1. Emotional literacy: I wrote about such courses in The New York Times (March 3,1992).
2. The statistics on teen crime rates are from the Uniform Crime Reports, Crime in the U.S., 1991, published by the Department of Justice.
3. Violent crimes in teenagers: In 1990 the juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes climbed to 430 per 100,000, a 27 percent jump over the 1980 rate. Teen arrest rates for forcible rape rose from 10.9 per 100,000 in 1965 to 21.9 per 100,000 in 1990. Teen murder rates more than quadrupled from 1965 to 1990, from 2.8 per 100,000 to 12.1; by 1990 three of four teenage murders were with guns, a 79 percent increase over the decade. Aggravated assault by teenagers jumped by 64 percent from 1980 to 1990. See, e.g., Ruby Takanashi, "The Opportunities of Adolescence," American Psychologist (Feb. 1993).
4. In 1950 the suicide rate for those 15 to 24 was 4.5 per 100,000. By 1989 it was three times higher, 13.3. Suicide rates for children 10 to 14 almost tripled between 1968 and 1985. Figures on suicide, homicide victims, and pregnancies are from Health, 1991, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Children's Safety Network, A Data Book of Child and Adolescent Injury (Washington, DC: National Center for Education in Maternal and Child Health, 1991).
5. Over the three decades since 1960, rates of gonorrhea jumped to a level four times higher among children 10 to 14, and three times higher among those 15 to 19. By 1990, 20 percent of AIDS patients were in their twenties, many having become infected during their teen years. Pressure to have sex early is getting stronger. A survey in the 1990s found that more than a third of younger women say that pressure from peers made them decide to have sex the first time; a generation earlier just 13 percent of women said so. See Ruby Takanashi, "The Opportunities of Adolescence," and Children's Safety Network, A Data Book of Child and Adolescent Injury.
6. Heroin and cocaine use for whites rose from 18 per 100,000 in 1970 to a rate of 68 in 1990—about three times higher. But over the same two decades among blacks, the rise was from a 1970 rate of 53 per 100,000 to a staggering 766 in 1990—close to 13 times the rate 20 years before. Drug use rates are from Crime in the U.S., 1991, U.S. Department of Justice.
7. As many as one in five children have psychological difficulties that impair their lives in some way, according to surveys done in the United States, New Zealand, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Anxiety is the most common problem in children under 11, afflicting 10 percent with phobias severe enough to interfere with normal life, another 5 percent with generalized anxiety and constant worry, and another 4 percent with intense anxiety about being separated from their parents. Binge drinking climbs during the teenage years among boys to a rate of about 20 percent by age 20. I reported much of this data on emotional disorders in children in The New York Times (Jan. 10, 1989).
8. The national study of children's emotional problems, and comparison with other countries: Thomas Achenbach and Catherine Howell, "Are America's Children's Problems Getting Worse? A 13-Year Comparison, "Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Nov. 1989).
9. The comparison across nations was by Urie Bronfenbrenner, in Michael Lamb and Kathleen Sternberg, Child Care in Context: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Englewood, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992).
10. Urie Bronfenbrenner was speaking at a symposium at Cornell University (Sept. 24, 1993).
11. Longitudinal studies of aggressive and delinquent children: see, for example, Alexander Thomas et al., "Longitudinal Study of Negative Emotional States and Adjustments from Early Childhood Through Adolescence," Child Development, vol. 59 (Sept. 1988).
12. The bully experiment: John Lochman, "Social-Cognitive Processes of Severely Violent, Moderately Aggressive, and Nonaggressive Boys," Journal of Clinical and Consulting Psychology, 199'4.
13. The aggressive boys research: Kenneth A. Dodge, "Emotion and Social Information Processing," in J. Garber and K. Dodge, The Development ofEmotion Regulation and Dysregulation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
14. Dislike for bullies within hours: J. D. Coie and J. B. Kupersmidt, "A Behavioral Analysis of Emerging Social Status in Boys' Groups," Child Development 54 (1983).
15. Up to half of unruly children: See, for example, Dan Offord et al., "Outcome, Prognosis, and Risk in a Longitudinal Follow-up Study," Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 31 0992).
16. Aggressive children and crime: Richard Tremblay et al., "Predicting Early Onset of Male Antisocial Behavior from Preschool Behavior," Archives of General Psychiatry (Sept. 1994).
17. What happens in a child's family before the child reaches school is, of course, crucial in creating a predisposition to aggression. One study, for example, showed that children whose mothers rejected them at age 1, and whose birth was more complicated, were four times as likely as others to commit a violent crime by age 18. Adriane Raines et al., "Birth Complications Combined with Early Maternal Rejection at Age One Predispose to Violent Crime at Age 18 Years," Archives of General Psychiatry (Dec. 1994).
18. While low verbal IQ has appeared to predict delinquency (one study found an eight-point difference in these scores between delinquents and nondelinquents), there is evidence that impulsivity is more directly and powerfully at cause for both the low IQ scores and delinquency. As for the low scores, impulsive children don't pay attention well enough to learn the language and reasoning skills on which verbal IQ scores are based, and so impulsivity lowers those scores. In the Pittsburgh Youth Study, a well-designed longitudinal project where both IQ and impulsivity were assessed in ten-to twelve-year-olds, impulsivity was almost three times more powerful than verbal IQ in predicting delinquency. See the discussion in: Jack Block, "On the Relation Between IQ, Impulsivity, and Delinquency," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 104 (1995).
19. "Bad" girls and pregnancy: Marion Underwood and Melinda Albert, "Fourth-Grade Peer Status as a Predictor of Adolescent Pregnancy," paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, Kansas City, Missouri (Apr. 1989).
20. The trajectory to delinquency: Gerald R. Patterson, "Orderly Change in a Stable World: The Antisocial Trait as Chimera, "Journal of Clinical and Consulting Psychology 62 (1993).
21. Mind-set of aggression: Ronald Slaby and Nancy Guerra, "Cognitive Mediators of Aggression in Adolescent Offenders," Developmental Psychology 24 (1988).
22. The case of Dana: from Laura Mufson et al., Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depressed Adolescents (New York: Guilford Press, 1993).
23. Rising rates of depression worldwide: Cross-National Collaborative Group, "The Changing Rate of Major Depression: Cross-National Comparisons," Journal of the American Medical Association (Dec. 2, 1992).
24. Ten times greater chance of depression: Peter Lewinsohn et al., "Age-Cohort Changes in the Lifetime Occurrence of Depression and Other Mental Disorders," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 102 0993).
25. Epidemiology of depression: Patricia Cohen et al., New York Psychiatric Institute, 1988; Peter Lewinsohn et al., "Adolescent Psychopathology: I. Prevalence and Incidence of Depression in High School Students, "Journal of Abnormal Psychology 102 0993). See also Mufson et al., Interpersonal Psychotherapy. For a review of lower estimates: E. Costello, "Developments in Child Psychiatric Epidemiology," Journal of the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 28 (1989).