TEEN TURNOFF AT A YOUTH SYMPOSIUM

The presentation last week was billed as "An Insider's View of Popular
Youth Culture." More than 350 adults who work in drug abuse prevention
would learn, a spokesperson said, "what turns teens on," and how to
communicate anti-drug messages effectively.

First on the agenda was a video about hip-hop style, followed by a
discussion with a dozen "youth ambassadors" in their late teens and
early twenties. A laudable effort that unfortunately, in the eyes of
several youths interviewed after the show, morphed into "How to turn
teens off."

The video, said Robert Harper, 16, "was kind of depressing." A
pulsating panoply of teenagers and hip-hop musicians, it jumped from
one bizarre scene to another, including a shot of a girl applying
makeup in her bathroom while her boyfriend lay dead in the bathtub.

"I looked at that and wondered, 'What's he doing in the bathtub?'
20-year-old Lance Minor said.

Sariah Moody, 17, worried about the impression the video left with the
adults: "We do more than play music and drive fast cars. We go to
school, we play sports, we have jobs."

Of course they do, said Patricia Hicks Harper, the video's assistant
producer. The video was intended only to introduce adults to the
portion of teen culture they least understand: the music.

Not that many adults ended up seeing the video, for youth culture was
slotted as the next-to-last topic at the three-day conference, called
the National Substance Abuse Prevention Congress. The conference was
to adjourn at noon, and by the time the teens came on at 10 a.m., at
least two-thirds of the adults already had left. Fewer than 100 stayed
in the downtown Washington hotel meeting room to hear the young
participants.

The young people were allotted a half hour, and answered a total of
three questions. "We never had a chance to really talk," said Minor.

Minor and his colleagues had made a PowerPoint presentation to the
assembly the morning before. But they said they were not included in
the final Powerpoint group on Thursday, which summarized drug
prevention strategies and preceded the youth culture presentation. If
the subject of youth culture had come first, the adults "might have
included some of our ideas into the last presentations," Moody sighed.

An official for the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, the
conference sponsor, said the youth were placed deliberately near the
end in the hopes that they would be a draw for attendees who otherwise
might skip out early. The youth had their own caucus throughout the
conference, she said, and were included more than young people
normally are at such affairs.

The "ambassadors" didn't disagree with that. "We're happy they let us
speak. A lot of meetings we don't get to speak at all," said Talia
Hicks, 16. But had they been heard? They weren't sure.

Other impressions, each one minor, added up. Breakfast consisted of
bagels, coffee and tea. "Coffee and tea, only what adults drink. Where
was the orange juice?" Minor asked. Lunch, ordered specifically for
the young people, was pizza. "Why do grown-ups always think we want
pizza?" asked Harper. "We like Chinese food, Mexican food, Thai." One
day, several of the youths spent four hours writing a skit they had
been asked to prepare, only to have the adults review it and pronounce
it "too negative."

It's a tough old bird, this communication gap between adults who want
to do the right thing by young people and youths who end up feeling
slighted. Families, as well as professionals, dig this ditch
frequently: Adults think they know what teenagers want and what they
can do and plan accordingly.

Teens resent such assumptions, for they are in the business of
learning how to make their own decisions. They can't learn if they are
never given any major decisions to make, or if they're brought in at
the end of the decision-making process rather than at the beginning.

"Any generalization we adults make is an insult to their finding out
who they are," says Janice Levine, a Massachusetts psychologist who
specializes in counseling adolescents and parents. "The culture we
grew up in and their (culture) are so very different. How do we
presume to know what the stressors are? What would we think if someone
said all adults listen to one kind of music?"

Levine says adults who seek to understand teens must consult them
first, observing and listening with curious eyes and open minds. The
adults will have needs, but so will the young people, and options can
be negotiated that satisfy both.

Such diplomacy says to teens that their opinions and emerging powers
of reasoning are respected. This boost to their sense of personal
competence, if repeated over and over, is likely to result in them
making wise choices.

Isn't that what drug prevention is all about?