• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=594WLzzb3JI

Youth Culture

Whaddya know?

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What surprised you most?What surprised you least?

WHY?

Generation Gaps

Generation gaps are the differences between yourself and your parents generation.How do you and your generation compare to your parents' generation? Are you really much different from them? If so, what are the differences? More interestingly, what are the similarities between the teenagers of yesterday and the teenagers of today? What about teenagers in other parts of the world? Do you think they share the same attitudes? Values? Interests? Challenges?

In the past, societies had initiation rites to mark the abrupt transition from childhood to adulthood. Most modern cultures, with the exception of some ethnic groups, no longer mark that transition with a common ceremony. Instead there is a grey period, a time when people are neither children nor adults but some kind of combination of both. That grey period seems to last much longer too. Adulthood seems to come much later for the modern youth than it did for their counterparts a century ago.

Even the term teenager is relatively new. It didn’t exist until the 20th century.

G. Stanley Hall first began to study the teenager in the early 1900s. He came up with the concept of “storm and stress” to describe adolescent behaviour and suggested that adolescence is marked by three key aspects: conflict with parents, mood disruptions, and risky behavior.

Do you agree?

Hall’s work has more recently fallen out of favour. While most modern psychologists believe that this type of behaviour is more likely during the teenage years, they also argue that not all teenagers will experience “storm and stress”.

Storm and Stress

Social Scientists Speak from Research

Anthropologist Margaret Mead argued that the storm and stress of the teenage years are not inevitable.

After living with and studying a group of teenagers from the nation of Samoa, she concluded that Samoan teenagers did not go through the same emotional and psychological distress that North American teenagers do. She suggests instead that the latter are a product of a Western culture which has created an environment that forces teenagers to rebel.

She and sociologist Mike Males have also pointed out that modern laws give contradictory messages to youth. Western laws set adult expectations and provide adult punishments for youth at the same time that other laws take away rights (the right to vote, for instance).

Do you agree?

Social Scientists Speak from Research

Psychologist Jean Piaget noted that the period known as adolescence occurred when cognitive development increased, and thus fostered conflict as the individual gained the cognitive ability to reason, dispute, and theorize on an adult level. He appears to argue that teenagers are simply figuring things out and challenging ideas with which they do not agree.

Does Piaget agree or disagree with Mead or Hall? How much? In what ways?

Social Scientists Speak from Research

Talcott Parsons (Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States, 1942) said that adolescence was a necessary period of transition where the child breaks fee of the parent-child relationship and the safety of the family home in order to begin to establish a home and family of his or her own.

Does Parsons agree or disagree with Hall or Mead? How much? In which ways?

Counter-CultureCulture has been called "the way of life for an entire society" . As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, norms of behaviour and systems of belief.

The terms “subculture” and “counter culture” are frequently used to describe youth. The idea is that youth have to break away from established culture in order to create their own culture, independence, and identity. Frequently youth in the 20th century have adopted their own unique modes of dress, language, music and other norms. Think about such youth phenomena as the lingo used in instant messaging and the first rock and roll bands in the 1950s.

One group who are frequently identified as having developed their own culture are the youth of the 1960s: the hippies.

Counter Cultures

Some terms that are frequently associated with the counter cultures are identity, alienation, conformity and social change.

Explain why.

Identify whether each is an example of culture, or is it an example of a sub or counter culture and explain why?

Sub and Counter Cultures

Is the presence of a subculture or counter-culture, by necessity positive or negative?

Is its absence by necessity positive or negative?

What are the benefits or costs of each?

Hippie Culture

Watch the following video clips and complete the appropriate section of handout titled, Defining Youth Culture.

Clip #1

Clip #2Clip #3Clip #4

Then complete the section about youth today.

Punk Culture

As you watch the following documentary, The Punks Are Alright, complete the handout of the same title.

You will also need to complete the appropriate section of the “Defining Youth Culture” handout.

Generation Comparison

Read the 3 sets of lyrics and answer the questions:

The Punks Are Alright

The Kids Are Alright

The Kids Aren’t Alright