youth

With the annual state fair season approaching nationwide, the Des Moines Register reports on the status of county fairs in Iowa, a rural state where the kids just don’t farm like they used to.

The challenge:

Keeping youth engaged in old-fashioned farm fun in the digital age, a time when kids may be more enticed by Farmville on Facebook than by a 4-H project with hogs.

Apparently, even tech-savvy teens aren’t immune to the lure of tradition:

Although the Iowa State Fair, which opens Thursday in Des Moines, typically attracts more than a million visitors, the county fairs have survived as an important cultural attraction in part because they are the largest event of the year for many communities, Tucker said.

Fried foods, giant stuffed teddy bears and bandstand acts connect people across generations who seek an alternative to movies and video games.

“It’s a unique marriage of entertainment and education,” Tucker said. “There’s a long tradition of people attending fairs with parents, grandparents.”

A sociologist interprets:

In that way, the fairs serve as an extended family reunion, said Paul Lasley, an Iowa State University sociology professor.

“Fairs have evolved,” Lasley said. “But the basis of social interaction, neighboring, seeing your old friends, that’s still an important part of them.

“It’s these connections that keep the county fairs going. Connections to the past, but also connections to the future.”

But shifting trends in youth participation are impacting more traditional fair activities:

A decline in Iowa youth participation concerns some because the county fairs make celebrating the accomplishments of children a core part of the mission.

The number of youth showing livestock at county fairs last year was down 9 percent from 2008, according to Association of Iowa Fairs statistics. The number of youth showing nonlivestock projects was down 3 percent, data showed.

However, the youths who participated were more active. The number of livestock and nonlivestock exhibits was up slightly in 2009.

Such changes in demographics and participation are prompting some fair organizers to innovate.  Marshalltown, Iowa provides one example:

Polt said few from Marshalltown’s sizable Hispanic population participate, despite the role of county fairs in celebrating a community’s culture and heritage.

“We have to find avenues of bringing them in and letting them know we want them to be part of our fair,” he said.

Holding the fair on Sundays would allow Hispanic parents, many of whom work six days a week, to attend on a day traditionally set aside to spend with family, he said.

“You can’t keep catering to the same old crowd,” he said. “Your crowd’s getting younger. Generations change.”

College students rest assured: the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that spending time on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace won’t tank your grades.

Researchers at Northwestern University found no connection between time spent on social-networking sites and academic performance. The study, the results of which appear in the latest issue of Information, Communication & Society, included responses from approximately 1,000 first-year students at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Sites such as Facebook and MySpace had no effect on grades, despite how often students used them or how many they used.

A sociologist weighs in on how other social perks of these sites may outweigh any detrimental effect.

Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication studies and sociology at Northwestern, suggests that the benefits of social-networking sites may cancel out the distractions they pose.

“You could go on there and waste your time,” she said. “On the other hand, you can connect with your classmates, get information about homework assignments, get to know people better, and feel more comfortable engaging with them on academic matters.”

The New York Times explores social science research about a new stage of life: emerging adulthood.

[A] growing body of research shows that the real Peter Pans are not the boomers, but the generations that have followed. For many, by choice or circumstance, independence no longer begins at 21.

Young people in the U.S., it seems, are taking their time reaching the traditional milestones of adulthood:

People between 20 and 34 are taking longer to finish their educations, establish themselves in careers, marry, have children and become financially independent, said Frank F. Furstenberg, who leads the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, a team of scholars who have been studying this transformation.

“A new period of life is emerging in which young people are no longer adolescents but not yet adults,” Mr. Furstenberg said.

National surveys reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans, including younger adults, agree that between 20 and 22, people should be finished with school, working and living on their own. But in practice many people in their 20s and early 30s have not yet reached these traditional milestones.

Marriage and parenthood — once seen as prerequisites for adulthood — are now viewed more as lifestyle choices, according to a new report released by Princeton University and the Brookings Institution.

One component of this shift is that young people are relying on their parents longer than previous generations. While parents used to invest most in their kids during the teen years, parental support now continues into the 20s.

