Children – that is, any person age 25 or younger – live in a world so different from the adult world that it could almost be described as a parallel universe.
This is nothing new. It was as true of my generation, in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s, as it is today, except in the matter of degree. I am now 64. When I was 25 and younger, it was popular to say, “Never trust anybody over 30.” Yet we had to live with, and live like, the old fogies, because that is the only kind of living there was.
In America in the 1950s, American post-war mainstream culture, and the companies that marketed to it, was still adult-oriented, and in goods and services, movies and entertainment, the kids wore and watched and listened to the same things as their parents because that’s all there was. It was very much a youth culture that convened at the movies and in the hamburger joint parking lots, but the movie was “Three Coins in the Fountain,” and Perry Como, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher and Patti Page sang practically all of the music coming out of the car radios. In the youth of that era, it set up the sort of angst that began to show up in movies like “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”
That all started to change after 1954, with the arrival in the youth awareness of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and with the spread of television. But compared to 2005, the 1950s in America might as well have occurred on another planet. Recently, in the comic strip “Zits,” Jeremy’s mom has asked him to take out the trash. Jeremy, not moving from the couch, says, “Ages 14-25, $94 billion in discretionary spending.” His mom counters by offering to freeze his allowance. In the last panel, Jeremy, dumping the trash in the can, says, “The retail industry respects me more than my parents do.”
That’s not generally true, but it is true in most cases that the retail industry pays at least as much (and frequently more) attention to children than their parents do. The kids are spending the $94 billion on things they want and have been manufactured, created, or organized for them. If parents researched their kids one-tenth as much as the retail industry does, millions of parent-child relationships would change.