First, in the middle of his argument, Crisp notes the most recent of a series of findings by the Centers for Disease Control “that traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for American teenagers, accounting for a third of all deaths in that age group.”
As Crisp notes with far more stress, too many Americans, period, die in traffic accidents, and far too many teens. Those deaths are bad things. However, for those teen deaths to be relevant for granting driver’s licenses, we’d need to know in how many of those accidents teenagers were driving. A fair number of teen deaths in traffic accidents are strong arguments for putting in jail old drunks who keep driving.
Also that a high percentage of teen deaths is from various kinds of violence is a relative good thing. Seriously, the high percentage reflects a steady decline in teens’ dying from infectious diseases and the low incidence of death from the heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and other causes of death among their elders.
A decrease in the percentage of teens dying violent deaths would be a very bad thing if, say, the current movement against vaccination resulted in a high number of deaths from a resurgent polio, or if some new strain of tuberculosis were particularly deadly among young people or if increasing rates of obesity resulted in teens starting to die from cardiovascular diseases.
For traffic accidents, my point on percentages vs. absolute numbers is pretty pedantic, but uncritical use of percentages is a bad habit to get into and definitely a problem with teen suicides.
Suicide does result in a high percentage of teen deaths, but mostly for that good reason that U.S. teens don’t often die. U.S. teens have a low rate of suicide, as Americans go, and panicking over the issue can lead to misallocation of funds for suicide prevention and too many teens committed to psychiatric hospitals.
My second point is one of context, that of teen bashing and real arrested development.
Old folks’ complaining about “Damn kids!” has been around long enough that Shakespeare could mock the cliché in his “The Winter’s Tale” in 1610. In our time, though, we get a continuation of G. Stanley Hall’s argument of 1904 (in his book “Adolescence”) of built-in teenage irrationality, irresponsibility and lust, stemming from all those “raging hormones.”
Let’s have some numbers on those “raging hormones.” Get out your tranquilizer dart gun, bring down some teens, draw blood, and give us some figures, compared with their elders (who can usually just be netted).
OK, I’m joking about how to get the samples, but I’m dead serious about comparative numbers. Older teens can be horrible, obnoxious people; in that and, in terms of most social pathology, they’re normal among the various adult U.S. populations. (Normal, Michael Males argues, except when doing better than their elders.)
As Crisp makes clear, Americans are often irresponsible drivers. What makes teens a special problem isn’t that they’re necessarily irresponsible but that they’re necessarily novices: New drivers have extra problems.
And American teens have the extra, extra problem of growing up in a society that doesn’t make adulthood pleasant — putting off adulthood is rational in America — and that lacks formal “rites of passage” into adulthood.
So let’s go with the Safe Teen and Novice Driver act and push it a step further:
Full driving privileges at 18, plus everything else at 18.
Let’s make 18 a real “age of majority” with a little ceremony at City Hall where new, fully adult citizens get their driver licenses, plus voter registration cards, and — if we still want a draft — federal service registration cards, for women as well as men, and for other possibilities than just the military, with the cards entitling this young citizen to buy booze and whatever other recreational drugs are legal.
So, indeed, let’s have consistent standards for the age of driving, and let’s put full privileges at 18, and make 18 — or some age thereabout — the age at which we say to America’s young: Today you are an adult, with all an adult’s rights and duties. We can develop a rite of passage that works the real magic of making it more likely someone acts like an adult.
Richard D. Erlich is a professor emeritus in English at Miami University in Oxford. He is retired and lives in Ventura County, Calif.