The Ambitious Generation: America's Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless

Rating:
Summary: Wazzzupp- -With Your Teen?
Review: Having two teen sons leads my nose of curiosty to all sorts of helpul books. No one source is a panacea. However, I am happy to know I am not alone in this wonderous yet sometimes bothersome Generation X. Baggy pants, booming music, wild hair colors, peculiar body piercings all are cries for individuality. But is there any sort of ambition under those generational masks? Yes--boundless ambition, in need of direction.

This book by David Stevenson and Barbra Schneider comes in hardback and paperback. I suggest the paperback. You are going to want to refer to it time and again. One theme I have noticed in many books including "The Devoicing Of America", is that of isolation. Teens today are wrapped into computers & video games so much, they have gotten away from a guiding hand. They are alone and lost.

Surprisingly, compared with the 1950's generation, today's teens have fewer long-lasting relationships and spend much more time alone. Many stay in college longer in lieu of leaping into marriage. They need more guidance than ever before. Would we expect a lone traveler to be told you must reach point A and not give them any map, or ideas or support? No, everyone needs some direction.

The study these adolescence experts did of over 7,000 teens shows this generation to be the most ambitious of them all. These teens expect to go to college, graduate and find high paying jobs. On the other hand, when asked how, few had answers. They just expect it. And some of the blame rests on we parents and teachers. Teens take the wrong courses, choose the wrong colleges and then enter college with unrealistic expectations.

Through this book, we can find helpful ways of directing teens and even pre-teens of today without adding pressures. I found the following of several students ( Grace, Elizabeth, and Jake) throughout their high school years and then re-visiting them in college interesting case studies of comparison of tools which can be implemented by any care giver.

Again, getting back to basics is a central theme. Of course it does not solve everything. It is a first step. It is a way of beginning a successful trip through adolesence to positive adulthood. A way to make dreams come true. Be there for your teen. Communicate. Listen.

Of course, you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink--leave the book out, you'll see, the ponies of today will also quench themselves and find help in becoming strong stallions of tomorrow.

--CDS--

Rating:
Summary: Good 50's data, otherwise worthless
Review: This book is an interpretation of a nationwide longitudinal study of American teenagers done by the Alfred P. Sloan Center. The thesis of the book is that today's teenagers (or at least, the teenagers of 10-15 years ago, when the study was done) are more ambitious and motivated than ever before in their vocational aspirations, but a disturbingly high percentage are directionless in that they have made inadequate plans to attain their vocational goals.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is the comparison that is made between the teenagers of the 1990's and those of the 1950's. 1990's teens are much more likely to aspire to careers as professionals, managers, and entrepreneurs that Silent-era teens, who had less ambitious goals, such as factory work or being wives and mothers without outside employment. Partly because of this, 1990's teens aspired to a higher level of education than their grandparents, usually a bachelor's degree at the minimum.
Schneider and Stevenson acknowledge the great changes in American society and the economy in the 40+ years covered in this book. A high school graduate in 1957 could reasonably expect to find a good stable job that would support a family and allow him to buy a house, with no further education. This is clearly not the case in later decades.
The authors apparently feel that the problem is not the changing society itself, but that students are preparing inadequately. They proclaim that the majority of high school students have "misaligned ambitions", that is, that they are planning to obtain too much or too little education for their proposed vocation, or that they are barely planning at all. Several case studies are given of students with "aligned" and "misaligned" ambitions. In particular, those with misaligned ambitions are made out to be clueless idiots.
The authors highlight the role of parents in forming proper alignment. For example, there is the case of Paul Cheng, a son of Chinese immigrants in New York. Paul's parents clearly want him to make something of himself, and have helped him select a career (medicine) and have supported him financially and in selecting friends, high school subjects studied, colleges applied for, and in finding work in the medical field as preparation for his career. It seems to matter little that Paul is not sure he wants to be a doctor; he is "properly aligned."
The authors also note the role of work in the teenager's life. They note that the large majority of high school students have part-time jobs, but they analyze this fact not from the point of view that work cuts into teenagers' studies, social life, or family ties; nor even from the point of view that most kids work to acquire spending money and the consequences of having it. Teen jobs are analyzed only from the point of viewpoint of whether the work helps or hinders teenagers' vocational ambitions.
This points to the biggest failing of this book. The authors view teenagers solely as future units of economic production. "Ambitious" is defined solely in terms of occupation; if a teenager wishes to travel or fall in love or feed the homeless or save the whales, that is not considered a valid ambition. It needs hardly be said that this reflects ambitions that are important to adults and perhaps not to the teenagers themselves.
The fact that these are adult ambitions certainly colors the way teenagers responded to the questions. After a lifetime of hearing adult society tell kids that they must get a college degree and make a lot of money, few teenagers will tell an interview that they want to be a barber or a truck driver. I suspect that most teenagers had no clear idea of what they wanted to be doing vocationally at the age of thirty, and gave the interviewer the first higher-status occupation that came to mind. It should then be no surprise whatever that these same teens had only vague and "misaligned" ideas of what it would take to achieve this spurious goal.
There is nothing that I am aware of developmentally that suggests that a young person must have his or her entire life planned out by the age of 17. The underlying assumption of this book that this is so does not help adolescents; rather it reinforces the abandonment and "hurrying" that is characteristic of our society since the 1960's. I am ashamed that I helped enrich these authors and their publisher by buying their book.