Orange County, Calif.
Sally, blonde, 15, and totally cool, minds her own business as she skates around the various ramps, cliffs, and cement obstacles that constitute the Vans Skate Park. Her gesticulating father, complete with backpack and video camera, bellows from the balcony of the parents’ gallery, trying to get her attention. He finally catches her eye and — just as all the angst and embarrassment an A-list teenager feels towards her parents should come bubbling to the surface — she smiles and waves. Beaming, Sally skates over toward the balcony. Over the din of music her father shouts instructions about when to meet for dinner. And then, as they say good-bye, she blows him a kiss. At Vans, which may well be the epicenter of contemporary cool, rebellion is deader than Dillinger.
Vans Skate Park is the cornerstone of America’s newest outdoor mega-mall, The Block at Orange, an 811,909 square foot Mecca in suburban Los Angeles. Unlike other malls, most of which are 75 percent retail and 25 percent entertainment, The Block is about 75 percent entertainment and 25 percent retail. Jim Mance, the regional general manager for the Mills Corporation, which owns The Block, bridles at the term “mail.” “This is really an entertainment center,” he explains.
While the typical mall brings together stores like Nordstrom, Macy’s, Hecht’s, and Sears, The Block has Vans, a Ron Jon Surf Shop, a Virgin Megastore, Hilo Hattie (“the Store of Hawaii”), the two arcade/restaurants Dave & Buster’s and Sega GameWorks, and a thirty-screen cineplex. Decorated in a style that can only be described as Disney in Vegas, the whole thing seems to be made of neon and glass. Along the open-air promenades stand “totems,” some ninety feet high, which feature images of community role models. There is music all around, provided by hidden speakers that are controlled by a high-tech system of sensors that monitors noise levels throughout the mall and adjusts the volume of music accordingly. And like the monumental theme casinos of Las Vegas, every shop is an event unto itself, beginning with Ron Jon, which features a forty-foot high blue and aqua plastic wave as its storefront.
But the really astonishing thing about The Block is the behavior of the teenagers who pulse through it. Kids are smiling and laughing, mothers and daughters walk the promenade hand in hand, and no one looks the least bit alienated. Kids at The Block don’t dress up, but they wear what can be described as high casual. The girls walk around in jeans that flare politely at the knee and fitted tops in bright, cheery colors like violet, sky blue, taupe, and red. The boys wear khaki cargo shorts and loose white or slate-blue T-shirts. Everyone wears Skechers, the hottest name in footwear.
And there aren’t many couples at The Block. Except for the occasional mixed group, boys and girls travel in separate packs, which often include — gulp — parents.
As suburban sprawl became the norm in America, the center of teenage social life moved from Main Street to the mall. Built for adults, these shopping centers were soon overrun by teens. Malls were places where smoking and fighting were the rule and where unsupervised kids ran amok. The quintessential teen movie of the 1980s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, rightly taught America to expect a large degree of surliness and revolt from kids in malls.
The Block rewrites that lesson almost completely. Kids here don’t smoke or curse. Very few have body piercings. Warning signs caution against “unnecessary staring,” “the non-commercial use of laserpointers,” and “engaging in non-commercial expressive activity without proper written permission.” One rule requires skateboarders carry their boards when they are not at Vans. And that is exactly what they do.
The Block was built specifically for teens and their parents. This marketing combination would have seemed impossible only a decade ago. But now, it appears, parents have returned to adolescent upbringing in ways that have rendered their children’s normally destructive impulses mute. In turn, teenagers’ hangouts have undergone a change, as evidenced by The Block, and their pastimes have taken a turn for the better.
Skateboarding, for example, used to be the domain of rebels. It was a non-sport sport — an athletic activity with no organization, and hence no concept of team or competition — that was performed illicitly in parking garages and town squares. Skateboarding’s lack of conformity — key to teenagers with visions of Holden Caulfield buzzing in their brains — made it the pastime of outlaws, the bad seeds who went behind school during lunch to sneak cigarettes. Now, Vans has legitimized skateboarding, making it sociable and about as rebellious as soccer.
The Vans complex looks like a personal-injury attorney’s version of heaven. It is filled with ramps, ledges, and steep drop offs onto hard, unforgiving cement. There are two large empty in-ground pools and a professional-size half pipe. The skateboarders are not devil-may-care scofflaws, but smiling Stepford-like adolescents, each wearing — as required — a helmet and knee and elbow pads. Parents watch from a gallery that rings the complex, some basking in the ebullience of their progeny, while others sit comfortably on the blue plastic bleachers and leaf through the Orange County Register. When one 16-year-old boy accidentally runs down a smaller skateboarder, there is no glaring, no harsh words. He hops off his board and runs back to help the other boy up, apologizing profusely. The two of them laugh and then go their separate ways.
When their skate session ends at Vans, lots of boys head directly to Sega GameWorks, a theme arcade that is a joint venture between video-game giant Sega and the movie studio DreamWorks SKG. Unlike the dark, sweaty arcades the Sean Penn character Jeff Spicoli haunts in Fast Times, GameWorks is a bright, spacious place with the latest virtual-reality games. It even has a restaurant where adults can wait while their kids go skiing, racing, rafting, or even fishing. The video games at GameWorks run on debit cards that can be bought with adult-sized $ 20, $ 30, $ 40, or $ 50 credits. The other mega-arcade, Dave & Buster’s, is so family friendly that all kids must be accompanied by an adult.
