From this has emerged an almost total breakdown of communication between teen-
agers and their parents' generation. Generally the adolescents do not tell their parents
their most acute problems; they do not appeal to parents or adults but to each other for
help in facing such problems (except where emotionally starved girls appeal to men
teachers); and, when any effort is made to talk across the gap between the generations,
words may pass but communication does not. Behind this protective barrier a new teen-
age culture has grown up. Its chief characteristic is rejection of parental values and of
middle-class culture. In many ways this new culture is like that of African tribes: its
tastes in music and the dance, its emphasis on sex play, its increasingly scanty clothing,
its emphasis on group solidarity, the high value it puts on interpersonal relations
(especially talking and social drinking), its almost total rejection of future preference and
its constant efforts to free itself from the tyranny of time. Teen-age solidarity and
sociality and especially the solidarity of their groups and subgroups are amazingly
African in attitudes, as they gather nightly, or at least on weekends, to drink "cokes," talk
interminably in the midst of throbbing music, preferably in semidarkness, with couples
drifting off for sex play in the corners as a kind of social diversion, and a complete
emancipation from time. Usually they have their own language, with vocabulary and

constructions so strange that parents find them almost incomprehensible. This
Africanization of American society is gradually spreading with the passing years to
higher age levels in our culture and is having profound and damaging effects on the
transfer of middle-class values to the rising generation. A myriad of symbolic acts, over
the last twenty years, have served to demonstrate the solidarity of teen culture and its
rejection of middle-class values. Many of these involve dress and "dating customs," both
major issues in the Adolescent-Parental Cold War.

In the days of Horatio Alger, the marks of youthful middle-class aspiration were such
obvious symbols as well-polished shoes, a necktie and suit coat, a clean-shaved face and
well-cut hair, and punctuality. For almost a generation now, teen culture has rejected the
necktie and suit coat. Well-polished shoes gave way to dirty saddle shoes, and these in
turn to "loafers" and thong sandals. Shaving became irregular, especially when schools
were not in session; haircuts were postponed endlessly, with much parental-adolescent
bickering. Fewer and fewer young people carried watches, even when they lived, as on a
college campus, in fairly scheduled lives.

"Dating," as part of adolescent rebellion, became less and less formalized. The formal
middle-class dance of a generation ago, arranged weeks ahead and with a dance program,
became almost obsolete. Everything has to be totally "casual" or today's youth rejects it.
By 1947 a dance program (listing the dances in numbered order with the girl's partner for
each written down) was obsolete. "Going steady," which meant dancing only with the
boy who invited her, became established, a complete rejection of the middle-class dance
whose purpose was to provide the girl with a maximum number of different partners in
order to widen her acquaintance with matrimonial possibilities.

...

Fortunately, "going steady" was only a brief, if drastic, challenge to parental attitudes,
and was soon replaced by tribal gregariousness and tolerant sexual broad-mindedness,
which might be called "clique going," since it involved social solidarity (sometimes
sexual promiscuity) within a small group, usually of ten or less. This became, to their
adults, the "teen-age gang," which still thrives, but never in a very formal way in middle-
class circles as it does in lower-class ones. Two casualties of this process are sexual
jealousy and sexual privacy, both of which have largely disappeared among many upper-
middle-class young people. In some groups sex has become a purely physiological act,

somewhat like eating or sleeping. In others, sexual experience is restricted to loved ones,
but since these youths love many persons (or even love everyone) this is much less of a
restriction than it might seem to a middle-class mind. Generally a sharp distinction is
made between "loving someone" (which justifies sex) and being "in love" with someone
(which justifies monogamous behavior).

Because of the breakdown of communication between the generations of middle-class
families, parents know little of this side of teen-age culture, at least so far as their own
children are concerned. They usually know much more about the behavior of their
friends' children, because they are more likely to catch glimpses of the behavior of the
latter in unguarded moments. On the whole, middle-class parents today are surprisingly
(and secretly) tolerant about the behavior of their daughters so long as they do not create
a public scandal by "getting into trouble."

...

One reason for the spreading of these relaxed ideas on behavior is the devastating
honesty of the younger generation, especially about themselves. This seems to be based
on their gregarious garrulity. An earlier generation had its share of illicit actions of
various kinds, but they kept these a secret and regarded each as an aberrant action that
was psychologically excluded from their accepted social patterns and would not,
therefore, be repeated. This view continued, no matter how often it was repeated. But the
younger generation of today has accepted the existentialist idea, "I am what I do." The

adolescent tells his group what he did, and they usually agree that this is the way he is,
however surprising it is. Their whole attitude is pragmatic, almost experimental: "This is
what happened. This is the way things are. This is the way I am." They are engaged in a
search for themselves as individuals, something they were called upon to do in the early
grades of school, thanks to the misconceptions of John Dewey, and they are quite alien to
any theory that the self is a creature of trained patterns and is not a creature of discovered
secrets. Now, in the 1960's, this opinion of man's nature is changing and, as a
consequence of George Orwell, mishmash conceptions of brainwashing, and the revival
of Pavlovian psychology through the work of men like Professor B. F. Skinner of
Harvard, the idea of personality as something trained under discipline to a desired pattern
is being revived.