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How teens today are different from past generations, a psychologist mines big data on teens and finds many ways this generation—the “igens"—is different from boomers, gen xers, and millennials..

Every generation of teens is shaped by the social, political, and economic events of the day. Today’s teenagers are no different—and they’re the first generation whose lives are saturated by mobile technology and social media.

In her new book, psychologist Jean Twenge uses large-scale surveys to draw a detailed portrait of ten qualities that make today’s teens unique and the cultural forces shaping them. Her findings are by turn alarming, informative, surprising, and insightful, making the book— iGen:Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us —an important read for anyone interested in teens’ lives.

Who are the iGens?

Twenge names the generation born between 1995 and 2012 “iGens” for their ubiquitous use of the iPhone, their valuing of individualism, their economic context of income inequality, their inclusiveness, and more.

She identifies their unique qualities by analyzing four nationally representative surveys of 11 million teens since the 1960s. Those surveys, which have asked the same questions (and some new ones) of teens year after year, allow comparisons among Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and iGens at exactly the same ages. In addition to identifying cross-generational trends in these surveys, Twenge tests her inferences against her own follow-up surveys, interviews with teens, and findings from smaller experimental studies. Here are just a few of her conclusions.

iGens have poorer emotional health thanks to new media. Twenge finds that new media is making teens more lonely, anxious, and depressed, and is undermining their social skills and even their sleep.

iGens “grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet,” writes Twenge. They spend five to six hours a day texting, chatting, gaming, web surfing, streaming and sharing videos, and hanging out online. While other observers have equivocated about the impact, Twenge is clear: More than two hours a day raises the risk for serious mental health problems.

She draws these conclusions by showing how the national rise in teen mental health problems mirrors the market penetration of iPhones—both take an upswing around 2012. This is correlational data, but competing explanations like rising academic pressure or the Great Recession don’t seem to explain teens’ mental health issues. And experimental studies suggest that when teens give up Facebook for a period or spend time in nature without their phones, for example, they become happier.

The mental health consequences are especially acute for younger teens, she writes. This makes sense developmentally, since the onset of puberty triggers a cascade of changes in the brain that make teens more emotional and more sensitive to their social world.

Social media use, Twenge explains, means teens are spending less time with their friends in person. At the same time, online content creates unrealistic expectations (about happiness, body image, and more) and more opportunities for feeling left out—which scientists now know has similar effects as physical pain . Girls may be especially vulnerable, since they use social media more, report feeling left out more often than boys, and report twice the rate of cyberbullying as boys do.

Social media is creating an “epidemic of anguish,” Twenge says.

iGens grow up more slowly. iGens also appear more reluctant to grow up. They are more likely than previous generations to hang out with their parents, postpone sex, and decline driver’s licenses.

More on Teens

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Explore how to help teens find purpose .

Twenge floats a fascinating hypothesis to explain this—one that is well-known in social science but seldom discussed outside academia. Life history theory argues that how fast teens grow up depends on their perceptions of their environment: When the environment is perceived as hostile and competitive, teens take a “fast life strategy,” growing up quickly, making larger families earlier, and focusing on survival. A “slow life strategy,” in contrast, occurs in safer environments and allows a greater investment in fewer children—more time for preschool soccer and kindergarten violin lessons.

“Youths of every racial group, region, and class are growing up more slowly,” says Twenge—a phenomenon she neither champions nor judges. However, employers and college administrators have complained about today’s teens’ lack of preparation for adulthood. In her popular book, How to Raise an Adult , Julie Lythcott-Haims writes that students entering college have been over-parented and as a result are timid about exploration, afraid to make mistakes, and unable to advocate for themselves.

Twenge suggests that the reality is more complicated. Today’s teens are legitimately closer to their parents than previous generations, but their life course has also been shaped by income inequality that demoralizes their hopes for the future. Compared to previous generations, iGens believe they have less control over how their lives turn out. Instead, they think that the system is already rigged against them—a dispiriting finding about a segment of the lifespan that is designed for creatively reimagining the future .

iGens exhibit more care for others. iGens, more than other generations, are respectful and inclusive of diversity of many kinds. Yet as a result, they reject offensive speech more than any earlier generation, and they are derided for their “fragility” and need for “ trigger warnings ” and “safe spaces.” (Trigger warnings are notifications that material to be covered may be distressing to some. A safe space is a zone that is absent of triggering rhetoric.)

Today’s colleges are tied in knots trying to reconcile their students’ increasing care for others with the importance of having open dialogue about difficult subjects. Dis-invitations to campus speakers are at an all-time high, more students believe the First Amendment is “outdated,” and some faculty have been fired for discussing race in their classrooms. Comedians are steering clear of college campuses, Twenge reports, afraid to offend.

The future of teen well-being

Social scientists will discuss Twenge’s data and conclusions for some time to come, and there is so much information—much of it correlational—there is bound to be a dropped stitch somewhere. For example, life history theory is a useful macro explanation for teens’ slow growth, but I wonder how income inequality or rising rates of insecure attachments among teens and their parents are contributing to this phenomenon. And Twenge claims that childhood has lengthened, but that runs counter to data showing earlier onset of puberty.

So what can we take away from Twenge’s thoughtful macro-analysis? The implicit lesson for parents is that we need more nuanced parenting. We can be close to our children and still foster self-reliance. We can allow some screen time for our teens and make sure the priority is still on in-person relationships. We can teach empathy and respect but also how to engage in hard discussions with people who disagree with us. We should not shirk from teaching skills for adulthood, or we risk raising unprepared children. And we can—and must—teach teens that marketing of new media is always to the benefit of the seller, not necessarily the buyer.

Yet it’s not all about parenting. The cross-generational analysis that Twenge offers is an important reminder that lives are shaped by historical shifts in culture, economy, and technology. Therefore, if we as a society truly care about human outcomes, we must carefully nurture the conditions in which the next generation can flourish.

We can’t market technologies that capture dopamine, hijack attention, and tether people to a screen, and then wonder why they are lonely and hurting. We can’t promote social movements that improve empathy, respect, and kindness toward others and then become frustrated that our kids are so sensitive. We can’t vote for politicians who stall upward mobility and then wonder why teens are not motivated. Society challenges teens and parents to improve; but can society take on the tough responsibility of making decisions with teens’ well-being in mind?

The good news is that iGens are less entitled, narcissistic, and over-confident than earlier generations, and they are ready to work hard. They are inclusive and concerned about social justice. And they are increasingly more diverse and less partisan, which means they may eventually insist on more cooperative, more just, and more egalitarian systems.

Social media will likely play a role in that revolution—if it doesn’t sink our kids with anxiety and depression first.

About the Author

Diana Divecha

Diana Divecha, Ph.D. , is a developmental psychologist, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center and Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and on the advisory board of the Greater Good Science Center. Her blog is developmentalscience.com .

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1 Introduction: A Kaleidoscope of Youth Cultures

The author, editor, or co-editor of more than twenty books, James Marten taught at Marquette University for thirty-six years, where he is now Professor of History Emeritus. He was a founder of the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) and served as the Society’s president from 2013 until 2015. He is a former editor of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.

