Moral panic

Earlier this week, the NY Time had two stories of interest. One noted that crack babies grew up to be pretty much normal, despite a lot of worry that they wouldn’t. The other noted the teen sex epidemic that apparently exists more in adults’ minds than in reality. I though “I should blog on that.” But Judith Warner got there first with her analysis of America’s “moral panic”, and as usual, she had a lot more to say that I.

In her blog today, Warner reported that researcher Maria Kefalas of St. Joseph’s University told her:

“For a 14-year-old to be having sex it’s usually a symptom of a kid who’s really broken and really hurt. Those who are having sex without contraception are a distinct set: they’re poor, from single-parent households, doing poorly in school, have low self-esteem. Teen pregnancy is so high in America compared to other places not just because of access to contraception but because we have a lot of poverty. But Americans don’t want to see themselves as a poor society. They want to make a moral argument: if only teens had better values.”

Some of this is a cautionary tale: don’t believe everything you read or hear at a cocktail party. In fact, we tend to believe the things that support our underlying prejudices and beliefs and ignore those things that challenge them.

But it’s also to note that throughout history, every generation has decried the moral degeneration of the next. You can bet our grandparents thought our parents’ generation was going to hell in the back of the jalopy. My grandparents had a copious photo collection of their kids and relatives standing next to wrecked cars with booze bottles in hand, proof of how immoral the next generation had become.

Kefalas said she had to struggle mightily to get people to understand that teens are not in a downward spiral or out of control. “They just don’t believe you. You might as well be telling them the earth is flat.”