Kids today
Interesting info.
Robert Epstein: Psychologist and visiting scholar at the University of California San Diego. He is the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today and author of several books, including The Case Against Adolescence.
During the interview he says:
"In more than a hundred cultures around the world, there is no teen turmoil... Any culture that severs the connection between young people and older people creates this problem. In other words, if you isolate young people from adults and you trap them, as we have done, in this peculiar world of their own where they learn everything they know from each other and, of course, in our culture everything they know comes from divisions of the media and fashion industries. If you do that, you isolate them from adults and then if you treat them as if they are still children, which really makes some of them very angry and depressed, you create adolescence."
.....
"They actually have almost no meaningful contact with adults here. In fact, according to research, teens in the United States spend about 70 hours a week, that's most of their waking hours, in contact with their peers. You compare that [cut off by interviewer]... They spend on average a half hour a week with their dads on average, 15 minutes of which is spent watching television. Now compare that to cultures where the child/adult continuum as it's called is still intact, in those cultures many of which are developing nations, teens spend on average 5 hours a week with their peers versus 70 here. Who are they spending their time with, they're spending most of their time with usually same-sex adults learning to become adults. That's really what the teen years were through most of human history even in the west, it was a time you learned to become an adult."
Listen here. Hat tip to Shoshannah for the info.