• Published: 23 February 2023
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This chapter provides an overview of youth culture, which represents multiple communities and values. It begins by considering the difference on how historians and social scientists examine youth culture. While social scientists are consciously trying to find solutions to perceived problems, historians are more interested in explaining why particular aspects of youth culture are perceived as problems. The chapter then explores how histories of youth culture can be divided into several categories of inquiry: juvenile delinquency, child labor, child soldiers, youth activism, girlhood, and popular culture. It also outlines the subsequent chapters, which, taken together, demonstrate that youth culture has developed out of efforts by adults to shape coming of age and the efforts of youth themselves to find their own paths. Throughout, the authors distinguish between the histories of youth and the histories of youth culture.

The phrase “youth culture” brings together two of the easiest and most difficult words to define. We all know what a “youth” is, and we all have at least a sense of what “culture” is, even though it is a fungible kind of word, related to literature, performing arts, and music, of course—but also to ethnicity, belief systems, and socioeconomic class. But the challenges and opportunities that scholars face in writing about youth and culture come from the fact that these words are highly elastic and relative; used together, they create an almost impossible-to-define concept. Yet youth is one of the most fascinating, rewarding, frightening, and fraught passages in a person’s life, and the way young people experience and describe that passage—and the way parents and society try to narrow the possibilities of that passage—makes up much of what we know about youth culture.

In his 1985 sociological overview, Comparative Youth Culture , Mike Brake writes that sixty or seventy years of scholarship on youth cultures had coalesced around the theme “that if the young are not socialized into conventional political, ethical and moral outlooks, if they are not programmed into regular work habits and labour discipline, then society as it is today cannot continue.” These perennial, age-old fears lend urgency to the need to understand youth culture, and they provide hints as to why social scientists—in the fields that developed late in the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, such as psychology, sociology, and social work—studied youth culture for decades before historians took it seriously. Brake goes on to write,

What is central to any examination of youth culture is that it is not some vague structural monolith appealing to those roughly under thirty, but is a complex kaleidoscope of several subcultures, or different age groups, yet distinctly related to the class position of those in them.

The historians who contributed to this handbook might not use precisely the same language, but they would certainly agree with the notion that there is not one “youth culture.” And, although it may stretch the metaphor to say so, youth culture is similar to a kaleidoscope in that it represents multiple communities and values, and that it can be seen differently depending on the perspective from which it is being viewed. 1

Societies have often focused on youth culture as a series of problems: delinquency, illicit sex, loud music, protest, and countless other forms of behavior often viewed as threats to social order that demand solutions. This reductionism is reflected in the titles found on the shelves of the Library of Congress’s HQ subsection in any academic library: Fitting In, Standing Out ; Youth Crisis ; My Son Is an Alien ; Search for Identity ; All Grown Up and No Place to Go ; Lost Youth in the Global City ; Teenage Wasteland ; Growing Up Absurd ; The Vanishing Adolescent ; Strangers in the House ; Pathways through Adolescence ; Not Much, Just Chillin’ ; Re/Constructing “The Adolescent” ; Goth’s Dark Empire ; Super Girls, Gangstas, Freeters, and Xenomaniacs .

Although the specifics have varied, the general concerns have not much changed since the early twentieth century. In a recent collaboration with Scientific American , the journal Nature devoted much of a 2018 issue to “Coming of Age: The Science of Adolescence.” Its introduction states that

It’s widely accepted that adolescents are misunderstood. Less well known is how far we still have to go to understand adolescence itself. One problem is that it is hard to characterize: the concept of puberty does not capture the decade or more of transformative physical, neural, cognitive and socio-emotional growth that a young person goes through. Another is that science, medicine, and policy have often focused on childhood and adulthood as the most important phases of human development, glossing over the years in between.

The rest of the issue examines contemporary health and social issues: brain development, generational relationships, use of media, alcohol, obesity, and antisocial behavior. 2

In some ways historians have followed the lead of psychologists, political scientists, social workers, activists, and policymakers in exploring youth culture through the lenses of pathologies, failures of society, or attempts to solve perceived problems. Yet historians by their very nature do not see themselves as solvers of problems; rather, they step back to study the actions and desires that seem to feed those problems along with the institutions, organizations, and laws intended to control them. In the introduction to their excellent anthology, Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard write that “the practices of young people become occasions for moral panic … resulting in calls for social renewal and action.” Drug use, sex, crime, sexuality and teen pregnancy, and shortcomings in our educational systems have all taken their turns, some several times—as sources of community anxiety and increased supervision and regulation. The more than two dozen essays that Austin and Willard assembled tend to focus more on youth agency than on attempts to control it, highlighting music, art, dress, cars, zines, and other forms of self-expression. 3

The difference, perhaps, between historians and social scientists examining youth culture is that, while the latter are consciously trying to find solutions to perceived problems (and, of course, there are problems that need to be solved), the former are more interested in explaining why particular aspects of youth culture are perceived as problems. Historians seek to understand the motivations behind the youth forming those cultures and the adults expressing their anger, fear, or dismay.

In Paula Fass’s Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood: In History and Society , Austin offers a useful overview of the historiography and history of youth culture. The first line of his entry is instructive: “Culture is among the most complicated words in the English language.” He goes on: “It refers to the processes by which … traditions and rituals” and “frameworks for understanding experience … characteristically shared by a group of people” are “maintained and transformed across time.” Some, he points out, are “distinctive from those of their parents and the other adults in their community.” Another useful point he makes is that, even if the institutions and concrete evidence of culture do not appear in the historical record, it does not mean that youth culture did not exist. For him—and for many of the authors in this handbook— behavior is as much a product and signifier of youth culture as are institutions, organizations, and movements. 4

Defining a Historical Youth Culture

The essays in this volume explore the development and diversification of youth culture around the world from the medieval period to the present. Although global in scope, this is not a comprehensive history of youth culture. It does , however, address a comprehensive set of issues related to youth culture. Throughout, authors distinguish between the histories of youth (in other words, the experiences of youth and the conditions in which they live) and the histories of youth culture (the cultural and emotional products of youths’ interaction with one another and with their larger community or communities). For instance, an essay on youth and work provides an overview of the nature of the work experience, but it emphasizes the ways in which youth responded to work, and the ways in which greater autonomy, access to spending money, and relationships to other youth contributed to the formation of youth culture.

Taken together, the chapters demonstrate that youth culture has developed out of efforts by adults to shape coming of age and the efforts of youth themselves to find their own paths. It encompasses the aspects of “culture” that we are familiar with—art, literature, drama—as well as the less tangible but perhaps more important organizations, associations, customs, and styles that draw youth together and separate them from others. The ways in which youth spend their leisure time has figured prominently in the ways that parents and policymakers have worried about youth culture, even as leisure activities provided structure to that culture, and a significant segment of youth culture has also been almost inseparable from popular culture—music, movies, and television, especially—since at least the 1950s and 1960s. Normal biological, emotional, and intellectual development naturally intersect with youth culture, especially in the contexts of emerging sexuality, mental health issues, and the relationship of youth to authority figures and institutions.

