Hi there,

I suppose older generations have always worried about the youth -- the age group that became known as teenagers when I was a kid. It must have been about then because teenagers was considered a cool name for a pop group in the mid-1950s -- as in Frankie Lymon and the … -- and, as we know, pop groups do not lag behind in the name stakes. But I digress. The point I wish to make is that back then parents only had to worry about kids who were literally still growing up -- whether they would become, for instance, milkbar cowboys or even fully-fledged juvenile delinquents. Now they have to worry about physically mature and expensively educated offspring who face another decade, perhaps, of meandering through a social and psychological wilderness before they achieve all or any of the milestones of adulthood.

That is the gist of a number of articles on the subject of 20-somethings -- a couple of which I have responded to briefly in the Family Edge blog. Though they are concerned with the United States, the issues they raise are common to most developed countries -- certainly in the Anglo world -- and the recession has made them more pronounced. But it often strikes me when reading such articles that they are dealing largely with these problems from an urban middleclass perspective (quite blinkered, too, on moral issues) and that things might be better or worse in other sectors of society.

That they are worse for young people from the working class who have only a high school education is a fact highlighted in a piece (The Generation That Can’t Move On Up) by Brad Wilcox and Andrew Cherlin in the Wall Street Journal today. Theirs is an important reminder that social and economic changes taken for granted in the ranks of the more educated and sophisticated -- or at least taken in their stride -- can be disastrous for others.

It is this fact that caused Dr Jennifer Roback Morse to have prolonged conniptions when reading a book by a couple of academics about how family values people in “red states” of the US have the family script all wrong and that it’s the “blue states” that have it right. Read her review and find out why she wanted to throw this book across the room.

In other articles Melinda Tankard Reist answers my questions about the effective Collective Shout campaign she is leading in Australia against the sexualization and objectification of girls and women; New York opera singer Andrea Lynn Cianflone asks why we are letting our working artists starve; and George Friedman writes about American options on Iran.

Enjoy the variety!

Carolyn Moynihan,
Deputy Editor,
MercatorNet