Published in the Baptist Times 2 September 2011
One point emerging from all the social analysis following the riots is that riotous misbehaviour is not the sole prerogative of the young.
A friend volunteering with Street Pastors can confirm this. Although primarily set up to ensure the safe return home of young people rendered incapable by alcohol and drugs, as the night wears on, it's people from the generation above who are rolling out of the clubs drunk and incapable, vomiting, fighting, shouting abuse and not wearing clothes. Most are parents, wage-earners, people in their forties with jobs and homes and children
If parents complain that today's grown-up children are reluctant to grow up and take on adult responsibilities, young people say the same about parents who desperately try to stay young or re-enact a caricature version of wild, carefree youth. Often it seems that the parental generation, rather than aiming to be a role model for the young, is taking as its own role model a parody of youth culture: hysterical nightlife, fleeting relationships and competitive excess intake of drugs and alcohol. It suggests an identity crisis in the middle generation - formerly the most confident and capable strata of society.
Changes in working methods may be a factor. Advanced skills used to be the preserve of those of advancing age, acquired during years of employment. Now, it is younger people who have grown up with IT and adapt more easily to fast-changing technology, who are likely to acquire those skills before their elders.
The old maxim about not teaching your grandmother to suck eggs is rendered redundant by grandparents routinely learning from their pre-teen grandchildren a whole range of communication and data skills, from Skype to Streetview, Wikipedia to Twitter and more.
Being the skilled generation confers status and authority, before maturity. An obsession with 'being famous' (the most popular and often the sole ambition of 80% of young people) reinforces the desire to remain young, as celebrities go to extreme lengths to look ever-youthful.
Body shape and size, hairstyle, clothes, cosmetics, tattoos, piercings, as well as attitude, all express a culture of youth which pervades every area of life and affects every age group.
Fashions initially objected to by parents as too extreme or revealing, are soon seen on mothers and fathers at the school gates.
The only-just-dressed look has translated fashion taboos into fashion statements. Women who would previously have been embarrassed by accidentally having a bra strap showing or an inch of midriff escaping cover, now aim for it as a desirable look. Fathers emulate 13-year old sons wearing jeans casually adrift below designer underwear. The fear of looking indecent or undignified has been replaced by fear of not looking young.
So if young people are now the role models for their elders, who are their own role models? Footballers, movie stars and pop idols aside, which adults in real life can they find to admire and aspire to become like? One severely depressed 17-year old boy, when asked, said after long thought, 'I can't think of anybody.'
Another nominated his mum. When it was pointed out that a woman could not be a role model for adult manhood, he mentally scanned his list of known male acquaintances and said that he didn't actually know many men.
A lifer in jail, reviewing his early years, said he had known nobody who lived differently. Adults in his neighbourhood were unemployed, living by taking what they wanted, and relying on drink and drugs to kill despair and time. 'There was no one to show another way.'
Who would he recommended as role models, to young people growing up as he had?
'You have to put the love of God in them first,' he said, 'before they start making decisions about their lives. If they don't know there's another way, they don't have any choice; they'll just do what everyone else does.'
The role models need new role models or the blind will keep following the blind, old or young.