Studying the history of youth culture in any society provides a crucial lens for understanding that society’s value systems, educational and economic structures, gender relations, and virtually every facet of cultural expression and human development. This is particularly important during the modern period, which saw the development of economies that required less labor from adolescents while at the same time offering—and requiring, in most places—more opportunities for formal education, both of which encouraged the development of a separate youth culture. Although these conditions emerged first in the United States and then in Western Europe, they gradually expanded to most of the world, although specific forms of youth culture varied greatly by place, ethnicity, and religion, among other factors. Moreover, societies around the world have periodically experienced crises in the behavior of adolescents (the “boy problem” in the United States in the early twentieth century, for instance).

The Search for a Definition of Youth Culture

Humans have for many centuries recognized “youth” as a separate phase of life. It appeared in many early demarcations of the “stages of man,” although the exact ages at which it began and ended could vary from the mid-teens to late twenties. But the important point is that virtually all societies recognized some distinct facets of youth, from legal responsibility to the ability to articulate thoughts and feelings to being physically ready and mature enough to consider courtship. As a recent brief survey of adolescence says, one definition is disarmingly simple: the “period of transition between life as a child, and life as an adult.” The author goes on to state that puberty has normally been a fairly safe starting point for thinking about adolescence, but a paragraph later he writes that although the teenage years are generally considered identical to adolescence, some researchers consider ages ten to eighteen as more accurate, and the World Health Organization identifies it as ten to nineteen. 5

Looming large over any study of youth or youth culture is the work of G. Stanley Hall, who earned the first doctorate in psychology in the United States and published Adolescence in 1904. This two-volume tome set the stage for much of what we think about adolescence and youth, although thinking about adolescence has become more complex since its publication. His borrowing of the German phrase Sturm und Drang —storm and stress—to describe the transformations and tensions that adolescents experience still resonates today. Indeed, many of the essays in this collection could be organized around three of the primary ways in which Hall’s work is still found useful: adolescents’ changing relationships with their parents and peers, with the former receding in importance and the latter increasing in importance; their increased willingness to take risks, and their emerging sexuality. 6

One of the issues facing historians of youth culture is the difficulty of separating youth from children in the past. The study of children and youth as a field of history emerged from the 1960s’ interest in social history, specifically in family and women’s history. The history of children is, at least on the surface, easier to define than the history of youth. Although individual historians often focused on children or youth, they were often lumped together, at least partly because of the variable nature of the social construction of both categories and the extremely subjective coming-of-age markers that attended the transition from one to the other. The fields are often combined, as the names of the flagship journal and one of the leading professional associations indicate: the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and the Society for the History of Children and Youth. But even children’s historians understand that they are dealing with a construct that has varied and does so considerably from time to time, place to place, and community to community. By the same token, we rarely write about a culture belonging entirely to children; they lack the agency, independence, and resources to create a truly separate culture. 7

It may be something of an artificial distinction to try to determine where those categories of age begin and end, and historians have placed more importance on understanding young people’s interactions with society no matter their age. Although a brief entry on “Youth Culture” in Adolescence in America: An Encyclopedia now seems outdated, the final paragraph of the entry offers an appropriate call for a deeper understanding of youth culture: “Culture is a prevalent and powerful presence in the lives of youth. We cannot understand today’s teenagers without attending to, studying and understanding their culture.” Youth culture can be found in the internal and external tension created by the push toward adulthood and the pull back toward childhood. 8

Most studies of youth culture focus on modern history—by its very nature, social science research used living subjects, and historians rely on written sources, which for youth are extraordinarily rare before the nineteenth century. Moreover, suggesting that youth formed a culture suggests that they had the freedom and space in which to create it, and except for the most elite families, that was rarely the case for premodern youth, who were normally integrated tightly into family economies, rarely had any kind of personal privacy, and had no or very little access to institutions devoted to young people. The primary evidence of youth culture from premodern eras often comes out of descriptions of their behavior, including participation in religious rituals and rowdyism among apprentices, rather than of institutions or self-conscious groupings. Schools provided some of that space, as educational opportunities slowly expanded from small academies and cathedral schools to various forms of local and even public education. Apprenticeships and guilds also provided a different kind of social group in which a kind of youth culture could flourish.

Perhaps the key transformations for the development of youth culture were industrialization and urbanization, with their attendant creation of large groups of ethnically and economically homogenous youth, a middle class with smaller families and greater resources, and a selection of pastimes and amusements. Although many factors could speed or slow the development of youth culture, by the twentieth century, many different youth cultures had emerged, along with many different responses to nurturing or controlling them, but the rise of consumerism and mass entertainment opportunities provided even more impetus to the formation of youth culture. Those developments would lead to periodic “scares” about delinquency, sex, and substance abuse. The primary innovation in the study of the history of youth culture over the last twenty years has been its expansion into non-western countries and more securely into gender studies, especially the burgeoning field of girls’ history.

Sampling the Historiography of Youth Culture

Because the authors of the chapters in this handbook have provided case studies rather than a comprehensive history of youth culture, it would be well to sample some previous scholarship on youth in general and youth cultures in particular, starting with a few broad studies.

A History of Young People in the West , a two-volume anthology first published in English in 1997, provides eighteen essays on the history of youth, mainly on continental Europe. Like many scholars prior to the twenty-first century (indeed, like many reformers and policymakers), the authors focus primarily on males. None write about “youth culture” as such, but their work shows that it is difficult to avoid youth culture when researching the things that are important to youth and the ways in which society tries to deal with youth. Many of these essays foreshadow the topics that appear in this handbook, including youth in early modern warfare, as sources of menace and disruption, and as members of socioeconomic classes. Some focus on youth exerting agency and some semblance of control over their lives, while others examine efforts to limit their control and to mold them to meet society’s needs. Perhaps the most important contribution to our understanding of the history of youth culture is the book’s demonstration that youth itself is a social construction, whose parameters and assumptions vary greatly over time and space. The lack of a single definition of either “youth” or “culture” provides historians with a great amount of freedom to explore myriad forms of expression or repression, but it also burdens them with the responsibility of defining for themselves what exactly they mean when they explore youth culture. 9

A much more tightly organized study is Youth Culture and Social Change , edited by a team of scholars interested in the ways in which music, especially, has reflected and influenced protest, rebellion, and even violence in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Great Britain. The salient feature of the book is its insistence that youth culture matters, and not simply to youth. “In this book we go further than documenting the sounds of dissent,” the editors write. “We explore how music worked as a way of making a difference” in issues including labor strife, race relations, student protests, courtship and sex, and gang culture. Each of the essays connects a form of popular music—usually a specific song or band—with a particular time, place, and issue. Its importance to this volume has less to do with its subject matter and more with the weight that it gives to youth culture in general. 10