And while the boys are out being boys, the girls behave surprisingly girlishly. The Block offers a number of places for mothers and daughters to bond, including Old Navy, the no-frills alternative to the Gap and Eddie Bauer. At Ultrahouse, the popular home furnishings store for teenagers, pairs of mothers and daughters coo over lava lamps. Ultrahouse is the source of all things translucent and inflatable, including chairs, loveseats, pillows, picture frames, and even Christmas trees. It is the perfect place for Boomer mothers to teach their teenage daughters the nuances of nesting. And, after a healthy bit of shopping, they’re off to see a tear jerker such as Patch Adams on one of the thirty screens at the AMC multiplex.
When all the consumption becomes too much, parents visit Starbucks while their kids retreat to Jamba Juice, where they eagerly plunk down $ 3.95 to recharge with drinks like the Kiwi-Berry Burner — a “Power Smoothie” that comes with a “juice boost” in Vita, Protein, Immunity, Fiber, Femme, or Energy flavors. If you’ve ever watched television or seen the pictures of dejected, slacker teens on the covers of Newsweek or Time, it’s enough to make you wonder who these kids are.
To understand today’s teenagers, you first have to understand American demographic history since the Second World War. In 1945 the men who had fought returned home to peace and prosperity and produced the largest number of children ever born in a single generation. The 76.8 million babies born between 1946 and 1964 were famously called the Baby Boomers, a cohort notorious for their selfishness and narcissism. The first generation to champion abortion and divorce, they were plagued first by drug use and then by mercenary careerism. As the Boomers began to settle down, they had children later in life than any other generation, and so between 1965 and 1978, only 52.4 million children were born. This shadow generation, called Generation X, was defined by the anti-child sentiments that racked their parents and created the “latch-key kid.” Boomer parents helped produce, among other unsavory things, a generational malaise in the lives of their first born.
But the Boomers weren’t bad, just spoiled and slow to learn. By the time the younger ones got around to having children, they started to get parenting right and the result is a second wave — an “Echo Boom” — of children, some 77.6 million of them born after 1979. Suddenly the radicals who marched for unrestricted access to abortion were sheepishly admitting that they wanted it to be only “safe, legal, and rare.” The protest junkies who made chemical living mod became terrified that their kids might try marijuana. Working mothers were replaced by soccer moms. And the new economic prosperity allowed the younger Boomers to dote on their kids almost as fully as their parents had on them. As a result, the differences between Generation X and their younger cousins couldn’t be more striking.
Consider the popular culture. Every generation has a crossover genre of music that makes a splash into the mainstream. In the ’50s it was rock, in the ’60s it was folk, in the ’70s it was disco, and in the ’80s it was hard-core rap and Smells Like Teen Spirit-style grunge. Today’s hit crossover genre is country. Where Gen X embraced the nihilism of N.W.A. and Ice-T, the Echo Boom adores the wholesome Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks, and Garth Brooks. (Faith Hill, the aptly named country singer, played at the opening of The Block.) Where the popular ’80s industrial anthem Head Like a Hole from Nine Inch Nails cried, “Head like a whole / black as your soul / I’d rather die / than give you control,” today’s teens adore the bubble-gum pop sounds of Barenaked Ladies and Jewel, who begins her hit song Hands with, “If I could tell the world just one thing / it would be / we’re all ok.”
Gen X dressed in ripped jeans and dark, sullen, earthy tones, while the Echo Boom chooses neat styles and bright colors. Even kids’ bodies have changed: Whereas Gen X celebrated the thin, frail, torpor of heroin chic, nearly all the kids at The Block still have a healthy smidgen of baby fat.
The statistics bear out the change. The Centers for Disease Control reports that since 1991, the percentage of teens who have never had sex has risen 11 percent. More than half of all boys and girls in high school now graduate without having sex. In their new book, The Ambitious Generation, Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson cite survey data that show, in contrast to teens in the ’70s and ’80s, almost half of today’s teens “feel appreciated for who they are” and think of their parents as “emotionally supportive.” Drug use is down, and after a decade of Gen Xers being despondent about their prospects for fulfillment, survey after survey shows teens exuberantly optimistic about their futures.
To hope that these changes in behavior lead to a generational moral reformation is probably unrealistic. A recent issue of Teen People featured a special section on religion where the editors presented the views of five teens, a Methodist, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Muslim, and an agnostic, making each seem a pleasant novelty. And so religion is with teenagers, because while teens seem to know that there are things that should be done — abstention from sex, avoidance of drugs — they don’t quite know why. They can articulate the reasoning behind right-minded popular morality, like saving the environment or fighting drunk driving, but they don’t have a vocabulary for explaining more serious things. For all the attention their parents have lavished on them, today’s teenagers were raised in the shadow of moral relativism. Whatever the merits of the Boomers’ reformation, they still don’t have the gumption to look their children in the eye and declare that they were wrong to live the way they once did — just as they can’t bring themselves to condemn President Clinton for sins they too have committed. And so the Echo Boom is growing up without a moral compass: doing the right things, but guided only by the warm reassurances of pop psychology and the innate desire to avoid the mistakes of their elders.
In that sense, it seems futile to hope that the Echo Boom will embark on a quest to make right all of the problems their parents created in the culture. But maybe they don’t need to. Size does matter, and maybe morality is as morality does. In the same way that it makes no difference whether Deep Blue, the IBM computer that beat Gary Kasparov in chess, “thinks” its way to victory or simply makes the necessary calculations to get there, maybe it’s all right for teens to do the right thing in service to the inarticulate ethos of New Age living.
Boomers devastated American morality not by one great centrally-planned blow, but by a thousand individual cuts, each a service to self-centered hedonism. What made society conform to them, however, was their demographic mass, not their generational character. Maybe the Echo Boom is big enough that the thousands of little things they do right will change society for the better every bit as much as the Boomers changed it for the worse.
But that argument is for another day. Today, we should just be grateful that Sally and her dad get along, which, seen in the dim light of the Gen X world, is no small miracle in itself.
Jonathan V. Last is a reporter for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