In the late 1990s, however, parents’ spending patterns began to shift so that the flow of money was greatest when their children were either very young or in their mid-20s.”

More people in their 20s are also living with their parents. About one-fourth of 25-year-old white men lived at home in 2007 — before the latest recession — compared with one-fifth in 2000 and less than one-eighth in 1970.

The sizable contribution from parents not only strains already stressed middle-class and poor families, researchers argue, but could also affect institutions that have traditionally supported young adults in this period, like nonresidential and community colleges and national service programs.

Some young people are not just delaying milestones, but are redefining what it means to be an adult:

For many, marriage has disappeared as a definition of traditional adulthood, as more and more younger people live together. Today 40 percent of births are to unmarried mothers, an increase from 28 percent in 1990.

At the same time, more women are remaining childless, either by choice or circumstance. Twenty percent of women in their 40s do not have children, Mr. Furstenberg said, pointing out that “not having children would have been considered bizarre or tragic in the ’50s; now it’s a lifestyle choice.”

Agriculture Online reports results from the Farm and Rural Life Poll, an annual survey of Iowa farmers conducted by Extension Sociology at Iowa State University.

The latest [survey] indicates concerns are growing surrounding the passage of farms to the next generation. In the 2008 poll, 42% of farmers responding said they were planning on retiring in the next 5 years, and among those, 56% said they had identified a successor, according to J. Gordon Arbuckle, Jr., leader of a team of ISU Extension sociologists administering the poll.

The survey explores what the farmers think motivates their children to take on the family farm:

“The 735 farmers who were over 55 — approaching retirement age — had 350 children who farmed, a proportion (48%) that represents less than half of the number that will be needed to replace the current generation of farmers as they retire,” he adds.

Of those saying the younger generation planned to take the reins of the farm, reasons like quality of life and love of farming topped the list of motivations.

“Following in importance were quality of life considerations and having grown up wanting to farm. Seventy-two percent of farmers rated these factors as having been important or very important criteria in their children’s decisions to farm,” Arbuckle says. “Ability to be their own boss (68%), desire to stay close to home (56%), desire to carry on family tradition (55%), and family ability to help get them started (55%) were also rated as important or very important by a majority of Farm Poll participants.”

Why are members of the next generation planning on other careers instead of returning to the farm? Arbuckle says income opportunities elsewhere comprised the top motivator, while industry entrance hurdles like input costs, high land rents and excessive overall financial risk topped the list of drivers toward other careers.

“In contrast to the factors influencing the decision to farm, most of the reasons that were rated as most important in the choice of a non-farm career were economic,” Arbuckle says.

“On the whole, results suggest that for those individuals who chose farming as their career, cultural and lifestyle factors were the predominant reasons underlying that choice. Whether regarding their own decisions to farm, or their children”s decisions, love of farming and quality of life issues were fundamental,” he continues. “On the other hand, for those children who did not choose to farm, parents’ assessments clearly point to economic factors as the most important decision criteria, whether in the form of economic barriers to farm entry or better income opportunities elsewhere.”

Check out the site for “The Farm Poll” for great summary reports of surveys dating back to 1982.

According to the Jamaica Gleaner, University of West Indies sociologist Claudette Crawford-Brown has identified a new phenomenon: Western Union children.  She said this is replacing “barrel children” in Jamaica:

Barrel children in the past were identified as those who did not have the physical presence of their parents, but were sent goodies through shipments from overseas.  The sociologist, however, said that the barrel-children phenomenon has been surpassed by parents who give their children remittances. The difference between the two is the amount of care involved.

“You don’t have the barrel children as I highlighted seven years ago, where you had parents sending children things in a barrel. We now have what you call ‘Western Union’ children, and these are children who are parented by cellphones and they are sent the money. However, when you have a barrel child, that mother goes into K-Mart or Wal-Mart and I see them and watch them and they say: ‘I wonder if this going fit Sasha’, and she takes out the shoes with the mark out on the paper and match it with the shoes, and say this will fit her, this will fit her. You know what that shows? Some amount of care,” she said.

