I Can Do That!
Getting adults to recognize your potential.
by Margaret Pevec, MA
TWEENS & TEENS News
December 2007
Imagine for a moment that you live in
a world where most of the adults you meet
treat you with respect. Imagine a world made
for young people to be active members in all
levels of government, schools and social institutions.
Imagine a world where adults value young people
for their ability to be joyful, playful, spontaneous,
uninhibited, open hearted, open minded, curious,
creative, imaginative, enthusiastic and loving.
Finding this vision a bit hard to see? The
reason you may not be able to imagine such
things has to do with adultism, otherwise
known as the oppression of young people by
adults. Adultism is one of the best-kept secrets.
Most people don’t even know the word
exists, and most adults don’t like to
admit they often behave badly toward younger
people.
Here’s a definition of adultism from
an article by John Bell— available at
www.freechild.org/bell.htm— “…adultism
refers to behaviors and attitudes based on
the assumption that adults are better than
young people, and entitled to act upon young
people without their agreement. This mistreatment
is reinforced by social institutions, laws,
customs, and attitudes.”
Here are some common adultist behaviors:
•Adults typically act like they know
best and that young people never know best.
•Adults decide when and where young
people can be loud and active— not many
places— and when youth must sit still
and be quiet.
•Adults have set up schools where students
learn mainly by sitting in a classroom, reading
and listening, even though that might not
be the best way kids learn.
•If young people can’t learn in
the traditional way, adults may decide they’re
dumb and give them bad grades.
•If a young person gets angry at an
adult for an injustice, the young person often
can’t defend him or herself.
•Young people’s opinions are usually
not asked for, and if they are, they are frequently
overlooked.
•Adults often put down young people’s
idealism, saying they’re too young to
understand the “real” world, as
if young people don’t live in it, too.
•Adults usually think they have the
answers— even when they don’t.
•Adults often talk about a young person
to other adults in the youth’s presence,
as if young people are invisible.
•Adults may tell kids to eat nutritional
foods and exercise, though they themselves
avoid healthy habits.
Have you ever thought about any of these
things? Have you ever talked about such practices
with your friends?
I’m an adult, and I’m writing
this article because adultism is bad for you,
bad for adults and bad for society. It’s
even as bad as racism and sexism because it
hits everyone from the first day of life.
I am a grandmother and I still feel the effects
of adultism. For me, adultism mostly made
me feel I was ignored, stupid and afraid.
I still have to work really hard to trust
my ideas and believe I have important things
to say. I’ve had to relearn the natural
joy I felt to be alive as a young person,
and I struggle to remember how to welcome
the future.
I learned early on not to expect adults to
listen to what I had to say. As a result,
I didn’t say much to adults. And that
resulted in never having a relationship with
an adult that was mutually respectful.
Although I might have learned a lot from adults,
what I learned was to mistrust them. That’s
one of the biggest problems of adultism. It
separates adults and young people. How many
adults do you trust as well as consider your
friends?
You can’t blame adults too much for
adultism because each adult was also once
a kid and got treated just like you get treated
now. The funny thing about an “ism”
is that when you’ve been a victim of
it for long enough, it becomes part of how
you see yourself. When you were younger you
may have been full of self-confidence. You
may have thought you were special, strong
and smart, and could solve any problem. But
years of adults pointing out the things you
should be afraid of, more often than the ways
you are strong and smart, likely made you
start feeling as afraid as adults feel. It’s
called “internalized oppression”
when the way people treat you becomes the
way you think about yourself.
What can you do about adultism? Well, it’s
tricky when adults won’t admit there
is such a thing. But understanding that adultism
exists and how it operates may control the
damage it does to you. You probably already
talk about adultism with your friends. Now,
having a word for it and speaking out when
it happens to you or another young person
might help you express your feelings about
the problem— “That’s so
adultist.”
Also, there are signs that things are changing
for the better. There are 800 percent more
Google hits on adultism today than there were
only two years ago, meaning a lot more people
care about it. Wikipedia now has an extensive
article about adultism. There are also many
youth organizations educating people about
adultism. The National Youth Rights Association,
www.youthrights.org, and the Free Child Project,
www.freechild.org, are just two such organizations.
And in a few places, young people are being
invited to participate on school boards and
city governments. Some kids are getting the
moral and financial support to make the big
contributions to society that many more young
people will make in the future, when adultism
has bit the dust.
If adultism bothers you as much as it bothers
me, I’d like to hear about it. While
I write the first book about adultism, I am
collecting stories from young people like
you about how the issue affects your life.
Just e-mail me at margaret@margaretpevec.com.
I’d love to hear what you have to say.
Kids give examples of how they feel
disrespected by adults.
“There were some kids in our skate park
the other day, parading around and being inappropriate.
Parents assume all kids are like that: troublemakers.
It’s totally messed up. It’s like
you’re guilty before you’re proven
innocent and you’re never given a chance
to prove yourself innocent. They always assume
you’re doing bad stuff; they never give
you the benefit of the doubt.”
—Kate, age 14
“If you leave the house at night, you’re
being a hooligan, even if you’re in
the backyard.”
—Joel, age 17
“Wearing all black means you’re
a troublemaker.”
—Taylor, age 14
“‘You’re kids,’ parents
say. ‘It’s not really love.’”
—Taylor, age 14
“A lot of adults don’t seem to
trust us. There were these kids that were
shooting off bottle rockets in the park. We
didn’t have any, but the cops made us
leave the park anyway.”
—Austin, age 14
“Adults seem to think...if it’s
past a certain time, or if you talk like this
or wear this...you’re up to something
and are a bad person.”
—Lyss, age 14
Margaret Pevec, MA, is the co-author of
What Kids REALLY Want to Ask: Using Movies
to Start Meaningful Conversations (Vanderwyk
& Burnham). See her Web site at www.margaretpevec.com
and her blog about adultism at www.adultism.blogspot.com.
