OUR LAST BEST SHOT

An eye-opening journey among a strange tribe: American adolescents.

Washington Post education writer Stepp considers young adolescents (ages 10 to 14) as distinct from older teenagers as infants are from kindergartners, although many popular books lump the two age groups together. Life is tough for these kids, she shows: not only are hormones kicking in to cause weird skin eruptions and weirder behavior, but most children at this tender age are muddling toward a sense of who they are, crushed by the forces of peer pressure and an educational establishment that has no idea what to do with them. Stepp examines children in three very different places (Los Angeles; Ulysses, Kansas; and Durham, North Carolina) to discover that they are much the same everywhere. Another discovery, she notes, is that children’s home lives today are generally a mess: “I went looking,” she writes, “for typical kids living in typical families and quickly learned that there is no such thing. The Ozzie and Harriet family really is a myth and has been for years.” Faced with a family structure in which one parent or another is largely absent, touched by violence, drugs, and crime, and confused by the biological changes they are undergoing, most of these children, Stepp suggests, turn out blissfully normal, all things considered, and despite the fact that they are so badly served by teaching methods that inhibit their socialization. (Schools would do well, Stepp advises, to consider European and Asian models of group problem-solving that foster teamwork and temper an already fierce atmosphere of competition.) Stepp, herself a mother, closes her book with helpful hints for parents on how to understand their children—which, more than anything else, involves taking the time to watch and listen.

A solid, intelligent addition to the child-development literature.