In the Company of Teenagers

I had the occasion this week to facilitate a focus group of teenagers for a public library that is planning an expansion. It’s been a long time since I was the only adult in a room full of teens. (I remember my years as a high school librarian when I was always surrounded by teenaged faces, and would be startled by a mid-day glimpse of my own middle aged face in the ladies room mirror!) As I used to tell my students when they would complain about the shoddy treatment they received from shopkeepers and other adults in charge of their world, “People don’t like teenagers, and they especially don’t like them in groups,” teens’ preferred mode of travel.

You may not like them. They may not be attractive, or well-spoken, or even clean, but they are truly, unabashedly alive. Except for the few who are adept at manipulation, teens aren’t usually skilled at the pretense they will develop as adults, the pretense of caring about worlds outside their own. Holden Caulfield’s contempt for the phonies still resonates because being a teenager in the Fifties is not so different from being a teenager fifty years later. The same questions abound. Will I have friends, be invited, loved, listened to? Adults can’t do much about the first three because teens don’t want to be friends with us, be invited to our dance, or even care if we love them. They do, however, want us to listen, give them credibility, and try to know them. This we can do.

On behalf of the library, I listened. What these teens want in a new town library is very much like what the old people, the moms, and the businesspeople want—their own space, a Third Place that is neither work, (or school,) nor home. Teens want to IM, to use the best technology, to sit on comfortable furniture, to have quiet areas, to be able to talk, to get new books and DVDs, to have unrestricted Internet access, and unrestricted (meaning with carbonation, salt, sugar, and trans fats) after-school snacks. Only phonies would tell us what they know we want to hear. When kids do tell us what they really want, it’s not that they expect us to do it all, but they do expect us to listen, and that we can do.