Sarah Kliff voxsplains:
The Centers for Disease Control released a monster report last week on the state of Americans’ health. The 511-page report makes one thing abundantly clear: teens are behaving better right now than pretty much any other time since the federal government began collecting data. The teen birth rate has plummeted in recent decades. Separate data shows this has coincided with dramatic drops in the teen abortion rates. The decline in teen births has also happened at a time when teenagers have gotten better at using contraceptives.
Russell Saunders cheers:
What this says to me is that, despite their reputations as hell raising hedonists with an immortality complex, teenagers are capable of absorbing information about keeping themselves safe and healthy. It speaks to the importance of comprehensive sex education programs, which provide teenagers with the facts they need to take care of themselves.
But he has a bone to pick with Vox:
In presenting those data, they summed it up with the headline “Today’s teenagers are the best-behaved generation on record.” However, the report contains no information about how frequently today’s adolescents call their grandmothers or turn in their homework on time. They haven’t collectively sat through a poetry reading and clapped politely at the end—they’ve demonstrated healthier choices than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Presumably health information about those latter age groups wouldn’t be framed in such a condescending manner.
Meanwhile, Drum speculates about the role lead exposure may have played:
What’s happening today isn’t an aberration. Teenagers from the mid-60s through the mid-90s were the aberration. We managed to convince ourselves during that era that something had gone permanently wrong, but it wasn’t so. The ultra-violent gangs and reckless behavior that became so widespread simply wasn’t normal, any more than expecting teenagers to sit around in kumbaya circles would be normal. Nor had anything gone fundamentally wrong with our culture. It was the result of defective brain development caused by early exposure to lead.
I’ll never be able to prove this. No one ever will. The data is simply not rich enough, and it never will be. Nevertheless, what evidence we do have sure points in this direction.
Much more Dish on Drum’s pet issue here.
The Dish 