Chapter 1 Introduction: Kids These Days Chapter 2 Kidnapped! Childhood Stolen Chapter 3 Greedy Gluttons: Childhood Indulged Chapter 4 School House Shock: Zero Tolerance and the Scary School Myth Chapter 5 Hazed and Confused: Mean Kids Chapter 6 Jackasses and Copycats: X-treme Behavior Chapter 7 Hell on Wheels: Teen Drivers Chapter 8 Conclusion: The Business of Youth Phobia: Fear Sells
Karen Sternheimer teaches in the sociology department at the University of Southern California. She is the author of It's Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture's Influence on Kids.
Sternheimer has examined the powerful shaping influence of US print
media articles on youth and linked these perceptions to policy and
community reaction to youth. Her analysis of newspaper articels
reveals perceived youth characteristics—dangerous, subject to
physical harm, gluttonous, misbehaving school students, stupid,
easily seduced into deviant behavior—as essential components
justifying US adult fear of youth. . . . Sternheimer challenges
these misperceptions with the available evidence arising from
natiaonal research and critical thinking, and details the impact of
socioecnomic class stratification and gender. Highly
recommended.
*CHOICE*
Kids These Days makes a critically needed contribution to our
understanding of modern youth and their distorted image in the
popular media. It is both intellectually stimulating and accessible
to a wide variety of readers, including youths themselves. There is
an avalanche of perfectly awful, same-themed books by popular and
academic authors…[Sternheimer] takes a radically different approach
and has produced a book that freshens this stifling, sterile
climate with dramatically new information. I believe it is ahead of
its time… and could well generate the kind of attention Culture of
Fear received. I would recommend it without hesitation as a text or
popular work that documents, analyzes, and challenges the
destructive myths about 'kids today.'
*Mike Males, University of California, Santa Cruz*
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