
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 15, 1995                   TAG: 9510130097
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: G-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A GENERATION IN JEOPARDY

Plenty, says a national report released last week - and it stems largely from the country's failure to address the consequences of profound social and economic changes. That failure, according to the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, is jeopardizing the futures of millions of American children ages 10 to 14.

A few items from the council's litany of findings:

One in five American adolescents is growing up in poverty.

More than one in four spends two or more hours alone after school.

Two in three have tried alcohol; one in three has tried illicit drugs.

One in three has thought about committing suicide.

They are the age group with the fastest-growing birth rate; the murder rate in their age group doubled between 1985 and 1992; their age group is among the least likely to have adequate access to health care.

All that would be sobering enough if it referred to 18- or 16-year-olds. That it refers to kids several years from reaching legal driving age is shocking.

Though perhaps not, when you come right down to it, wholly unexpected. If early adolescence is typically a time of inner turmoil, of emotional swings, of rebellion against authority and yearning for acceptance by one's peers, how much more intense do these years become when society at large is volatile, cynical about authority, and increasingly divided into fragmented groups of the like-minded?

And if the turbulence of adolescence is intensified by the zeitgeist, how much worse is it made by the increasing absence of the kind of adult attention and supervision that, however resented sometimes, at least provide guidance and a sense of limits to ease the transition to adulthood?

The problem is easier to define than to solve. The decline of adult supervision, for example, is partly a result of social forces that swell the numbers of one-parent households and economic forces that compel both adults in two-parent families to work if they are to maintain a middle-class living standard. These huge forces - reflected in the decline of traditional households and the growing gap between rich and poor - cannot be wished away with the snap of a finger.

Moreover, solutions lie in the realm of personal attitudes about parenting as well as in the realm of public policy. The quality of family life in America, and how to make it better, is both an intensely personal issue and a matter of urgent public concern.

But the two realms are not unconnected; personal attitudes inform public policies. Parents need to become more involved in the schooling of their children, for instance. But schools and communities also need to become more involved in making sure that adolescents aren't left isolated and to their own devices in the hours after school.

In both personal and public realms, it's time to make sure kids' welfare is the main theme, not an afterthought.

by CNB