Deadly crash makes me wonder why we’re placing so much pressure on teens these days.
By: Hank Kalet
A few difficult weeks with days off and holidays mixed in and suddenly I realize that the blog’s been a bit silent.
Really, there is no excuse worth the words used, but time is a precious commodity at this time of year and time truly becomes an issue when such horrid news must be reported.
When the news came in that two local teens were involved in a crash, that one had died and that the crash was intentional, a suicide pact, everything was put on hold around here.
I didn’t know the kids, don’t know the parents. Yet, I consider them neighbors in some way. I live in South Brunswick and went to South Brunswick High School. I have friends with kids over there, have friends who teach over there. I am connected to the community. How can I not feel some sense of grief over what happened.
As a news person, a story like this is truly difficult. But it had to be covered. The issue, as this week’s Dispatches column relates, was how. I’ll let you read the column and judge for yourselves whether we handled this correctly.
Suffice to say that our approach, to pull in the reins a bit and not join in with the pack of buzzards, was not necessarily endorsed by all around here. But it was my decision and I was the one, ultimately, that had to live with it.
I basically had to balance the need for information with the understanding that there were a lot of impressionable and angry teens who saw the press as an intrusion and with the desire of the two families to deal with this tragedy on their own. Not an easy balance. I hope we managed to strike the correct one.
That said, there remains the question of why two teens, one 16 and one 15, would look to the future and decide that it was best to end it all. I’m not sure we’ll ever get an answer to that one. I’d like to think that, because this thing played itself out so publicly, the answer is not one that should be kept private. But, again, I doubt we’ll ever really know.
The crash, however, has left me wondering whether we as a society are robbing our teens of their childhood. I can only look back at my own pre-teen and teen years and say that things have changed drastically.
On the one hand, I think many teens have the same concerns and interests today that I had when I was 16. They are worried about college and the future, worried about finding boyfriends and girlfriends, worried about their self-image (though they may not realize it). They want to fit in, but also find a way to define themselves.
But we’ve added a layer of expectations and pressure to their lives that can be suffocating.
I remember when I was 12, I could just round up my friends and head over to the open field next to St. Augustine of Canterbury R.C. Church on Henderson Road and play football or baseball. Or we’d grab a basketball and hit the courts at the church or at Brunswick Acres School. Or we might trek into the woods at the edge of Brunswick Acres or play bumper pool in John and Rob’s garage or any one of a number of completely useless activities. There was no order on it, nothing needed to be organized. It was our own little world and that was cool.
We did play organized sports, but there was nothing like the mania that surrounds youth sports today. I was a fairly terrible ballplayer, would step badly into the bucket on my swing, as they say, and would flinch when fielding a hard-hit ball. But I got a chance to play and was able to walk away when I wanted no pressure to continue. Yes, being the worst or one of the worst players on a team was embarrassing, but being the second-string rightfielder was not something that followed you around. (And I don’t ever remember my dad, who coached me on several teams, or any other of my coaches getting into screaming matches or fistfights with referees, umpires, opposing coaches or other parents. But that’s a topic for another column.)
What I’m getting at is that the lack of structure back then allowed me and I assume my friends and peers to develop our own sense of who we were. We weren’t trekked around from soccer practice to saxophone practice to ballet to gymnastics to Scouts to well, you get the picture.
And there wasn’t the kind of intense pressure to succeed at everything that seems to exist now. The Scholastic Assessment Test it was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test back then was not the kind of knock-down, drag-it-out brawl it has become. Only a handful of people took test classes and, while we all were worried about college, I don’t remember the kind of gut-wrenching pressure that seems to paralyze kids these days.
There are positives to some of the changes. There is an obvious interest being taken by parents though, I hasten to add that my folks were as interested in my well-being and intellectual and emotional growth as any of today’s parents. My sense, however, is that the interest has become obsession with some, perhaps most, and that obsession in turn suffocates kids.
Does this explain what happened last week? No. But I doubt that the current state of things is very healthy. Kids need to be kids for as long as it’s possible. Let’s remember that.