There are consequences of these changes in long-distance care:

Crawford-Brown pointed out even with remittances and barrels, the absence of mother in a child’s life has the same impact on youths as the absence of fathers. She noted that the absence of parental guidance leaves these children vulnerable to negative influences, where many turn to violence and drugs to cope.

According to her, many of these children who receive money through remittances are not given proper guidance, thus the money they have access to can be used to purchase drugs or facilitate their participation in illicit activities.

The noted child advocate and sociologist said many behavioural problems shown among some children are as a result of the breakdown in the family and exposure to violence. Crawford-Brown also said that Jamaica needs to tackle apathy towards murder in the society, which has trickled down to children she has worked with.

Crawford-Brown’s research on “Western Union children” was also recently featured in a column in the Jamaica Observer.

This week, the Christian Century reviewed sociologist Christian Smith’s new book on religion and spirituality in “emerging adulthood”:

Souls in Transition, the impressive second installment of findings—and the first longitudinal sounding—from the massive National Study of Youth and Religion, is about [18- to 23-year-olds], the most religiously disengaged cohort in the U.S. Principal investigator Christian Smith, assisted by Patricia Snell, returned to young people originally interviewed in 2003 to see how their religious lives had changed.

Smith, a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, is a gutsy sociologist who does not mind tipping sacred cows or poking around in areas that theologians like to claim for themselves such as religious formation. His earlier book (with Melinda Lundquist Denton), Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, reported the first wave of NSYR findings. In 2007 Mark Oestreicher, then president of Youth Specialties, called Soul Searching one of the ten most influential youth ministry books—a first for a secular book on the sociology of religion.

Some findings:

Souls in Transition is a denser and in some ways more sobering volume [than Smith’s previous book] that represents a field-shaping contribution to the growing literature on emerging adults (young people roughly between the ages of 18 and 30). As developmental tasks once associated with the teen years reach into the twenties and thirties, ministry with emerging adults shows signs of becoming the new youth ministry of 21st-century congregations. Compared to people in other age groups, emerging adults are less likely to attend religious services weekly, pray daily or affiliate strongly with a religious tradition (a fact consistent with their tendency to resist institutional affiliations generally). Yet on some measures (thinking about the afterlife, taking the Bible literally, self-identifying as liberals) they reflect the adult population as a whole.

The big story in Souls in Transition is continuity: highly devoted emerging adults almost always start out as highly devoted teenagers, and religiously disinterested youth are unlikely to become interested as they grow older. (Most teenagers in the NSYR who committed to God did so before age 14.) When religious change occurs in emerging adulthood, it tends to be in the negative direction. What makes the faith of some young people more durable than that of others seems to be the presence of formative religious influences in their lives while they are teenagers (especially religious parents, but also other faithful adults), teenagers’ personal embrace of faith, a lack of religious doubts, multiple religious experiences, and personal faith practices, especially prayer and Bible reading.

Another intriguing argument:

Smith saves his most intriguing analysis for a discussion of the implicit cultural influences of mainline Protestantism and American evangelicalism (for example, a Muslim girl describes her “personal relationship with God”). Drawing on sociologist N. Jay Demerath’s thesis that “liberal Protestantism’s core values—individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of personal experience—have come to so permeate the broader American culture” that these values no longer need liberal Protestantism to survive, Smith makes a fascinating move: he argues that young people are not more involved in American religious life because they don’t have to be. The values of America’s dominant religious outlook for the past century are now carried forward by American culture itself. Smith contends that many emerging adults have bought into an implicit “mainline-liberal Protestant” perspective on American culture and “would be quite comfortable with the kind of liberal faith described by the Yale theologian H. Richard Niebuhr in 1937 as being about ‘a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.'”

New research on the social network effects of obesity was recently reported in the Guardian UK:

Children at schools where older students are obese or otherwise overweight are significantly more likely to suffer weight problems themselves, researchers report.

