

The Collateral Damage of a Teenager - tokenadult
http://nymag.com/news/features/adolescence-2014-1/

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jseliger
I don't have much to contribute to this discussion beyond saying that a) the
article fascinated me and b) this article is compatible with "Why Nerds Are
Unpopular":
[http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html](http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html) :

 _As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval
with suburbia. I don 't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are
driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the
Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their
craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere._

and "Lies We Tell Kids":
[http://paulgraham.com/lies.html](http://paulgraham.com/lies.html) :

 _Imagine if you tried to keep someone in as protected an environment as a
newborn till age 18. To mislead someone so grossly about the world would seem
not protection but abuse. That 's an extreme example, of course; when parents
do that sort of thing it becomes national news. But you see the same problem
on a smaller scale in the malaise teenagers feel in suburbia.

The main purpose of suburbia is to provide a protected environment for
children to grow up in. And it seems great for 10 year olds. I liked living in
suburbia when I was 10. I didn't notice how sterile it was. My whole world was
no bigger than a few friends' houses I bicycled to and some woods I ran around
in. On a log scale I was midway between crib and globe. A suburban street was
just the right size. But as I grew older, suburbia started to feel
suffocatingly fake.

Life can be pretty good at 10 or 20, but it's often frustrating at 15. This is
too big a problem to solve here, but certainly one reason life sucks at 15 is
that kids are trapped in a world designed for 10 year olds.

What do parents hope to protect their children from by raising them in
suburbia? A friend who moved out of Manhattan said merely that her 3 year old
daughter "saw too much." Off the top of my head, that might include: people
who are high or drunk, poverty, madness, gruesome medical conditions, sexual
behavior of various degrees of oddness, and violent anger._

