Recently in the April/May issue of Scientific American Mind, I encountered something startling. But before I go into exactly what it was, I first want to talk about a concept I created years ago on an old website of mine called YoungPRer.com. The concept was called Evolving Youth. It began as an article that I had written describing how the mind of youth works. And when I say the mind of youth, I am not just referring to any individual mind, I am referring to the collective Mind, as well. Or in other words, the mind of youth is youth acting as a whole within society. Teenagers today are commonly finding themselves trapped in a separate world from adults, but what is also pointed out from a number of sources – the United States and other Westernized cultures have very particular sorts of teen problems and issues.

In the U.S., teenagers have commonly been labeled as misfits, delinquents, and irresponsible. In the article I read entitled The Myth of the Teen Brain, writer Robert Epstein has written to claim that behind the growing number of laws that limit teen behavior, the invention and introduction of television, and poorly understood brain activity charts – there lies a fully functional, and even a potentially superior, human being.

There is no question that since the 1950’s, teenagers have been changing, and no – not just puberty. But speaking of puberty, it has been occurring at an earlier and earlier age for decades now as time has gone on. The politics have changed, the sexual revolution has passed, the counter culture has been invented, and high school shootings have damaged the reputation and security of high schools nationwide. The food we are eating has changed, as agriculture experiments with cloning and injecting our farm animals with synthetic hormones. The particular events that have taken place, combined with the shift in technology and active media have managed to take youth in a serious turn. But to where?

Perhaps the best example of how things have changed can be found in just spending a single week going to your child’s local intermediate or high school. An excerpt from the article:

Prompted by a rash of deadly school shootings over the past decade, many American high schools now resemble prisons, with guards, metal detectors and video monitoring systems, and the high school dropout rate is nearly 50 percent among minorities in large U.S. cities.

But are such problems truly inevitable? If the turmoil-generating ‘teen brain’ were a universal developmental phenomenon, we would presumably find turmoil of this kind around the world. Do we?

In 1991 anthropologist Alice Schelegel of the University of Arizona and psychologist Herbert Barry III of the University of Pittsburgh reviewed research on teens in 186 preindustrial societies. Among the important conclusions they drew about these societies: about 60 percent had no word for ‘adolescence,’ teens spent almost all their time with adults, teens showed almost no signs of psychopathology, and antisocial behavior in young males was completely absent in more than half these cultures and extremely mild in cultures in which it did occur.

The core fact of the matter is – something is happening, and something has been happening on a mass scale for decades, possibly even the entire past century. With the advent of technology, with the shift in media, with the splitting movement in culture, we are seeing a brand new age, and a whole new generation of people that we will have never seen anywhere anytime in known history. Youth is evolving, and we can say that like new technology – the question of whether or not it takes a turn for the better or for the worse will be a matter of how this energy is directed.

When talking to my own parents about this, they remark that there is “nothing new under the sun,” and that there really is no original experience that kids today have, not really, over the experience that previous generations have had. But I am not the only one disagreeing, and that disagreement is apparently not coming from me simply because I am now 19 years old and was, or am, a teen myself quite recently.

In my book, The Island of Yellow, I tell a story from my perspective about young teen Cacee Kenner and her influence on the others around her in a social network. The book was written from a period in time between 1998 to 2002, during which time I was one of the few individuals in existence to witness, right in front of my eyes without any specific bias, a single girl and her rise or fall to adulthood, as well as the entire group of people that surrounded her. Throughout the events of the book, I was able to make many predictions, many of them seemingly impossible, purely based off of deductive reasoning and intuitive analysis. The story, which can be looked at many different ways, is something I have questioned myself about: did I really do that? Many days I look back at what I know, and say a very definitive, “yes.”

Western culture and the Western teenager are very exclusive to only a specific sort of environment and mood. Epstein also points out that “in many Western cultures, teens socialize almost exclusively with other teens.” Where as in other parts of the world, the phase of ‘adolescence,’ is not nearly so emphasized, and there is more of an even integration and functionality between adults and teenagers. This might explain why when I was in London, all the adults seemed so much more respectful(or that could just be the people of the UK for you). ;)

Between 1850 and the year 2000, over 120 different laws have been passed that govern the legal behavior of teens in the United States. Both research and, in my view, common sense will tell you – infantilizing and isolating teenagers from responsibility and their common rights will make them act more like children than ever before. In just a few locations, teens are making an incredible difference, and while a teen mind is unable to gain information as quickly as an even younger child, teenagers also have a drastically improved learning ability beyond that of adults. The societal conditioning on teen behavior could use a facelift, and some teen credibility could be given some of what it’s worth. So for those of you reading Hayley Dimarco or listening to your child’s high school counselor, learn a hard pressed fact: teens can in fact take care of themselves, and can even know what is best for them in a higher number of situations than you might give them credit.

If I were to ever set out to look for proof that teenagers are capable of being highly capable individuals, I’d need look no further than myself. At age 18, I started my first company, and by age 17 I had written my first book. I was running my own class at my high school during my senior year, when no one else got that same sort of privilege. When the teacher had a question, she would ask me. I was the biggest rebel I knew, and when people were pressing me to do one thing with my life, I often did another during the heart of my teen years, following my intuition. My point is not to brag, my point is that perhaps you could say I was one of the few individuals who did not accept the effect of a society pressing down with one idea when in reality there is another more accurate.

The laws are not the only thing that has changed with the way teens have been treated over the past several decades. Psychologists are viewing the different age ranges with a new outlook, as well as a new sort of authority, that they had never done in the past. Part of this is also due in part to the fact that psychology is fairly new, and philosophy treated youth as a figurative state in metaphor. The amount of drugs in use to try to help the kids to fall in line with the currently existing educational system has been on an epidemic rise over the past 10 years. Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro and more are being prescribed to new kids daily, and the scary part of it all is that we are not even sure how these medications are permanently affecting the brain, or other areas of the body. A number of heart-related deaths have already been linked to the use of Ritalin for children with ADD/ADHD.

Children are being conditioned to grow into teenagers with an emotional attitude that, in effect, could be described as a mass reaction to being science’s ongoing guinea pig. As technology and science advances, the experiments played on the public in an effort to improve a current situation will also affect the behavior and choices of a future generation.

From the number of problems that have been presented here, there is a single conclusion that can be reached. Suicide is the third largest cause of death in teens. Behavior altering medication such as anti-depressants has increased dramatically over the past decade. Right brain dominance is now recognized as the newly forming common trend of left brain dominance. The school system has a tendency not to change, but one day will be required to. Throughout the difficulty and the pain that the future generations will experience, we must remember one thing.

There is a choice.