SCORNED BY THEIR KIDS:

The 'found' generation: Today's teens aren't as lost as many think, despite images to the contrary, some researchers say. (THERESA WALKER, January, 5, 2004, The Orange County Register)

Mariela Segura, a senior at Fullerton High who plans to become a paralegal, doesn't feel teens get a fair shake in fact or fiction. The canned- food drive at her school didn't get a mention in the local news, while "The O.C.," a prime-time soap about the lives of the young and the rich in Newport Beach, emerged as a fall TV-season hit.

Segura is not a fan of "The O.C." or other shows that she believes falsely portray youth and, worse, don't show consequences for bad behavior.

"They assume we're all one way. They make it seem like we're always sneaking out at night, not doing anything good," says Segura, 17.

She belongs to a group called Teens for Truth that encourages young people to remain chaste until they marry.

"Teens are trying to do good," she says. "We don't always make the right choices, but we try."

Levy finds some measure of fairness in "The O.C." because the adults are at least as dysfunctional as the kids.

But the feature film "Thirteen" is another story. Released earlier this year, the movie is a disturbing depiction of a 13-year-old girl's blink-of- an-eye free fall into promiscuity and drug abuse. Its director tried to make the film a wake- up call to parents.

Levy called it "vicious, pernicious, absolutely poisonous."

"I think there was a certain amount of truth in that movie, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it was a cheap shot. It was only the one-dimensional view. That's the most poisonous impact the media has - the one view."

Others say the problem isn't with the film's content, but with how adults perceive it.

"It's not the movie, but the director of the movie and the reviewers of the movie insisting that it is some kind of statement on a generation," says social ecologist Mike Males, who teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is a senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.

"The movie is about several troubled individuals; it's not about an entire generation." [...]

Males - formerly a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, where he wrote a pair of books on the scapegoating of adolescents - returned to Orange County in October to speak at Chapman University about the disparity he has documented and sees growing larger.

Statistics show that the overall rate of violent youth crime is down, as are teen births, teen drug use, teen smoking.

According to Males' research, Orange County teens are better off than their parents' generation of the 1970s. He says teens today are:

70 percent less likely to commit suicide

67 percent less likely to die by violent means or drugs

66 percent less likely to be arrested for a felony

40 percent less likely to become teen mothers

Perhaps the problem is that young people today are a rebuke to the generation of the '60s and '70s?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 6, 2004 1:28 PM