Kelley Tedd

“and becoming a general at age sixteen. Joseph Smith received an answer to his prayer at age fourteen. What happened? How did young people change from being responsible to reckless? The current stereotypical assumption of teenagers was invented in the United States after World War II. In the early 1900s, large cities sprouted up in which youth experienced crime, child labor, and emotional stress. To protect children from these ills, reformers pushed for mandatory schooling, which pooled young people together for the first time. In the early 1940s, the word “teen-ager” was coined, and after the war an explosion of births produced the largest number of youths in history in the baby boomer generation. Economic stability after the war gave American families more disposable income, and to attract more of that money, advertisers began to market things directly to teenagers—cars, music, clothing, magazines, and movies.11 The idea of a “rebellious teenager” was thus invented in the 1950s and 1960s and sold (literally) to the baby boomer generation of youngsters, who grew up and passed this invented “tradition” down to their children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren in the twenty-first century. If we assume young men and women will act rebelliously, then when they do, they are simply meeting our expectations! In rebellion against my cultural surroundings and in support of the divine nature and potential of my children, I frequently tell them that “I don’t believe in teenagers!”
― Keith A. Erekson, Real vs. Rumor: How to Dispel Latter-Day Myths