Historians who have tried to offer broad overviews of youth and youth culture have usually placed them in tension with the history of childhood or of adult culture. Most of the broadly framed books deal with youth as a period of life rather than with the culture it produces. Joseph Kett’s Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present was the first major effort by an American historian to provide such an overview. He argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries “youth” could mean anyone from the ages of ten to twenty-five; one of the major developments as attitudes about childhood, education, and work changed was the narrowing of that age range. Although Kett spends more time on efforts to shape and control youth than on the creation of a youth culture, his book was a first step toward understanding the history of youth culture in America. 11 Although the term “teenager” is a decidedly modern construct (even as it is also a simple descriptor), Grace Palladino’s history of this population associates nearly universal attendance in high school with the building of a “teenage culture” that she describes as “a story of institution building, market expansion, racial desegregation, and family restructuring” after the Second World War. 12 Although not purporting to be a history of youth or of youth culture, a number of the essays in a recent anthology edited by Corrine T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett touch on issues related to American youth culture, particularly political participation and voting, sexuality, work, and drinking. 13 Finally, David Pomfret’s and Richard Ivan Jobs’s collection of essays show youth as a “historical force” in the twentieth century, with case studies on such topics as the modernization of rural Japan, male scouting in Mexico and female scouting in Malaya, youth travel, youth displacement, political protest, and popular culture. 14

The generation that, in America at least, provided the most grist for the study of youth culture was that of the “baby boomers” of the 1940s–1960s; an excellent introduction on their impact on the larger culture and, in the 1960s, the creation of their own is Victor D. Brooks, Boomers: The Cold War Generation Grows Up . Although not limited to youth, as such, but providing a deep understanding of the twentieth-century globalization of the contours of youth culture is Paula S. Fass, Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization . 15

More narrowly conceived histories of youth culture can be divided into several categories of inquiry, which follow.

Delinquency and Control

One of the oldest traditions in the study of youth culture is the history of juvenile delinquency—although the original scholars would not have couched their work in that way, focusing more often on ways of combating the problem rather than on the points of view of the youth themselves. Two recent examples of transnational investigations into delinquent behavior and policy are Jean Trepanier and Xavier Rousseaux, eds., Youth and Justice in the Western States, 1815–1950: From Punishment to Welfare , and William S. Bush and David S. Tanenhaus, eds., Ages of Anxiety: Historical and Transnational Perspectives on Juvenile Justice. A number of books published over the last twenty years have explored the particular ways in which notions and biases related to race and gender contributed to the behaviors identified as delinquent, including Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 ; Tera Eva Agyepong, The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945 ; and Jenifer S. Light, States of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895–1945 . 16

The efforts by most societies throughout history to raise youth into productive citizens run through many of these essays and throughout the literature; this becomes even more imperative in times of crisis. Just two of several excellent works on this effort are Sayaka Chatani, Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies , and Sian Edwards, Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside: Creating Good Citizens, 1930–1960 . 17 These books and others focus on the work of organizations—village-level youth associations in the far-flung reaches of the Japanese empire, and the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and other such organizations in Britain and the West—in obligating youth to their current or future civic duties.

Youth and the Economy

Work is one of the more confusing elements of the history of youth; the major campaigns to set limits on the work of young people attacked “child labor,” rather than “youth labor,” and the laws that were eventually passed to regulate age in the workplace usually set the point at which employers could legally hire young people squarely in the middle of what would commonly be considered “youth.” Yet studies of child labor can tell us a lot about the ways in which work could contribute to the development of youth culture at the local level by creating pride in the ability to do a day’s work, a sense of belonging to a community, and a sense of contributing to their families’ well-being. One of the most useful books on the legal as well as community facets of child and youth work is James Schmidt, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor. 18 Related to the issue of work is the issue of how youth spend their own money—whether received as allowance or earned as wages. Elizabeth Chin’s Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture shows how that agency among older children and youth in underprivileged families is not necessarily governed by acquisitiveness, but by numerous other factors, including the welfare of other family members. 19

Armed Conflict

One of the confusing elements of studies of children and war is that they virtually always include people we would call “youth,” although the word rarely appears in titles. David M. Rosen , one of the contributors to this volume, is perhaps the leading authority on the history of child soldiers—who are usually, of course, youth, and for whom defending their country, protecting their family, or promoting a certain political view can often shape their identity as youth. 20 The experiences of young people on the home front are often difficult to separate from those of younger children, but among the books that investigate the ways in which war can create opportunities for youth—by providing more room for developing their own cultures and contributions, narrowing possibilities by requiring them to work or by depriving them of family and government support, or by causing governments to pay more attention to them—is Nazan Maksudyan, Ottoman Children & Youth during World War I . James Marten’s The Children’s Civil War shows the development of proto–youth cultures during the American Civil War through literature, home front hardships, work, and familial sacrifice. Although dated, Victoria Sherrow’s Encyclopedia of Youth and War: Young People as Participants and Victims provides brief summaries of hundreds of events, policies, and people related to the ways in which youth were forced or chose to engage in war, mainly in the twentieth century (although a few entries extend back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). 21

Political Awareness and Activism

The essays in Mark Roseman’s anthology, Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany, 1770–1968 , offer a long view of the ways in which conflict between generations shaped class relations and political movements, including Nazism and especially in East Germany. 22 Although youth contributed greatly to the protests that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa, for decades before that the frustration and generational tension sparked the creation of sometimes violent and criminal gangs. 23 More typical accounts of youth activism—one challenging the existing power structure, one being enthusiastically socialized into it—appear, respectively, in Louie Dean Valencia-García, Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism , and Anne Luke, Youth and the Cuban Revolution: Youth and Politics in 1960s . 24 Perhaps even more central to their nation’s political and social development were the youth of Argentina, whose culture helped modernize the nation even as it engaged its authoritarian government; see Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, & Sexuality from Peron to Videla . 25 Although we commonly associate the political activism of the 1950s and 1960s with college campuses, Gael Graham pushes that narrative back to the high school years in Young Activists: American High School Students in the Age of Protest , and the thirty essays in Student Revolt, City and Society in Europe begins in the Middle Ages and runs all the way to the present, covering everything from riots to strikes to protests on issues ranging from town/gown conflicts and curricula to political radicalism and oppression. Sampling activism from every part of Europe through the ages, the book collectively shows the importance of action, resistance, and group formation (even temporary group formation) to the creation of youth culture. 26

A flurry of recent books on “girlhood” captures the ambiguity of age as a category of analysis, as “girl,” “youth,” “young girls,” and “young women” can all be identifiers of female youth. The title of Sherrie Inness’s 1998 anthology Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Culture suggests the dichotomy that girls faced as they reached sexual maturity and in the ways that historians have analyzed that segment of youth culture. 27 But these books often capture the intersections of sexual coming of age and the transition from economic dependence to at least partial independence in ways that separate the experiences of female youth from male youth. Abosede George’s Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development is an excellent example of this genre of study and adds the all-important colonial aspect to the issue of “girl-saving.” 28 Ann Kordas’s recent overview of Female Adolescent Sexuality in the United States, 1850–1965 covers the typical proscriptive efforts by adults throughout the twentieth century to regulate girls’ sexuality, but it emphasizes the ways in which girls reappropriated the message of the larger society in creating their own girls’ culture, while Nicholas L. Syrett’s American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States tackles the complicated problem of how local and regional attitudes and politics have influenced thinking about the rights of youth and gender relations. 29