For each one per cent increase in the prevalence of obese students aged 16 to 18 years, the odds of a student at 14 to 16 years old attending that school also being overweight increased significantly.

“It was the one risk factor that held true across every school we looked at,” said Dr Scott Leatherdale, the chair of research at Cancer Care Ontario and lead investigator with the School Health Action, Planning and Evaluation System.

Commenting on the obesity connection between older and younger students, Leatherdale says:

It could be that younger students look up to older students, and so emulate their sedentary behaviour and bad eating habits and do not judge the older children’s body shape.  Or it could be that the school doesn’t encourage enough physical activity among its students, and the older students’ weight issues are an indication of that.

Sociologist Steve Fuller at Warwick University concurs with his assessment:

Obesity is one phenomenon that medical sociologists have nominated as an ‘epidemic’ that is transmitted by copying the behaviour of peers.  Certain connections between overeating and social activities become contagious. Young people gather together in more stationary modes than in the past: in front of computers and video games rather than sports.

The reason it’s called an ‘epidemic’ is because the pattern is reinforced by regular contact, so that if one is not in regular contact with the pattern, one doesn’t spontaneously do it The idea is that you overcome obesity by breaking up the networks where it’s transmitted.

The Sofia Echo reports on the debate in Poland over a new ban on symbols of communism.  It seems much of the disagreement is between those who were alive during the communist era and the younger generation:

Evocative symbols of Europe’s troubled past, such as the swastika, have long been illegal in a number of countries across the continent. But now, Poland has gone one step further. Poland has revised its criminal code to include a ban on symbols of communism. And, Poles can now be fined or even imprisoned if they are caught with a red star, a hammer and sickle or even a Che Guevara t-shirt.

To some, it is a natural reaction for a country that suffered so much from communism under the Soviet Union. But these days, many younger Poles are more likely to see communism as a source of satirical fun and creativity.

Sociologist Jutyna Kopczynska of Warsaw University says that Polish youth may be sympathetic to their elders’ suffering, but are more likely to see this as an issue of freedom and personal style:

“The young people are rebellious a bit. They think about their future and their freedom, and they want to show that they are free,” said Kopczynska. “So wearing a t-shirt with Che Guevara doesn’t mean that I am communist, but it means that I am trendy. The generation gap in our country is so huge that it’s hard to make a compromise.”

There are still questions about how the new ban will be applied, which is one explanation for the conflicted feelings of some young Poles:

The ban includes a number of exemptions for artists, educators and collectors of communist relics. And, so far no one has published an official list of exactly which symbols are outlawed. Critics have complained that the law is too hazy to actually be applied.
 
One woman speculates that this is why there has been little public outrage, even among the younger generation.

Twenty-four-year-old Lukasz Pawlowski says he agrees with the ban, if only because it protects the feelings of older Poles.
 
“I can understand that people who actually lived at that time, in the communist era, who were hurt by this system – it might upset them to see young people who might have basically no knowledge about this system and didn’t live in that, wearing the symbols they don’t understand. Wearing them probably just for fun,” he said.

The Des Moines Register recently discussed rural Iowans’ efforts to combat the problem of population loss as their young adults relocate to bigger cities, as well as the difficulties faced by those who stay close to home:

Iowans have made countless efforts to stop the state’s rural population drain. Former Gov. Tom Vilsack recruited former Iowans and welcomed immigrants. Groups worked to gussy up Main Street for a kind of nostalgic small-town tourism. Conference attendees listened to speakers who touted attracting a young, creative class of artists and entrepreneurs. Experts waited for the telecommuters who never came. Economic development officials hustled for small manufacturing plants that sometimes didn’t pay much.

The article includes sociological commentary on the fates of the “stayers”:

They are ignored, maybe even pitied when you see them in the grocery, and yet they are the very future of the town, say Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas, a husband-wife sociologist team who moved from Philadelphia to Iowa for several months to write “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America.”

