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“Girls today are doing great.” This news link caught my eye today, so I followed up to see what sociologist Michael Males is saying about adolescent girls. This senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco maintains that collected research on girls goes against what he calls cultural myths about girls in America-violent deaths, depression, and pregnancy have all fallen over the last thirty years. More girls in college than ever. Internet predators aren’t a threat. Dating violence has gone down over the last 10 years.
The top cause of injury to females, according to Males? Violence in the home. The media, however, seem to drift past that reality.
Despite that painful point-which deserves a post of its own-Males’ overall picture is that girls are, by and large, doing well. We should be encouraged, right?
We’ve had some things to say about girls in our own research articles here, and here, and here. And they have all elicited a lot of conversation among youth workers. So what really IS going on with girls, anyway? Or more broadly, what’s the news about kids in general? Our Positive Youth Development friends say things are always looking up: kids are resilient and thriving, and the glass is half full. Other colleagues are deeply concerned about the hurts kids face, and call our attention to their overwhelming pain. The glass is half empty, or worse.
To both sides, we say “Yes.” Right. We need to be thinking about the both/and realities of the adolescents we know and love. Research can point us in all directions, and quite honestly we can use research to take us down a lot of roads of speculation. But our passion for ministering among kids and families has to be drawn from both sides: a healthy realization of the pain and suffering kids struggle with, right alongside bursts of good news that keep us hopeful for their futures.
Sounds a bit like a Kingdom that is both now AND yet to come…now that’s news.
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March 11th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
From just a cursory glance at Michael Males’ website it seems like he’s looking through rose colored glasses and that every news story about teens is made up.
I was also disturbed by the dismissal of internet predators.
I am all for positive youth development, but he really seems extreme.
March 11th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
A clarification – every negative news story is made up.
March 11th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Shane, I agree–throwing all caution and research to the wind is a wrong approach. Tempering the two sides is what gets tough. What I think people like Males can help us remember is that media-reported research is a few steps away from the research itself, and that research of any kind is done from a particular standpoint with particular assumptions and hypotheses that shape what we learn from the data. So like we often say about our own college transition research, we think we can learn a lot from it, but we should still take it all with a grain of salt…