Popular Culture

The study of popular culture often intersects with the study of youth culture, as shown in a recent spate of books on Irish youth in the twentieth century, most recently Eleanor O’Leary’s Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland . O’Leary also shows that the study of youth culture can revise common assumptions about a time and place; the films, comics, clubs, and other leisure activities—including illicit ones—are a counterpoint to the traditional narrative of hardship and stifling traditionalism that usually dominates the Irish narrative. 30 Similarly, in Machines of Youth: America’s Car Obsession , Gary S. Cross tackles a seemingly well-worked subject but makes larger points about how working-class male culture often created a community that revolved around autonomy, masculinity, technical know-how, and rebellion. 31 Devorah Levenson’s well-received study of gangs in Guatemala City goes well beyond the usual account of juvenile gang activity to explore poverty, class, and the failure of a revolution to live up to its promise. 32 In Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism Juliane Fürst shows how even as the Cold War heated up after the Second World War, the youth who had grown up during the last years of Stalin produced a youth culture that looked to the West for style and popular culture and began to challenge Soviet assumptions and hegemony. 33 Chinese youth culture since the 1960s has been shaped by both local and global currents, argues Paul Clark. While the Cultural Revolution dominated youth culture in the 1960s, by the late 1980s sports and rock music had begun to influence Chinese youth, and by the twenty-first century the Internet became both a source of information about the wider world and an outlet for frustration with their sometimes constrained lives. 34

Spaces of Their Own

Youth have often developed their own cultures by taking over certain locations and spaces. The young in these books range from the newsboys (actually youth and young men) of David Nasaw’s Children of the City: At Work & at Play , to the youth claiming places to work, consume, play, court girls, and form gangs in Simon Sleight’s Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 , to Joe Austin’s young graffiti artists in Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became a Crisis in New York City . 35 Jason Reid examines a more literal physical space in Get Out of My Room: A History of Teen Bedrooms in America , which includes, of course, ideas about privacy, sex, and technology. 36

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Youth Culture

Inspired by and complementing this wide-ranging and flourishing historiography of youth culture, the authors who contributed to this handbook come out of a number of academic disciplines, although all write with a historic sensibility. Their essays address topics from their particular points of reference and methodologies. Although global in scope, it is not comprehensive. Each author highlights a particular place or time but draws comparisons and contrasts with other locations and periods. Their samples might cover a century or a decade, a specific country or a larger region, or young men or women or both. But each essay is representative in that, despite its necessarily limited temporal and geographical coverage, it offers conclusions useful to understanding other times and places.

The essays can be split into multiple approaches, with most essays fitting into more than one category. The handbook itself is organized into several sections.

Just a few chapters deal with premodern youth, when the institutions created by and for youth did not yet exist; the sources are few; and the perceptions of this troublesome phase of life were so different than in our own time. These essays illustrate how historians have tried to identify the elements of youth culture during the pre- and early modern periods, when the concept of adolescence, although recognized as a biological phase, was not clearly seen as a discrete period during which youth created their own spaces, prerogatives, and traditions. Nevertheless, several threads that would emerge in youth culture—and in the ways that scholars have explored youth culture—are evident and will surface in the essays that compose the bulk of the book.

Perhaps the first hint of a youth culture emerged in the monasteries, cathedral schools, and universities of medieval and early modern Europe. The boys and young men attending these schools created a proto–youth culture based on their self-conscious “performance,” as Andrew Reeves puts it, of masculine traits and values. Reeves shows that the emergence of the Catholic orders of the thirteenth century, and the Protestant reformation of the sixteenth century, offered youth “countercultures” that rejected established male identities and what they believed to be oppressive Catholic institutions, respectively.

Louise J. Wilkinson’s study of youth culture among the European elite from the thirteenth to the mid-seventeenth-centuries describes a phase that sounds a little more like modern youth. Acknowledging that not all historians of the period agree on what “youth” might have meant to people living during this time, she argues that a tiny fraction of the population—males and some females—took on some adult responsibilities; completed training or education in universities, noble households, or royal courts; and had access to economic resources that helped them prepare for adulthood. Most of these youth came from the European economic elite or were headed for membership in the institutional elite. Adriana Benzaquén’s examination of non-elite youth in the premodern West shows that male youth (and very few females) defined and enlivened a culture of their own through rowdiness, sexuality, and rebelliousness, despite the persistent efforts of the Church and civil authorities to control them.

The second grouping of essays focuses on external forces acting on youth and on the ways that youth have engaged those forces: sometimes resisting, sometimes accommodating, but usually finding some sort of middle ground. All have contributed to the development of youth culture in their times and places.

Armed conflict is one of only a few human enterprises in which the boundaries separating youth and adulthood are simultaneously blurred and reinforced. In war youth can be victims and soldiers, heroes and villains, observers and actors. David M. Rosen reveals how youth have interacted with armed conflict in all its complexity, as participating in war becomes a form of coming of age, socialization, and opportunity for self-expression. Moreover, in certain conflicts, such as revolutionary movements, youth become symbols of a future for which they are fighting. In any case, Rosen argues, youth mobilization has been a “relative constant in human history.”

At face value, the institutions and practices of slavery seem as though they should have quashed any attempt to form a youth culture. Yet, using Jamaica as a case study, Colleen A. Vasconcellos declares that youth culture became a “battleground” in which masters, parents, and youth themselves tried to control lives that, although tightly constrained by violence and law, still represented a chance for youth to use various levels of resistance to create a “culture of survival.”

Corrie Decker looks at the ways in which religion—another constant in youthful lives through much of recorded history—can shape a particular kind of youth culture. Although focusing on one place—Zanzibar—and one faith tradition—Islam—her analysis of the tensions caused by modernization, especially in terms of gender roles, can help us understand the process by which youth culture is formed and evolves. As she writes, “religious ideals held singular importance for young people’s understanding of themselves and their relationships with family members and friends.”

James Schmidt examines another point of continuity through the ages, one that both inhibited and enhanced the development of a youth culture: work. Although youth have worked in nearly every society and every epoch, the extent to which work prepares youth for responsible adulthood, or simply exploits their cheap labor, has been the subject of debate since at least the early nineteenth century. Schmidt studies three distinct periods that demonstrate the widely varying attitudes about work from the points of view of both working youth and reform-minded policymakers in the United States and across the globe.

Urban spaces have always provided conditions and opportunities that encouraged the creation of cultures among the youth living in crowded tenements, attending high schools, or working in shops or on street corners. Simon Sleight and Jasper Heeks explore a particular expression of that youth culture: gangs. Although focusing on the English-speaking world between the middle of the nineteenth and middle of the twentieth centuries, their essay shows the ways in which self-conscious choices about style, a sense of uniqueness, a touch of rebellion, and consumerism merged into this most-talked-about and feared form of youth culture.

Sexuality emerges in a number of chapters, but in David Niget’s essay it provides an occasion to study how values and expectations of the larger society can influence youth culture. The “sexual liberation” of the 1960s, which cracked the “moral order” created by the Cold War, reflected youth’s efforts to achieve greater autonomy in politics and in all aspects of their lives.

The handbook’s third section offers case studies on the ways in which youthful self-expression helps young people create their own cultures. Technology has played an important role in this, but so have political institutions created by adults, which youth have adapted for their own purposes, including patterns and cultures of consumption, sexual mores, and religion.

According to Juliane Fürst , the “power” of style in clothes, hair, music, and entertainment reflected youth interests and politics. Concentrating on the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, she argues that the rise of the Soviet Republic, the Cold War and its aftermath, and the globalization of youth culture shaped the sometimes-subversive youth culture as it grew and evolved under Communism.

Mary Clare Martin expands the parameters of “youth” by investigating the ways in which outdoor activities, imaginative play (such as theatricals), and home-produced magazines and newspapers played important roles in the transition from childhood to youth and then on to adulthood. Focusing on Great Britain between 1700 and 1900, she argues that these processes cut across class and gender lines and show that activities instigated by children and youth complemented those initiated by adults; many took place in familial settings where children and youth of all ages frequently played together.

The boarding schools attended between the mid-nineteenth- through the mid-twentieth-centuries by indigenous children and youth—some voluntarily, most involuntarily—were, in fact, intended to quash native culture. Kristine Alexander shows, however, that indigenous youth in the United States and Canada were often able to resist acculturation by forming their own cultures within the schools, often by sustaining language and other elements of their native cultures, but also through such activities as sports and student journalism and publishing.

Elena Jackson Albarrán casts a wide net throughout Latin America to trace the relationship between national governments and political movements and youth cultures. Although leaders from communist regimes, populist movements, dictatorships, and every other point on the political spectrum tried to employ such organizations as Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, youth exchanges, and others to politicize children and youth into specific ideologies, young people often reshaped those organizations to meet their own ideas and “social goals.”

The ways in which youth spend their money has long been recognized as a form of self-expression. Elizabeth Chin explores the ways in which “entrepreneurial selfhood” shapes the choices and aspirations of wealthy Qataris and poor African and Haitian youth. Despite the huge differences in their backgrounds and opportunities, they are connected by the “global reach of neoliberalism and the pressure to develop entrepreneurial selves.”

Although focusing partly on the Middle East since the late nineteenth century, Nazan Maksudyan provides a broad view of the ways in which youth cultures have been influenced by and, in turn, shaped political activism. Reformers and repressers alike have sought to mobilize youth to promote particular points of view, from nationalist movements in the early twentieth century to antiestablishment movements in the 1960s to the recent rise of environmental and other groups.

Highlighting the centrality of sexuality to the ways in which youth have always identified themselves and the larger culture has always sought to define them, Nicholas L. Syrett offers a second chapter on sexuality, this time focusing on the United States. Although the century witnessed major changes in courtship patterns and sexual activity leading toward the “sexual liberation” of both sexes, there remains a significant double standard based on gender, particularly in the ways that some males used sexual conquests to enhance their masculinity even as some women pay the social price of premarital sexual activity.

Although in most cultures religion has come to play a smaller role in the development of youth culture, Dylan Baun suggests that in Lebanon and other parts of the Global South, religious-oriented youth organizations promoted religion, nation, and masculinity—central components of male youth culture in the twentieth century.

The ways that youth cultures have been depicted in the arts and media, and the ways in which youth interact with them, provide a fourth and final major area of inquiry for this collection.

Although images of youth are relatively rare in the visual arts—unlike children, who are plentiful— Ann Barrott Wicks explores several themes that surface in depictions of youth in China. Despite the difficulty of identifying them, representations of youth, like children, expressed family priorities, such as “lineage, moral outlook, political view, power, or wealth.” As such, rather than being realistic portrayals of youth, they became symbols of aspirations.

Like other commercial art forms, literature has always reflected youth culture and been part of society’s efforts to shape its youthful readers. Paul Ringel takes a broad look at American literature for youth from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Unlike other popular art forms, he argues, literature did not give up moral instruction to be commercially successful. Even as the plots have expanded to include more adventure and youthful agency, the themes have continued to reinforce the importance of existing institutions and values.

Helle Strandgaard Jensen and Gary Cross show the intersections and divergences in the ways that television and movies have shaped youth identity and created anxiety among adults in the United States and in Scandinavia. They find deep differences in the ways content was created and the ways that youth were involved between the commercially driven model in the United States and the publicly funded processes in Scandinavia.

Stuart R. Poyntz traces youth culture through the production, representation, circulation, and consumption of mainstream and social media, both in the West and, more recently, in emerging societies. Although originating in tightly controlled commercial settings, the expansion of such platforms as YouTube and WeChat offer youth a chance to create their own media culture.

More than two decades ago, Joseph Hawes, a pioneer historian of childhood, declared that “Childhood is where you catch a culture in high relief.” Hawes can be paraphrased in a way that provides a wonderful framing device for the essays in this anthology: Youth culture is where you catch a community in high relief. Studying the history of youth culture reveals the values that are—or are not—most important to a society, and how they are passed from one generation to the next. Youth culture often provides a sampling of the ways in which new ideas and technologies—from politics and sexuality to television and social media—might eventually affect an entire community. And youth culture, if observed closely, is a constant reminder of our own coming of age, with all the anxiety and joy and sense of discovery that brings. Despite the countless variations over time and space, youth culture is one thing experienced by all humans. 37

1.   Mike Brake , Comparative Youth Culture: The Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth Subcultures in America, Britain and Canada (London: Routledge, 1985), ix .

2. “Introduction,” to “Coming of Age: The Science of Adolescence,” special issue, Nature 554, no. 7693 (2018), https://www.nature.com/collections/vbmfnrsssw , accessed March 30, 2021 .

3.   Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard , eds., Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 1 .

4.   Joe Austin , “Youth Culture,” in Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood: In History and Society , vol. 3, ed. Paula S. Fass (New York: Gale, 2004), 910 .

5.   Peter K. Smith , Adolescence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1 .

  Smith, Adolescence , provides an excellent, brief discussion of Hall; 12–15.

7. For two examples of excellent overviews of children’s history in which childhood and youth are blended together, see Colin Heywood , A History of Childhood , 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2018) , and Steven Mintz , Huck’s Raft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) .

8.   Jacqueline V. Lerner and Richard M. Lerner , eds., Adolescence in America: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2001), vol. 2, 810 .

9.   Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt , A History of Young People in the West , 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997) .

10.   Keith Gildart, Anna Gough-Yates, Sian Lincoln, Bill Osgerby, Lucy Robinson, John Street, et al., eds., Youth Culture and Social Change: Making a Difference by Making a Noise (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 2 .

11.   Joseph Kett , Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977) .

12.   Grace Palladino , Teenagers: An American History (New York: BasicBooks, 1996), xxi .

13.   Corrine T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett , eds., Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2015) .

14.   Richard Ivan Jobs and David Pomfret , Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) .

15.   Victor D. Brooks , Boomers: The Cold War Generation Grows Up (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009) ; and Paula S. Fass , Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization (New York: New York University Press, 2007)

16.   Mary E. Odem , Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) ; Tera Eva Agyepong , The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) ; and Jenifer S. Light , States of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020) .

17.   Sayaka Chatani , Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018) ; Sian Edwards , Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside: Creating Good Citizens, 1930–1960 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) ; and Kristine Alexander , Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017) .

18.   James Schmidt , Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) .

19.   Elizabeth Chin , Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) .

20.   David Rosen , Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination: From Patriots to Victims (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015) ; and Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005) .

21.   Nazan Maksudyan , Ottoman Children & Youth during World War I (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2019) ; James Marten , The Children’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) ; Victoria Sherrow , Encyclopedia of Youth and War: Young People as Participants and Victims (Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 2000) .

22.   Mark Roseman , Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany, 1770–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) .

23.   Clive Glaser , Bo-tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) .

24.   Louie Dean Valencia-García , Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) ; and Anne Luke , Youth and the Cuban Revolution: Youth and Politics in 1960s Cuba (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018) .

25.   Valeria Manzano , The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, & Sexuality from Peron to Videla (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) .

26.   Gael Graham , Young Activists: American High School Students in the Age of Protest (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006) ; Pieter Dhondt and Elizabethanne Boran , eds., Student Revolt, City and Society in Europe Begin the Middle Ages: From the Middle Ages to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2018) .

27.   Sherrie Inness , Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998) .

28.   Abosede George , Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014) .

29.   Ann Kordas , Female Adolescent Sexuality in the United States, 1850–1965 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019) , and Nicholas L. Syrett , American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016) .

30.   Eleanor O’Leary , Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) .

31.   Gary S. Cross , Machines of Youth: America’s Car Obsession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018) .

32.   Devorah Levenson , Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013) .

33.   Juliane Fürst , Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) .

34.   Paul Clark , Youth Culture in China: From Red Guards to Netizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) .

35.   David Nasaw’s   Children of the City: At Work & at Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) ; Simon Sleight’s   Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 (London: Routledge, 2013) ; and Joe Austin , Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became a Crisis in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) .

36.   Jason Reid , Get Out of My Room: A History of Teen Bedrooms in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) .

37.   Dale Russokoff , “On Campus, It’s the Children’s Hour,” Washington Post , November 13, 1998 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/11/13/on-campus-its-the-childrens-hour/a3d0ee1f-dac7-4543-80db-a95eb07ce215/ , accessed December 19, 2022 .

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Youth Culture

Introduction, theoretical interventions.

• Life-Cycle Shifts
• Socialization
• Language Use and Identity
• Subcultures
• Linguistic Style and Slang
• Schooling and Education
• Class and Labor
• Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
• Race and Racialization
• Modernity and Globalization
• Migration, Immigration, and Transnationalism
• Activism and Politics
• Violence and the Law
• Commodities
• Visual and Digital Culture

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Youth Culture by Shalini Shankar LAST REVIEWED: 13 August 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 28 May 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0081

The anthropological study of youth began as part of broader inquiries about life cycle, ritual, personhood, and generation (e.g., Margaret Mead’s 1952 classic Coming of Age in Samoa ). Such early studies were generally interested in childhood and adolescence insofar as they offered further insight about a society and adult notions of personhood. “Youth culture,” the term widely used in academic and popular circles today, emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a post–World War II phenomenon in the United States, Canada, and western Europe. A product of extended secondary schooling, delayed entry into the workforce, and the proliferation of consumer culture, youth culture has taken multiple forms with unique trajectories. Youth culture studies now include children, teenagers, and young people in their twenties, and have placed these individuals at the center of the inquiry, rather than as a liminal period before adulthood. This shift has led to productive understandings of broader anthropological questions of interest—such as race, gender, sexuality, class, globalization, modernity, education, and cultural production—while it also shows how youth action is a site of agency, resistance, identity construction, and social change. Scholarship examining style, adornment, and identity construction has made excellent use of the concept of subculture, while practice-based models have further considered the significance of leisure activity, such as consumption of media, commodities, and digital technologies, in young lives. Several other prominent areas have emerged, including childhood and socialization; psychologically informed approaches to child development; schooling as a lens to dynamics of race, gender, and class formation; and language use, identity, and subjectivity. In the past two decades or so, increased emphasis on the ways in which youth mediate globalization, modernity, migration, and transnationalism have come to the fore, as have studies that foreground issues of activism and politics. The potential of youth to be the initiators of social change, however measured, has been productively explored; so too have the struggles of youth as they cope with racism, poverty, abuse, violence, armed conflict, and other social ills. Methodologically, anthropological work on youth is marked by long-term, rigorous fieldwork using ethnographic and sometimes sociolinguistic approaches, and this in situ fieldwork has led to substantive insights about identity and subjectivity, while also attending to history and political economy. Such research has enabled youth to be regarded as significant contributors to the social worlds in which they operate, as well as how they may be poised to inherit and transform these worlds.

The shift to move youth from the margins to the center of anthropological inquiry has been a slow process. Still somewhat sidelined in the discipline overall, as Hirschfeld 2002 notes, theoretical interventions via review articles that define youth as a field of study help give it more of a presence. For instance, Bucholtz 2002 looks at youth culture with a practice-based approach that also considers language use. Korbin 2003 considers childhoods with violence, and Levine 2007 covers numerous contours and debates of this field. Revising approaches to theorizing youth, such as Durham 2004 , and considering issues of methodology and representation as shown in Best 2007 , keep critical focus on this field of inquiry. Sloan 2007 turns a focus on minority youth in particular (see also Shankar 2011 cited under Linguistic Style and Slang ). Undoing misconceptions about the ways that youth have been assessed in schools is also of major concern, especially to those working on the anthropology of education (see McDermott and Hall 2007 , as well as the citations under Schooling and Education ).

Best, Amy, ed. 2007. Representing youth: Methodological issues in critical youth studies . New York: New York Univ. Press.

A thoughtful collection of essays that examine the benefits and challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork with children and youth.

Bucholtz, Mary. 2002. Youth and cultural practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:525–552.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085443

This review article offers in-depth coverage of about three decades of youth culture studies. It establishes the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s as setting the stage for a practice-based approach, and draws in more recent work from anthropology and related fields.

Durham, Deborah. 2004. Disappearing youth: Youth as a social shifter in Botswana. American Ethnologist 31.4: 589–605.

DOI: 10.1525/ae.2004.31.4.589

Argues that youth should be considered less as a fixed category and more as a set of shifting relationships, and thus as a “shifter” in the indexical sense of indirectly pointing to broader social meanings.

Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. 2002. Why don’t anthropologists like children? American Anthropologist 104.2: 611–627.

DOI: 10.1525/aa.2002.104.2.611

Those working on youth culture may find the title question to ring true, as anthropology has largely marginalized youth as a legitimate field of inquiry and instead considered them primarily as a precursor to adulthood. This article offers reasons for these theoretical and ethnographic gaps and critiques anthropology’s overwhelming emphasis on adults.

Korbin, Jill E. 2003. Children, childhoods, and violence. Annual Review of Anthropology 32:431–446.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093345

An overview of numerous types of violence children face and are recruited into, including armed conflict, bullying, abuse, violent rituals, and neglect. Also considers the violent behavior of youth as a form of agency.

Levine, Robert A. 2007. Ethnographic studies of childhood: A historical overview. American Anthropologist 109.2: 247–260.

DOI: 10.1525/aa.2007.109.2.247

A survey of approaches from Mead and Malinowski to twenty-first contemporary ethnography of children, with an emphasis on developmental and psychological perspectives.

McDermott, Ray, and Kathleen D. Hall. 2007. Scientifically debased research on learning, 1854–2006. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 38.1: 9–19.

This intervention documents problematic classroom practices, testing, and teacher training brought about by the No Child Left Behind Act, and calls for less standardized testing and more individual case studies.

Sloan, Kris. 2007. High-stakes accountability, minority youth, and ethnography: Assessing the multiple effects. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 38.1: 24–41.

DOI: 10.1525/aeq.2007.38.1.24

Illustrates the value of ethnography in offering a counterpoint to dominant perspectives on minority youth schooling, including curriculum, pedagogy, and student experiences.

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‘Speaking of Youth Culture’: A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Youth Cultural Practice

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• Andy Bennett  

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For a number of years, theorists have suggested that the term ‘youth culture’ corresponds with particularized forms of youth cultural practice clustered around the more spectacular manifestation of the consumption of music, style, and associated objects, images, and texts. However, such a focus serves to close off any discussion of ‘ordinary’ youth, that is, those young people who are not obvious, card-carrying members of style-based youth cultures. With the increasing turn in academic research to issues of youth leisure and lifestyle in more mundane contexts, combined with a growing body of work focusing on youth’s online practices, questions now need to be asked about the value, and validity, of focusing on ‘youth culture’ as this term has hitherto been defined and applied in sociology, cultural/media studies, and other academic disciplines interested in the cultural practices of youth. Aligned with this is the blurring now evident between youth culture as an age-specific practice and as a series of discourses through which individuals who are far beyond any categorization as ‘youth’ based on age continue to invest in ‘youth cultural’ identities. For example, many adults identify as punks, hard-core, or dance music fans, while simultaneously engaging with adult responsibilities and leading adult lives. This chapter will examine these and other challenges to our understanding of the term ‘youth culture’ and consider whether the latter continues to be a valid conceptual and analytical category.

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Bennett, A. (2015). ‘Speaking of Youth Culture’: A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Youth Cultural Practice. In: Woodman, D., Bennett, A. (eds) Youth Cultures, Transitions, and Generations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377234_4

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Youth Culture   /   Spring 2009   /    Bibliographic Review

A bibliographic essay on youth culture, what is “youth”, emily o. gravett.

Youth, large, lusty, loving—youth, full of grace, force, fascination. —Walt Whitman 1 1 x Walt Whitman, “Youth, Day, Old Age and Night,” Leaves of Grass (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1905) 180.

One of the initial difficulties in mapping out a bibliographic terrain on youth culture is simply ascertaining what that terrain might be, beyond the impression that a line from a Whitman poem leaves. What is “youth”? Are such individuals children? Do they represent innocence, curiosity, naivete, or gullibility? Do youths qualify as adolescents or teenagers, on the cusp of adulthood, experimenting and experiencing, forging new identities for themselves? Or are they actually young adults, feet firmly planted in the world of responsibility and maturity?

First, it is important to remember that “youth” is a social construction, largely shaped by social and economic factors, and that, as Shirley Steinberg notes in the preface to Contemporary Youth Culture , the “notion of youth as we know it has not existed very long in historical time.” Indeed, for much of recorded history, adulthood began at the point we now think of as the years of adolescence, puberty, and “teenagehood”; younger members of society were simply viewed as miniature adults or “adults in training,” to borrow Stephen Mintz’s phrase from Huck’s Raft . Cultural issues that may have been pertinent only to young people or that may have required special treatment when studying this sector of society would have previously remained unaddressed. For this reason (and because the field, and its current data, changes so quickly), most of the texts listed below are quite recent.

While Picasso once said that “youth has no age,” modern institutions are prepared to offer firmer interpretations of this ambiguous term. For instance, while the United Nations defines this period as the years between 15 and 24 and the World Bank describes the category as that “time in a person’s life between childhood and adulthood” (also between 15 and 25), other institutions locate the term a bit earlier. 2 2 x For the UN definition, see http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unyin/qanda.htm; for the World Bank definition, see http://youthink.worldbank.org/glossary.php. See the U.S. Department of Transportation’s definition, which designates “youth” as a person under 21 years of age: http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/ injury/research/FewerYoungDrivers/ii_ _data.htm. This bibliography also focuses on an earlier age range, situating the subject of study in the adolescent years.

Because youth is a constructed category that intersects with so many other aspects of life, the selection of topics to include in this bibliographic essay proved to be a challenge. Age always acts as a sort of horizontal cross-section of society, providing ranges to which many different subcategories could easily be applied. Everyone spends time in youth, and inevitably passes through it, whether they want to or not. Because of how comprehensive the subject of “youth” is, therefore, the sections below (and the texts included therein) are necessarily partial and selective. They focus on some of the most salient issues in contemporary youth culture studies, while acknowledging that many other directions were not chosen.

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 11.1 (Spring 2009). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.

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Youth culture is the societal norms that shape children, adolescents, and young adults. The norms, values, and symbolic systems shared by this demographic are distinct from those found in adult culture. As a result, there are many theories on the origins, development, and influences of this culture. This article will...

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Youth culture is the shared societal norms of children, adolescents, and young adults. It consists of symbolic systems and processes that are common to this demographic, and differs from adult culture in a number of ways. Let's explore the origins, genesis, and evolving nature of youth culture. The definition of...

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The History of Youth Culture

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Youth culture:, history, domain of youth culture:, the modern period:.

• *High school students: new consumers.
• *Youth culture in high school: social problem; sexual activities, delinquency, the influence of comic books, music, mode…!
• *the automobile: not only for travelling, but also for some bad activities like taking drugs, sex…
• *Hippies, rockers and skinheads.
• *Punk: “do it yourself” everyone can be a musician.
• *Glam rockers and disco dancers, clothing style.
• *Skateboarding, scooters.
• *youth culture as a “lifestyle”: some people are continuing their youth culture affiliations into adulthood.
• *Internet: a way for new culture to emerge.

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             Culture is the patterns of behavior and thinking that people living in social groups learn, create, and share. It refers to a society or group in which many people live and think in the same ways it also distinguishes one human group from others. For instance youth culture.              Youth culture is a very big part of a young adults life. The way young adults dress, what they listen to, what they eat and what they do in their free time shows how their youth culture has influenced them. I think that TV and music has a major role in today's youth culture. Many young adults today listen to what is mostly "popular". For instance, I think hat MTV has a big influence in many of the young adults at my school. If they listen to a song on TRL they'll immediatly start loving that song and listen to it all the time. No matter if it's rap, rock or pop. They'll think it's cool and since everyone else is listening to it they'll love it. For clothes in your young teen years if you wear Abercrombie and Fitch people will think you're cool and you'll be part of the group.              Many young adults stress out because of our youth culture. If they don't fit in or are in a group then they'll think that they aren't cool or have any friends. Youth culture is just part of our life. I think that adults are pretty much the ones who make up our youth culture because they are the ones who set up MTV and what will be on MTV. They are the ones who design the clothes and try to advertise it to us so that we wear it. And they are also the ones who choose what songs might be popular so that we start liking them.              Many adults don't understand our youth culture now a days. Many of them think that our music is just "noise" and they can't even understand what they are saying when us young adults do understand it and enjoy it. Many of the songs do have a meaning and are not just descriminating women. In my opinion I think songs that descriminate women are q...

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