The Emerging Generation: An Inside Look at Canada's Teenagers

Alexander Craig is a freelance journalist in Lennoxville, Quebec.

It’s not just the very rich who are different from you and me, as Hemingway noted. Teenagers are too. Or are they? How much are today’s teenagers really different from their predecessors, how much do they continue to share and reflect similar values?

In today’s society this can hardly be measured except by extensive polling, and skillful interpretation of such survey research. The authors of this book, one based in Lethbridge, Alberta, the other in Toronto, Ontario, questioned 3600 high school students across Canada, with the assistance of guidance counsellors and teachers, in 152 randomly selected schools. The result is this wide-ranging examination of the many concerns that occupy the minds of Canada’s teenagers.

The book is sympathetic too. “While our culture tends to stress that it is not easy to be a teenager’s parent, we are taking the position in this book that it is also not easy to be a child-adult hybrid.” So the authors look at this “period in which an individual is lost in between being a child and an adult.” The focus here is on teenagers aged 15 to 19.

Again and again, the authors emphasize how and why life’s not easy for teenagers. Adults expect them to live up to standards that they, the adults, don’t exactly observe perfectly. Yet parents continue to see the problem as being, as one person put it, not a “generation gap” but a “species gap.”

As the authors say, “many of us did not understand clearly what we experienced during ‘those years.’ And we are often perplexed by what is happening with teenagers today.” They offer to help clear up some of that confusion — and to a great degree they keep that promise.