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Drinking, Voting, Driving, Having Sex Shouldn't Be Based on Age, Author Says

by Tom Henderson (Subscribe to Tom Henderson's posts)
Apr 9th 2010 4:00PM

14Comments

Filed under: Books for Kids, Teen Culture

Dr. Robert Epstein says we don't give teenagers enough opportunity to prove their competence. Photo courtesy of Dr. Robert Epstein. Photo courtesy of Dr. Robert Epstein.


Dr. Robert Epstein says kids as young as 12 ought to be able to smoke, drink, vote, drive, have sex and fight in combat.

It just depends on the kid, he says. Look at David Farragut. The American naval hero commanded his first ship when he was 12, Epstein points out. And long before Andrew Jackson was president, he was a 14-year-old soldier fighting in the American Revolution.

In his book "Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence," Epstein, the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, argues we should do away with the very concept of adolescence and base what we let people do on ability and competence rather than age.

"I am not slightly right," he tells ParentDish. "I am completely right."
Epstein was not always so confident. He says he started out with the usual American view of teenagers: that they have underdeveloped, immature brains and are inherently more brutish and less intelligent and responsible than adults.

Accordingly, when he was raising his older children, he treated them like, well, children. His younger children have a much different father, he says. He says he realized teenagers don't need keepers. They need mentors.

Teens are basically apprentice adults, Epstein says. When they complete the apprenticeship – at whatever age – they deserve to reap the benefits.

That could be the right to vote, drink or fight. And if a 14-year-old girl wants to marry a 54-year-old man, Epstein says, that should depend on her emotional and intellectual maturity rather than her chronological age.

"You have to look at people one-by-one by competence," he says.

Epstein says he didn't come to these conclusions easily.

"This has been a very difficult journey," he says. It has taken the better part of 20 years, he adds, to unlearn all he had learned. "It's completely changed me."

The founder of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts, Epstein says we inherited our modern notions of adolescence from psychologist G. Stanley Hall and his 1904 book, "Adolescence." Hall claimed that the individual goes through the same evolution as the species itself.

"Hall mistakenly concluded that the turmoil he saw among teens was inevitable," Epstein says, "but he was completely wrong. That turmoil is entirely absent in most cultures, and that was true when he wrote his book. He just didn't have access to the information."

Thus, adolescents are more brutish than adults and less intelligent. They also are irresponsible, incompetent and hormonal. However, Hall made his observations of the "stress and storm" of adolescent life based on kids living on the streets during the height of the industrial revolution.

Yet, the image of the angst-ridden and hormonal teen is so ingrained in our society that teens tend to live down to the stereotype, he says – just as women once acted meek and submissive to reflect society's expectations.

"Most of them are not mature," Epstein says of adolescents. "We've raised them to be big babies. Most of them are not living up to their true potential. The way we look at teens is totally wrong."

Teens really are in turmoil in this country, Epstein says. But blame the doctor, he says, not the patient.

Americans now spend more money on prescription drugs that control teenagers' emotions and behavior than we do on all other prescription drugs for teens combined, "including acne medication and antibiotics," Epstein claims in his book.

"The mental health profession is dead wrong when it comes to teenagers," he adds.

To understand our misconceptions about adolescence, Epstein suggests looking at history. For hundreds of years before Hall and his theories came around, there was a seamless web between adolescence and adulthood.

"This stage of life we feel is cast in concrete is absent in Shakespeare," he says.

Epstein says we too often quarantine teenagers with other teenagers, and they have very little interaction with the adult world. The average teenager spends 70 hours a week with other teenagers and only a half hour each week with their fathers, he claims in his book – and 15 minutes of that is spent in front of the television.

Parents should be there not to dominate their children, Epstein says, but to gently guide them into adulthood. And kids should take their teen years more seriously too, he says.

"This is a time to learn to be an adult, not master hip-hop lyrics," he adds.

Epstein wants to see society dole out rights by competence rather than age. That would mean potential voters -- whether 11 years old or 80 – would have to prove a minimal amount of intellectual competence.

"As a society, we need more competence," he argues.

Some Americans toward the older age of that spectrum might remember when literacy tests were given to African American voters in the South as a way to keep them out of the political process. Those were bad tests given for the wrong reason, Epstein says, and there are other ways to test people, he insists.

The idea of people in authority sitting in judgment of other people's competence or incompetence might be a can of worms many – if not most – of us would rather leave unopened. Yet, Epstein argues our current system of judging people by age is inherently unfair.

"That's why it takes a massive book to change it," he says, "not that my book will change anything."

Related: When Big Authors Write for Little People

Tags: psychology, robert epstein, RobertEpstein, teen 2.0, Teen2.0, teens

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