But on Kid Nation, a reality show that makes its debut next month, 40 young people have just 40 days to build a society – with no adults to curb what the show describes as “the urge to break every rule they've ever known”
– in an Old West ghost town in the New Mexico desert.
All of which suggests yet another stunt on the part of television executives hoping for a Lord of the Flies-style shocker. Except that Kid Nation also amounts to a test case for a radical theory about child development – and taps into an emerging debate about the role of the teenager.
Yet this proposal appears even as teens' rights are being curtailed. Towns such as Thompson, Man., are passing curfews to keep them off the streets at night, Mothers Against Drunk Driving is fighting to keep them away from alcohol for five years after they get behind the wheel and parents are stocking up on hot new products such as the SnoopStick to spy on their Web surfing.
Dr. Epstein's book – The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen – challenges this drive to postpone the rights and obligations of adulthood. He suggests that we have lost track of what it means to be an adult – and underestimate just want it takes to become one.
Why is the former editor of Psychology Today making such extreme claims? In a series of in-depth discussions about his work, Dr. Epstein concedes that teens appear to need reining in – more money is spent on psychoactive drugs for young people in the U.S., he says, than all other prescription medicines combined.
But these troubled teens are Frankensteins of our own making, he insists. There is a correlation between the myriad regulations and restrictions that adolescents face (surveys show they are subjected to twice as many limitations as incarcerated prisoners in the United States) and problem behaviour.
And the more we keep teens from adult activities, the more we keep them from interaction with other adults – inadvertently sealing them in a peer-dominated MySpace bubble, a constant feedback loop with other teenagers.
“We've trapped all of our young people in this idiotic world of teen culture,” he says. “All their models are imbeciles – you don't have to look far to find exemplars that support the belief that teens are incompetent and irresponsible. But none of this tells you what teen competence is. It goes beyond what you see. It's about what's possible.”
In fact, with the help of other experts in adult development, Dr. Epstein and his colleague Diane Dumas developed a test to measure 14 skill sets that distinguish adults from non-adults – and on questions covering everything from knowledge of sex to citizenship to math proficiency, differences between teen and adult scores were negligible.
On questions that measure romantic maturity, for example, the mean score for adults were 8.32 out of 10 and 7.95 for teens. The overall mean scores for adults was 116.7 compared with 114.2 for teens – even though there were double the number of college graduates in the adult sample group as there are in American society.
“There's nothing magical that happens at 16 or 81,” he says. “If you're not skillful in at least most of these areas, people either behind your back or to your face are going to say you're immature. Which, it turns out, many adults are.”
Dr. Epstein says the explanation is simple Darwinian logic.
This, it turns, out is just when a number of functions start to decline. Brain size tops out at about 14 and while intelligence, memory and reaction time are on the upswing during the teen years, they start to nosedive in the early 20s.
“In the early or mid-teens, we are either at our peak or very close to our peak.”
THE BIRTH OF THE TEEN Not that we see evidence of this today. It's telling that the creators of Kid Nation had to turn back the clock to the era of the Wild West to imagine a world in which children and teenagers might tackle grown-up chores and responsibilities.
While many of us think of girls in poodle skirts and saddle shoes as a benchmark for North American teen culture, a distinct stage between childhood and adulthood was not born in the 1950s, but far earlier – at a time in the late 1800s when industrialization was replacing the frontier.
Before then, many young people worked alongside their parents as soon as they were able and, shortly after puberty, boys would leave home to pursue an apprenticeship. By 1900, more than two million kids 10 to 15 years old were working full-time in the U.S.
But some adults worried that wages for older workers were under threat. An influx of immigrants also led to fears about what would happen to children who couldn't find jobs. Soon, labour unions were fighting to end child labour and what Dr. Epstein calls “bluebloods” were campaigning to control idleness and encourage socialization through education.
“Labour laws and education laws were put into place by all kinds of different people,” he says. “None of them had the best interests of teenagers in mind.”
Still, the emerging field of adolescent psychology seemed to support the idea of reining in this new teenager.
In his landmark 1904 book Adolescence, genetic psychologist G. Stanley Hall suggested that the teen years were a time of natural turmoil. Drawing on a theory popular among German scientists of the 19th century that all creatures relive the stages of evolution during their lives – that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” – Dr. Hall saw adolescence as the midpoint between a “savage” and “tribal” past and a civilized future.
The science underpinning his theories has since been repudiated. But Dr. Epstein suggests that a new science has simply taken its place. He points to studies of the “teen brain” that try to prove there are biological underpinnings to adolescent angst and laziness – research he calls a “scientific fraud.”
“These assertions that teens are irresponsible and incompetent because they have a defective brain or an undeveloped brain – it's the zeitgeist,” he says. Some of these studies may find correlations between age and laziness, but do not necessarily show cause and effect. “The teen brain is, at best, a reflection of teen problems, not their cause.”
Marshall Korenblum is a professor at the University of Toronto and the chief psychiatrist at Hincks-Dellcrest, a children's mental-health centre. He agrees with Dr. Epstein's characterization of adolescence as a relatively modern invention, one that, in effect, ghettoizes youth.
But he takes exception with “the notion that there is no difference between the teen and the adult brain.” Recent studies suggest that the teen brain is very different, he says, specifically in the pre-frontal cortex, which is in charge of such things as planning and impulse control. “It would be a mistake to give teenagers more rights and responsibilities,” he says. “The brain continues to mature into the 20s.”
Dr. Epstein responds by listing off young people who didn't need to wait until their 20s to flex mental muscle.
