BOOKS
Ever Permitted, Never Ready
READY OR NOT: WHY TREATING CHILDREN AS SMALL ADULTS ENDANGERS
THEIR FUTURE - AND OURS. By Kay Hymowitz. Free Press. $25 .00.
I KNOW AN EXTRAORDINARILY BEAUTIFUL fourteen-year-old girl who
turned up one day with a gold earring inserted through her tongue.
When I asked her if punching a hole in her tongue had not been very
painful, she shrugged. When I asked her what had moved her
to
have
such a thing done to herself, she shrugged again.
To be sure, the shrug is an indispensable piece of body language for
any fourteen-year-old being confronted by an inquisitive adult- even,
or especially, an adult who is fond of her. But in this case, I don't think
that shrug was intended for me as much as it was for herself: she did not
actually have an answer.
Nowadays all over the American middle class are to be found chil–
dren just like her who are in one way or another mutilating themselves.
You see them everywhere, with rings in their tongues or brows or navels
or God-knows-where, or with tattoos on their tender breasts or but–
tocks. In some cases the self-mutilation takes the form of starving them–
selves into a dangerous state of emaciation. To say, as some sociologists
have, that such behavior is a symptom of the terrible force of confor–
mity to fashion-such as might have been dictated to them by televi–
sion, for instance-seems
to
me to be getting at the question
back-to-front. Obviously, there is no more powerful force of conformity
than that governing the style and behavior of adolescents: one false
move, as the gangsters used to say, and you're dead. But after all, the
kids of whom I speak are not merely flouting authority, or even flouting
it at all; nor, on the other hand, are they merely imposing some
expanded form of dress code on one another: these are the healthiest
and hence the handsomest kids who have ever lived, and they are
muti–
lating their bodies,
for God's sake. And neither they nor we know why.
Kay Hymowitz, however, has taken the first genuinely enlightening
stab at an answer in her new book
Ready or Not.
One finds it hard to
describe in strictly professional terms just what it is that Mrs. Hymowitz
practices. She has all the requisite university degrees, and her book gives
evidence of an enormous amount of research; but to think of her pri–
marily as a working social scientist seems somehow off the point, at
least in this instance. She is a member of a new group of social observers
("scientists" doesn't make it) whose work, punctilious as it may be
