"This is the end..."

I want to write about the effect of increased youth isolation, and the impact pop music and youth culture has on these teens.

There can be no doubt that the media has played an ever-increasing role in this transition in our society. A study from just two years ago showed that the average teen in America spends approximately 42 hours a week in front of a screen of some sort (TV, computer, game systems). This did not include school time or time on their cell phones. That is the equivalent of a full-time job!

Previous generations did not have this same level of screen time. Sure, there have always been couch potatoes out there, but it was never encourage in the way it is today. Because of other societal changes over the last 40 years, particularly the increased number of female heads of households, women in the workplace, and the smaller number of children per household, there are more children unsupervised at home for more hours than ever before.

In many cases, the parents or guardians are at work before the children leave for school and/or do not get home until well after the kids have gotten home. For safety reasons, many parents do not want their children to go anywhere, but instead instruct them to stay home and keep out of trouble.

For many kids, this means time on the computer or watching TV, and often both simultaneously. Of course, for lots of them, they are also listening to their iPods or watching videos on TV or the computer during this leisure time.

Okay, so what does this have to do with us as teachers? Lots. Simply put, we have a ton of students who are very street smart in some ways, but socially retarded in others. Generations of American kids learned socialization skills not through “play dates,” but rather by heading to the playground after school and playing with whoever showed up. They learned how to get along with children who were older, younger, and different in many other ways.

Today, you can take a drive after school through whatever city or suburb you teach in, and you’ll see the parks are absolutely abandoned. Not a kid anywhere, unless it is an organized practice with lots of adults around. That is another thing missing from the socialization experiences for many of today’s students; they don’t have as many opportunities for unsupervised play, where they learn how to negotiate situations on their own, resolve differences, collaborate, cooperate, and even compromise.

Okay, back to the impact of media on these kids. When you spend a lot of time alone in your room, and much of your most meaningful human interaction takes place online, you end up feeling disconnected. When it is all you know, though, it doesn’t seem “wrong,” it just seems inadequate. Something is missing. You’re lonely. You’re frustrated by your teachers, your parents, your bratty younger sibling. You’re horny. You’re a teenager. And even if you are able to articulate these feelings via texting or Facebook chat, or wherever, you’re still missing the real time, face-to-face communication that delivers a far more satisfying validation (through body language alone), than any emoticons can deliver online.

So your loneliness/frustrations grow. Your outlets seem limited. You turn to what you find online, on TV, in music for some solace or understanding. Don’t get me wrong – this is not the first generation to look to popular music for validation of its feelings. But this may be the first to do it in the vacuum of their own experience, without sharing it communally.

This has spawned a ton of songs. While songs of teen loneliness and frustration used to center on unrequited love, a broken heart because your girl/guy wasn’t “true,” or other teen drama, now it is just as often about the lameness of life itself. So many songs decry the values of this society, and espouse a hopelessness that asks, explicitly or implicitly, “What’s the point of it all?”

For many kids, they cannot answer the question satisfactorily. This dark outlook has contributed to the epidemic of dropouts in this country, and some social scientists even point to certain subgenres of pop music as playing a role in the increase in teen suicide attempts.

Yes, I know that there have been suicide songs for decades. The first one I remember was Simon & Garfunkle’s “Richard Cory.” And while there were others in the 60s and early 70s, they usually didn’t position suicide as an option, but rather as the horrible choice made by someone in a story the song was telling, e.g., “Ode to Billy Joe.”

For the last 35 years, however, there have been more and more songs that are not only about suicide, but actively promoting it as an option – sometimes the only option, including such songs as Ozzie Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution,” Judas Priest’s “Better by You, Better Than Me,” Filter’s “Hey Man, Nice Shot,” and a host of others. Each of these songs was cited as the cause of a young person’s suicide, although the courts routinely have not found in favor of the parents in these sorts of lawsuits.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness points out that individual stresses, acts, or incidents are not truly “the cause” of a suicide attempt, but rather act as triggers for teens who are suffering from a mental or emotional illness, often undiagnosed and untreated, and are often overcome with hopelessness.

As teachers, it is not our job to try to monitor and moderate the music our students listen to, the videos they watch or the games they play. It is our duty, though, to watch them and look for signs of trouble. If you see a troubled kid who is not able to make the same kinds of associations with other students, they are quite possibly feeling disconnected. True, we are not trained psychologists, social workers, or medical professionals, but our schools do have these people on staff. It doesn’t hurt to make a casual referral if you see a student who is hurting, and may hurt themselves.

For all the hours they spend online, they rarely look for help there. Instead, all alone in their rooms, they look for solace, for like-minded kids, and too often, for respite and relief from a source that will usually only make things worse. As educators, we talk so often about academic interventions, but we need to be ready to make other kinds, too.