DISPATCHES: For teens today, the pressures are growing

DISPATCHES By Hank Kalet Is the weight of living a life full of micromanagement and structure becoming too much for teens to handle?

   There are things, sometimes, for which there are no explanation.
   That’s how I feel about the crash two weeks ago that took the life of one South Brunswick teen and resulted in the other facing charges.
   The events of that December day remain incomprehensible to many in the community and, until Assistant Middlesex County Prosecutor Nicholas Sewitch concludes his investigation, it is likely to remain incomprehensible.
   What we know at this point remains sketchy. Two teens — 16-year-old Joshua Aanestad and 15-year-old Richard VonDeesten — were travelling at excessive speeds northbound on Route 1 in a Ford Taurus at about 4 a.m. on Dec. 20 when the car they were in veered left through an opening in the divider at Deans Lane and crashed into a utility pole. The car was sheered in half and Richard was killed. Joshua was thrown from the car. His injuries have healed and he remains under psychiatric observation.

   Mr. Sewitch said the crash was intentional, that the teens had made a suicide pact. He has charged Joshua with juvenile delinquency for a criminal offense that would constitute murder if committed by an adult.
   Beyond that, the information is sketchy, based on rumors and opinion, with many in the community refusing to believe the suicide theory and others accusing the school district — and the parents of the two boys — of ignoring what should have been obvious signs.
   These reactions, it seems to me, are based less in fact than in anger and grief. They come from a need to explain the unexplainable by attributing blame. And they allow us to escape any complicity on our part. Should the school have stepped in? The parents? What about the boys’ friends? We can follow this logic to its extreme, implicating all who had contact with the teens, but what does that get us?
   Suicide ultimately is personal decision, too often made for reasons that are unfathomable to the rest of us — especially when teens are involved.
   And, yet, that is not enough. The personal nature of the act — even when committed so publicly — does not absolve the rest of us from some responsibility.
   In this case, and with all teen deaths, I am left wondering whether we as a society have created an atmosphere for teenagers of extreme pressure. This is a group, as the doctors and psychologists consistently remind us, whose minds are not fully developed, who generally lack the maturity to deal with the kind of difficult decisions and pressures that most adults wrestle with on a regular basis.
   On the one hand, I think many teens have the same concerns and interests today that I had when I was 16 in the late 1970s. 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.
   These were and remain difficult issues for teens to deal with. But we’ve added a layer of expectations and pressure that did not exist back then, a layer that can be suffocating. We’ve been micromanaging our kids lives to a degree that seems unhealthy to me, running them through an array of organized sports and classes from the time they are still in diapers until they start filling out their applications for college.
   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. No adults, no coaches. Just a group of friends and neighborhood kids doing our thing.
   And if we weren’t playing ball, 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 played organized sports, but there was nothing like the mania that surrounds youth sports today. And while many of my peers were involved in a variety of groups, few had the kind of experience that many of today’s kids have, getting trekked from soccer practice to saxophone practice to ballet to gymnastics to Scouts to — well, you get the picture.
   What I’m getting at is that the lack of structure back then allowed me — and I assume my friends and peers — to develop a sense of who I was. I read, sketched and listened to music and didn’t have to worry about whether my pastimes were productive.
   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 knockdown, 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, don’t get me wrong. I know the world we live in today is different than the world of the mid- to late-1970s. And I know the focus on activities and structure comes from parents’ desire to be involved in their children’s lives.
   But we need to ask ourselves if that desire has turned to obsession and whether it ultimately is healthy for kids.
   Kids need to be kids for as long as it’s possible. Let’s remember that.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected].