‘Needless hugging?’ What will teens think of next?

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By D.L. Stewart, Contributing Writer Updated 1:46 PM Wednesday, June 10, 2009

In their endless campaign and their inherited duty to confound their elders, this latest generation of teenagers has adopted a new weapon:

Hugging.

As detailed by a recent front-page story in The New York Times, teenage hugging has become an epidemic stretching from one coast to the other. Girls are hugging girls. Boys are hugging boys. Boys are hugging girls and vice-versa, which is not really a new development, except that now the inter-gender embraces do not necessarily have ulterior motives.

“For Teenagers, Hello Means ‘How About a Hug?” according to the story’s headline.

“We’re not afraid, we just get in and hug,” a male high school junior is quoted as saying. “The guy friends, we don’t care. You just get right in there and jump in.”

“We like to get cozy,” an eighth-grade girl in San Francisco explains. “The high-five is, like, boring,”

One might think that the practice of kids exchanging hugs, not drugs — or slugs — would be welcomed without reservation and even with open arms by parents and educators. One might be wrong.

• A parenting columnist for the Associated Press admits that she is baffled.

“It’s a wordless custom, from what I’ve observed,” she writes in her book, “13 is the new 18.” “And there doesn’t seem to be any other overt way in which they acknowledge each other. No hi, no smile, no wave, no high-five — just the hug.”

• Experts have been consulted to delve into what this threat of teenage hugging is all about.

“Without question, the boundaries of touch have changed in American culture,” declares a Virginia sociologist. “We display bodies more readily, there are fewer rules governing body touch and a lot more permissible access to other people’s bodies.”

• Attorneys are standing by to fight for the constitutional rights of students who might feel pressured by their peers into hugging. The day after the Times story was published, a legal Web site in Michigan warned that parents “should be alert to the potential downsides” of hugging.

• And school officials, naturally, are having trouble getting their arms around this latest form of teenage rebellion. Some have instituted a “three-second rule” to limit the length of a hug. A few years ago, in Bend, Ore, a middle school girl received detention for illegal hugging.

“Touching and physical contact is very dangerous territory,” notes the principal of a high school in New Jersey, where student — and, presumably, faculty — hugging was banned two years ago. “It was needless hugging — they are in the hallways before they go to class. It wasn’t a greeting. It was happening all day.”

As a parent and a lifelong nonhugger, I understand that principal’s concern. There’s always the risk that, at some point, a hug may become something more serious than just a hug.

But, I’ve lived through several generations of teenagers for which we fretted mostly about sex, drugs and lock-and-load. I guess that’s why the phrase “needless hugging” seems like it should be the least of our worries.

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