They identified a group of citizens they labeled “the stayers” who were not often encouraged by teachers or parents to attend college, worked through school to buy a pickup truck, and became invisible to the town’s more moneyed and educated classes.

“They are taken for granted, as in the story of the prodigal son,” said Kefalas, a St. Joseph’s University sociology professor who interviewed nearly 300 young people in a northeast Iowa town they chose to keep anonymous. “They don’t work as hard investing in them and just assume the old way of life will somehow work out for them.”

Part of the problem is that secondary education in America is focused on preparing kids to go to college:

“Those that have the ability go off. That makes a lot of sense as a community or a school. You don’t want to hold them back,” said high school counselor Diane Stegge. “But at the same time, you are taking them away from the community.”

Kefalas said schools should do more to prepare students who have a desire to stay or don’t have the money or abilities for college. Many are too busy catering to the high achievers.

“Teachers in Ellis (the pseudonym for the town in the book) were offended by our portrayal. But I’m a teacher, and it’s much more fun to teach those above grade level,” she said. “The challenge is how you make your school work for everyone.”

One rural Iowa school board member sums up the consequences for small towns of ignoring their average students:

“The ones with higher education, we know there is going to be nothing here for them,” he said. “We also try to focus on those with special needs. But the middle-of-the-road ones are going to become our community.”

The New York Times reports:

In recent years, a growing number of teenagers have been dressing to articulate — or confound — gender identity and sexual orientation. Certainly they have been confounding school officials, whose responses have ranged from indifference to applause to bans.

Further:

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules.

“This generation is really challenging the gender norms we grew up with,” said Diane Ehrensaft, an Oakland psychologist who writes about gender. “A lot of youths say they won’t be bound by boys having to wear this or girls wearing that. For them, gender is a creative playing field.” Adults, she added, “become the gender police through dress codes.”

Recently, a Mississippi 17-year-old wasn’t allowed to wear a tux for her yearbook photo:

At Wesson Attendance Center, a Mississippi public school, just that sort of fight erupted over senior portraits. Last summer, during her photo session, Ceara Sturgis, 17, dutifully tried on the traditional black drape, the open-necked robe that reveals the collarbone, a hint of bare shoulder.

“It was terrible!” said Ms. Sturgis, an honors student, band president and soccer goalie, who has been openly gay since 10th grade. “If you put a boy in a drape, that’s me! I have big shoulders and ooh, it didn’t look like me! I said, ‘I can’t do this!’ So my mom said, ‘Try on the tux.’ And that looked normal.”

Shortly thereafter, students were informed that girls had to wear drapes for yearbook portraits; boys, tuxedos.

The Mississippi chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to the school. Rickey Clopton, superintendent of Copiah County schools, did not return phone calls. Last month he released a statement affirming that the school’s decision was “based upon sound educational policy and legal precedent.”

Last month, Veronica Rodriguez, Ms. Sturgis’s mother, paid for a full-page ad in the yearbook that is to include a photograph of her daughter in a tuxedo.

Schools have some freedom in how they will respond:

But generally, courts give local administrators great latitude. In Marion County, Fla., students must dress “in keeping with their gender.” Last spring, when a boy came to school wearing high-heeled boots, a stuffed bra, and a V-neck T-shirt, he was sent home to change.

“He was cross-dressing, and it caused a disruption in the normal instructional day,” said Kevin Christian, a district spokesman. “That’s the whole point behind the dress code.”

Sociologists weigh in on how non-conformity can lead to harassment:

“There are other places where there are real safety issues,” said Barbara Risman, a sociologist at the University of Illinois who studies adolescent gender identity. “Most boys still very much feel the need to repress whole parts of themselves to avoid peer harassment.”

Last fall, Stephen Russell, a professor at the University of Arizona who studies gay, lesbian and transgender youths, conducted a survey of about 1,200 California high school students. When asked why those perceived as not as “masculine” or “feminine” as others were harassed, a leading reason students gave was “manner of dress.”

So…

When a principal asks a boy to leave his handbag at home, is the request an attempt to protect a student from harassment or harassment itself?