The True 'Great Generation'

SANTA CRUZ — Check out your favorite bookstore's newer "parenting" and "adolescence" arrivals, and you will find many of their authors decrying the degeneration of modern youth. Today's teens are lonely, troubled, depressed and confused, say psychologists William S. Pollack and Mary Bray Pipher. "Twice as many kids ... are seriously troubled" and exalt "dark images," worries psychologist James Garbarino. Today's teenage girls engage "in far riskier health behavior in greater numbers than any prior generation," claims leftist media critic Jean Kilbourne. Youths perpetrate "our most troubling social problems," asserts rightist philosopher Kay S. Hymowitz. "Substance abuse has become epidemic

However, the latest statistics show that youth crime and drug and alcohol abuse, among other social ills, are plunging. Mindful of these, generational historians Neil Howe and William Strauss argue, in "Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation," that the new Millennials (youngsters born after 1981) "manifest a wide array of positive social habits that older Americans no longer associate with youth: teamwork, achievement, modesty and good conduct." Commentators who assume that Millennials will continue the "selfishness in personal manner ... risk-taking with sex and drugs [and] crime, violence and social decay" of grungy-gangsta Generation X (born 1961-1981) commit fallacious "straight-line thinking," the authors contend.

What both the optimistic Howe and Strauss and the negativist others suggest is that stern adult authority produces model kids, while freedom yields brats. While the negativists call for renewed grown-up authority to "rescue," "revive" and "save" the wayward young, Howe and Strauss argue that adult crackdowns on youths in the 1990s have already nullified the effects of 30 years of permissiveness to forge disciplined, "no-nonsense kids."

But this homily wilts in the face of reality. The permissively raised, universally deplored Generation X (especially California's version) is the true "great generation," for it has braved a hostile social climate to reverse the abysmal trends of their baby-boomer predecessors.