William Blake wrote important poetry at 12. Blaise Pascal proved mathematical theorems at 16. Then there are modern-day wunderkinds such as computer scientist Erik Demaine. He says home schooling and early interaction with adults were key to his finishing college at the age of 14. At 20, he was the youngest professor to be hired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.“It's fortunate for me that I got to learn so much so early because it's a lot easier to learn things when you're young,” he told Psychology Today. “Other than that, age is an arbitrary number.”
Adult abilities are not restricted to career go-getters, either, Dr. Epstein says. Young people are also capable of forging deep and complex emotional relationships with others. Take Mary and Paul Onesi, who were feted in 1995 as the longest married couple in the U.S. They were married in 1917, when he was 21 and she was 13.
If Dr. Epstein gets his way, North America could unlock scores of success stories like these.
THE AGELESS SOCIETY
It hadn't occurred to Yvonne O'Hara to offer her teen boys beer with dinner.
She didn't much care that the 12-year-old and 15-year-old weren't of legal drinking age. The well-behaved boys had simply never asked to try alcohol. But when her sister offered them beer or wine with dinner one weekend at the cottage, she let them make their own decision – and the Toronto mother noticed the psychological effect.
Her younger son drank half a glass of beer. “I could tell he liked that we trusted in him that he was mature enough to handle it,” she says. Now, she's a firm believer in lowering the drinking age in order to normalize the practice.
But how to assess a young person's maturity before they take up risky adult activities?
All we have to do, Dr. Epstein says, is set up a system of competency tests. Just as driving tests are administered today, tests to vote, marry and give sexual consent could be developed by experts and administered by governments.
Some tests would be fairly basic. “We'd like lots of people to vote,” he says. Others would set the bar much higher. “We don't want people to be able to take drugs or make medical decisions unless they're really know what they're doing. We might set the mark for the abortion decision quite high.”
Critics say the system would be an unwieldy, bureaucratic mess, but Dr. Epstein says society already requires licences and permits not only as safety measures but as incentives for those who desire certain rights and responsibilities.
“If someone wants to be an electrician, they have to take a test that was developed by a panel of relevant experts. They want to be a plumber, a physician, a lawyer – it's pretty darn simple. There are hundreds of precedents.”
And when should testing start? As the parent of four, Dr. Epstein says puberty may be a realistic minimum age to take any competency test, but he is reluctant to set a firm limit of any kind.
“If you're 8 and you happen to be the Dalai Lama and you pass the test, then we should admit you to adult society. He was negotiating on behalf of Tibet at 15.”
Still, given the ongoing criticism of IQ testing – Stephen Murdoch's book IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea is the latest jab – maybe the last thing we need is a new battery of tests. What if subtle socio-economic factors biased results? And what about nuances of maturity not easily measured in yes/no questionnaires?
Dr. Epstein insists that such tests would be works in progress. And that unlike IQ, these tests would not measure fixed qualities but fluid skills and knowledge.
Someone can learn that love and sex are not the same thing; someone can learn that drinking alcohol and taking drugs at the same time is extremely risky.
“Traits are unchangeable,” he says, “but competencies are trainable.”
So, let's imagine for a moment what happens when scores of competent young people actually pass tests allowing them to vote, drink, own property and work at meaningful jobs instead of attending high school (which Dr. Epstein characterizes as more like a prison than a place of true learning).It would be what Dr. Epstein calls an ageless society. “In some ways, it will look like society used to look,” he says. “There was a time when it was very common for a 12-year-old to go into a bar. If the 12-year-old behaved irresponsibly, the 12-year-old would be treated harshly – just like a 30-year-old.”
We might end up with a return to an apprenticeship system, albeit more high-tech than earlier versions. Other young people might start their own businesses. And for those who want to keep studying, home-schooling and personalized training could become mainstream options.
In some ways, the impact of a more integrated society would be less jarring than we might fear. The computer age, for example, means that 16-year-olds would not necessarily have to share water-cooler time with 40-year-olds in an ageless workplace.
“The computer creates a certain anonymity. You can work with someone and not know they're 13. Age is less visible, with complex interactions often occurring at a distance.”
On the other hand, teens with strong raw abilities just might run rings around many adults – which could create a certain amount of turmoil.
“Some people will be overrun. But it was the same issue when we allowed women in the workplace.”
And benefits, Dr. Epstein says, outweigh such costs. Not only are teens winners, but so are families, since an ageless society would end “the adversarial relationship that exists with parents and young offspring” – they might even contribute financially to the household. The economy would also get a boost from an influx of new talent, not dissimilar to a wave of eager new immigrants.
“We're bringing extremely energetic people into the economy. Tens of millions of extremely bright, energetic young people who learn quickly who have been excluded from the economy for a century. Would some people lose their jobs? Yes. But the economy would thrive.”
In the same way that forcing a 60-year-old to retire before he or she is ready robs society of a valuable resource, Dr. Epstein says, preventing a teen from starting an adult life when he or she is ready is ultimately a loss to people of all ages.
“We benefit by throwing away age or any other arbitrary characteristic such as gender or race and instead at least move in the direction of looking at competency. I don't see how we could possibly lose out by that.”
All of which would seem to bode well for those 40 young people in the middle of that New Mexico ghost town.
Although one child suffered grease burns while cooking and another accidentally drank bleach – and this week state officials launched an investigation into possible abuse of labour laws – Kid Nation producer Tom Forman said that, over all, young people on his show proved wise beyond their years.
“As a parent out there, I was floored every day watching these kids get up, light a pioneer-era wood-burning stove, cook a breakfast for 40, do their own dishes, head to the water pump, get water, bring it back,” he said at a press conference last month in Los Angeles.
As for more complex issues – like questions producers posed on religion or pollution? “Sometimes it stumped them, and I think that they did worse than adults today do. Sometimes they nailed it and, in a couple of minutes, would solve the problem that adults can't seem to solve.”
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