Status Updates From Rumspringa: To Be or Not to...

Some Amish elders do acknowledge that cutting off schooling after the eighth grade limits the children, but that it benefits the community of the sect for the kids to have less ability to make it on the outside and hastens their return to the fold. Do those who return home have a sense of limited horizons or of inadequacy? If they do, they don't express it. Rather, they affect the attitude of "been there, done that."

Norm believes that while a "strength" of the Amish is "that we respect tradition and are slow to change," that strength can function as a drawback when the community and its families must deal with a rapidly changing world and escalating bad influences. The best thing for Amish youth, Norm argues, is "more witnesses from among us who grew up and never did drugs, alcohol, premarital sex."

At age thirteen, after moving with her family from Wisconsin to Middlebury, Indiana, Lydia T has a strange moment: for the first time in her life she is attending an Amish school--just for a year, until she is old enough to graduate. Her entire previous schooling has been in the public school system. The Amish schoolhouse in Middlebury is the smallest school she has ever seen.

"It's the 'cool' kids who drive everything," she opines. "In school, if they're inclined to do well academically, others follow, and everybody does better. Same thing with the band and the choir: once you get the cool kids excited about an activity, it takes off." That's the positive side of peer pressure.

As the party gets into full swing, and beer and pot are making the participants feel no pain, a few Amish girls huddle and make plans to jointly rent an apartment in a nearby town when they turn eighteen, as some older girls have already done. Others shout in Pennsylvania Dutch and in English about how much it will cost to travel to and attend an Indianapolis rock concert.