October 9th 2009

How "Teen" Is Nineteen?

Even before it hits the newsstands, November’s Teen Vogue has people talking.

Why? Because the cover displays two 19-year-old supermodels, one of whom, Jourdan Dunn, is pregnant.

Critics say Dunn shouldn’t be there because she is a role model for teen girls. She makes pregnancy look cool - and there are way too many pregnant teens already.

I’m going to raise a different issue. Why is either model – Dunn or Chanel Iman – on the cover? Vogue, I could see, but Teen Vogue? Though technically teenagers, Dunn and Iman have a lot more in common with 20- and 30-something women than girls who just got their braces removed.

Both can vote. Both have successful careers that presumably allow them to buy a house (and much more). Both are old enough to ditch their designer digs for war fatigues and head off to fight in Afghanistan if the spirit moves them. Dunn has a steady partner of several years who is the father of her child.

Of course, celebrity culture said goodbye to childhood years ago. Teen Vogue, like so many teen publications, encourages 13- and 14-year-olds to look years older than they are. But that’s another column.

What I’m asking with this column is why we do just the reverse as children move into their late teens and even early 20s? Why do we trivialize, even infantilize, young adults?

It’s difficult for older adults to talk coherently about 18- to 29-year-olds because, as William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has noted, the traditional markers of adulthood no longer apply. Young adults today live longer with parents that they did in generations past. They marry later, have children at older ages and move from job to job more frequently.

Several years ago, I wrote an article about the tendency among some health officials and researchers to think of young people, even up to age 34, as adolescents. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a developmental psychology professor at Columbia University, told me she disagreed with the trend.

“It’s very disrespectful,” she said. “Twenty-year-olds aren’t teenagers. Cognitively, emotionally, they’re like adults.”

She has a point. And that point makes me wonder, does being treated like a teenager mean a young adult tends to think of herself or himself as still a teenager? Does thinking that way influence the choices that he or she makes in, say, sex partners and using protection from pregnancy and disease? Could this in any way contribute to the high rate of unplanned pregnancy among 20-somethings?

What do you think?