Post #3826922

It's always surprising to me to learn how relatively new the concept of a teenager is, it really doesn't enter common parlance until the 1940s and you can find clumsy articles from the time discussing this newfangled phenomenon of the teen-ager. In retrospect it explains why youth culture starts to become a big deal starting in the 1950s and then really kicking into high gear in the 1960s, that's when you're really starting to get the first crop of people growing up to firmly think of themselves as teenagers and a separate category from their parents (as opposed to something closer to an adult that owes deference to age). And it is very telling that many of the cultural developments since has involved taking more and more rights away from teenagers, folding them into the category of children as soon as they started challenging the status quo en masse.