TODAY'S TEENS AVOID A 'TRAFFIC' JAM

Experts And Kids Say This Generation Is Optimistic -- And Less Inclined To
Do Drugs

OK, you are the parent of a teenager. And you know that a movie is
just a movie; it's celluloid, not a slice of real life.

Nevertheless, you are panicked by the portrayal of alienated A-list
teenagers in Traffic, Steven Soderbergh's drug epic with multiple
themes that's up for five Golden Globe awards Sunday.

How real are those class leaders in private school, those teens with
the social pedigree and the top grades who kill time and almost themselves?

Not very, some say.

The movie has that dark thread about cynical, bored, angry, coked-out
kids -- as personified by the daughter of Michael Douglas' character
- -- all wrong, say some prominent trend trackers and teens themselves.
Those traits tend to belong to Generation X, the twentysomethings, not
today's 16-year-olds, they say.

"We assume that all that stuff from Gen-X land -- all the stereotypes of
detachment from family life, an attraction to risk-taking activities like
drugs and sex, a collective pessimism about the future -- is true of the
new bunch of teens today, that they are just a linear extension of
Generation X," says Neil Howe, co-author of Millennials Rising: The Next
Great Generation (Vintage, $14). "That is just not happening."

Howe and co-author William Strauss, both historians who have written
extensively about generational differences, coined the term
"millennials" for those born since 1982. The oldest have just
entered college.

"You can always find some kids like those in the movie," Howe says.
"But to say Michael Douglas' daughter is some type of representative
kid, that is just not indicated."

As Douglas' character prepares to become the nation's new drug czar,
he faces a brutal reality. His 16-year-old daughter, a National Merit
finalist played by Erika Christensen, is a drug addict. She and her
friends, one of whom almost dies from an overdose, generally trash
society, themselves, their parents, their future and one another as
they do drugs.

Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan says the portrayal is absolutely
accurate. Now 35, he says he saw such behavior often as a teen. And
those memories are bolstered by "hundreds and hundreds of people" he
interviewed while researching the movie for three years. "The
addictive nature cuts across every generation," he says. And
believing that kids headed to fancy Ivy schools don't do major drugs
is "ridiculous."

Parents can easily be confused about the real extent of teen drug use.
Statistics are complex and can be conflicting. The Partnership for a
Drug-Free America runs its own studies and monitors those of others.
The private, non-profit organization says that, overall, adolescent
drug use peaked in 1979, declined steadily throughout the 1980s and
began to climb again in 1991-92 until 1997. For the past three years,
however, there has been a slow, steady decline.

Howe and Strauss cite many hopeful statistics. Over the past five
years, the rates of teen homicide, violent crime, abortion and
pregnancy have "plummeted at the fastest rates ever recorded," they
write.

The authors see many positive teen values:

* Teens are team players. "They wear their school uniforms, give
service in the community, gravitate to group activities," Howe says.
Polls show they see selfishness as the major cause of the nation's
problems.

* They accept authority. Again, polls say twice as many teens as
parents trust the government; nine in 10 teens trust and feel close to
their parents. Teens tend to support and agree with the values of
their parents, Howe says, "although they may disagree with how well
those parents live by their values."

* They see themselves as smart. "These new teens think being smart is
a hugely positive thing," Howe says. "During the 1990s, aptitude
test scores have risen within every racial and ethnic group,
especially in elementary schools," Howe and Strauss write.

* They believe in the future and see themselves as its cutting edge.
This optimism perhaps most sets them apart from Generation X and the
teens in Traffic, according to other experts and some teens as well.

"Cynicism is much more true of Gen Xers," says Laura Sessions Stepp, author
of Our Last Best Shot: Guiding Our Children Through Early Adolescence
(Riverhead, $29.95). "I would say today's teens are realistic, not cynical.
They know much more about the world than we did at their age, and that has
made them more cautious. I found a resilience among them, a sense of
optimism that some might say is out of proportion with reality. They sense
they have a place in the world, and they will find it."

They are, she says, concerned about college and then getting jobs, but
"they feel they are better prepared by technology to take on the
future. The world they have known, without war and with a healthy
economy, has been pretty good. They do not see the world as black as
we do." The have their eyes open, Stepp says, "but they are looking
up at the sky."

Some teens agree. "We get jaded at my school once in a while, but I
would not say it is a constant thing," says Shinzong Lee, 17, of
Basking Ridge, N.J. "The depiction in the movie is an exaggeration."
And, she says, "the top students are not the ones using drugs."

Teens today know what is going on, says Brady Welch, 17, of Mount
Pleasant, S.C. "The fact is, you do see 16-year-olds using some
drugs. But you don't see a lot of pessimism and cynicism. We are not a
pessimistic generation."

Sarah Rosen, 17, goes to a private school in New York. "My friends
are motivated, upbeat people. Some do have money and the ability to
pay for things like drugs. But the kids I am around are talking about
what they will do after college and how they will change the world. We
don't think the world is going nowhere and there is nothing we can do
about it."

However, not everyone is mellow about teens in 2001. "Kids today are doing
cocaine and heroin. We know that," says Patricia Hersch, author of A Tribe
Apart: A Journey Into the Heart of American Adolescence (Ballantine, $14).
"We know many are depressed and not getting appropriate mental health
treatment." She says she deplores today's trend to see teens as either all
good or all bad. Instead, they are a collection of "complex, individual
lives."

Howard Simon of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America says parents
can take two messages from Traffic. "The movie is a wake-up call for
those who think good kids don't use drugs," he says. At the same
time, "the majority of kids are good kids," he says. And "the
majority are not using" illegal substances.