people are not exactly enthusiastic about newly befriending their betrayors. But this doesn't stop Dylan: "Brenda, please try to understand how much you mean to us [him and Kelly]." Dylan one minute later: "I know this is hard for you, Bren. It's hard for all of us." Dylan 20 seconds later: "We didn't plan this, Brenda." Finally, in the predictable aftermath, Dylan to Kelly: "She'll be all right."
This pseudo-maturity... it's a sad thing. It depresses me to see kids trying so hard to act like grown-ups--not because it's wasted energy (though it is) and not because they can't pull it off (though most can't). It depresses me because it's fun being a kid. Childhood disappears fast; it seems a shame to spend it acting like an adult. Some kids--those in South Central, those in Sarajevo--have to act like adults, and that's a terrible tragedy. For those lucky enough to act childlike, it seems perverse for them to do anything otherwise. Why would any kid really want to be an adult? You pay a lot of bills, laugh at jokes that aren't funny. It bores the hell out of me.
But what's most important to remember is that kids are kids; the posing shouldn't fool us. And this insight offers great possibilities, not the least of which is we can all watch "90210" in a radically different way. No longer must we cringe when we see physically mature kids striking up false bravado or wallowing in self pity (naggy female whining voice: "But Dylan...."). Erase that. We'll cringe because that's involuntary. But when we do, we should take comfort in the fact that we're looking first-hand at the glorious stupidity of adolescence in all its radiance and color. Childhood naiveté has not disappeared. It's just buried under layers of pimple cream. So relax, draw yourself a nice bath, and buy some of that Sassy bath gel. Margie says she felt serener. Silkier, too.
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