Free Republic

The employment rate among teenagers is incredibly dismal. I know this firsthand, since I have teens at home and teenage nieces and nephews who cannot find work. There’s an irritating theme that runs through family conversations about our unemployed teens, and the words I hear most often are “lazy” and “entitled.” “I had a paper route when I was their age,” one of the older members of the family will tell me every time we get together. “They need to get out and hustle. Walk the neighborhood, mow lawns, weed gardens. There’s lots of jobs out there for teens.” “They...

The "knockout game" -- and the media underreporting of it -- combines the breakdown of the family with the media's condescending determination to serve as a public relations bureau for blacks. The "game" is a dare in which a young man -- all the perps appear to be male people of color, mostly blacks -- tries to literally knock out an innocent bystander with one blow. Both National Public Radio and The New York Times say these reports of the "knockout game" being widespread are overblown and do not represent a trend. Really? According to Colin Flaherty, author of "White...

A McDonald's outlet in Australia has begun playing classical musical and opera late at night to deter young people from loitering around the restaurant. Fed up with their outlet's nocturnal transformation into an unofficial youth club, the store adopted the tactic a few weeks ago and says it has significantly reduced the number of loiterers, particularly around the car park. The strategy has reportedly been tried before by a local council at a car park in Australia, though previous efforts involved blaring songs by Barry Manilow. Matthew Watson, the operations manager at the Mt Annan McDonald's on the outskirts of...

As more U.S. states increase legalization and increased accessibility of marijuana a recent scientific study reveals that the negative impact on the brains of teenagers is being ignored.

We have become a nation of relentless self-promoters. Every day I check my email inbox and find it full of messages like “my media availability this week is…”, “I will be on TV or radio…”, “I am available for interviews,” or “my new book is available…” The onslaught of people promoting themselves makes it extraordinarily difficult for editors, funders and media to sift through potential talent, there is simply too much. Everyone wants to be a star, and the advent of YouTube and social media has made it appear to be readily attainable. The Internet’s democratization of access to publicity...

A 13-year-old boy who police say was doused with gasoline and lit on fire last week while walking home from school is recovering from first-degree burns to his face and head. The boy was just two blocks from his home in Kansas City Tuesday when two teenagers began to follow him and then attacked him, his mother, Melissa Coon, said. Police have described the suspects as black 16-year-olds, while the victim is white. "We were told it's a hate crime," Coon told KTLA. "They rushed him on the porch as he tried to get the door open," Coon told KMBC....

For the record, I tend to think that a cigarette ban for minors may be appropriate. While I oppose prohibition for adults, I think it makes sense to say that adults shouldn’t be permitted to entice children into certain unhealthy choices. Of course, if such a prohibition is put in place, it needs to be justified by banning a substance that is clearly dangerous, not just “unhealthy” by some statistic that we know doesn’t apply to all people. If the evidence qualifies tobacco as such a substance, then I can see restricting it from children.But recent news about a new...

Just last week, I was commiserating with other moms of middle-school teenage girls about the lack of appealing clothing available to teenage girls and the appalling state of girl teenage fashion today. You can find a few decent outfits, (cute but not risque), but they are few and far between. Once a girl outgrows Laura Ashley's offerings, she can find little more from mass merchandisers than clothes that appear to have been designed for young, tacky sex kittens -- clothes that my mother would not have let me wear to college, much less to middle school. According to Suzy Menkes,...

Full title: "Mystery of 17-year-old boy who 'stole his parents’ truck, fled and then shot himself dead in botched attempt to rob Texas home'" A 17-year-old Oklahoma boy was found dead at the scene of a violent robbery in Texas just two days after he stole his parents' pickup truck and loaded it up with guns and ammunition.

Sometimes it's hard to measure the distance between the supposedly established, respectable press and the seediest corners of hardcore pornography. On March 1, ABC's "Nightline" celebrated a porn star named "James Deen" (real name: Bryan Sevilla). The apparent "news" hook is his role in a forthcoming movie with the ever-more pathetic Lindsay Lohan. ABC reporter Cecilia Vega sold Deen as a 27-year-old hazard to teenaged girls. They're boasting that he's found a new frontier of porn consumers, "some of them so young we couldn't even interview them on camera. Their parents had no idea that secretly they have a crush...

Four girls went "gallon smashing" at the Shaw's in Salem in Monday. How do you rate this in the annals of stupid teen pranks? (with video--which was not filmed at that market) In an evolutionary sense, we owe a lot to the adolescents of the species. The unnecessary risks they take helped our ancestors learn important lessons — like which plants were poisonous. But Monday in Salem there was an example of juvenile behavior for which I'm hard pressed to see the advantage. "Gallon smashing" is, well, just take a look at the YouTube video attached to this post. People...

Another bright, young male with time on his hands, another violent fantasy. This time, however, the young man who was "threatning [sic] my father and mother Smith to burne [sic] them and the house over them" was stopped in time. An owner of a crossbow, the teen was a resident of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth in Lincolnshire, England. Removed from King's School, Grantham, two years prior to the incident, the suspect is son of Hannah Ayscough and stepfather Rev. Barnabus Smith. The incident was recorded in the teen's diary which listed several violent episodes -- including an assault on another student with a...

It's very likely that kids will find this column to be, like, totally stupid, and will conclude that they can write one sooooo much better. They will declare this on their Twitter feed, sandwiched between the hundreds of photos of themselves making that pursed-lips "duck face," then wait for the "friends" they've never met in person to tell them how hot they look. That's because compared with 30 years ago, more American students think they're above average in writing, leadership, intelligence, drive and social skills, according to a BBC analysis of college freshmen data by psychologist Jean Twenge. A separate...

I have a 16 year old grandson that spends too much time on the computer and playing X games. He doesn't read books. So, I am thinking of giving him a couple of books for his christmas present. Two books I am thinking of is; 'The Richest Man In Babylon' by George Clasan and 'Anthem' by Ayn Rand. I would like suggestions from other writers that counter act the teaching he is getting in his school, and still be interesting for a 16 year old.

Back in the 1950s, "Little Joe Cartwright" starred in a movie called "I Was a Teenage Werewolf." That's right, after seeing a full moon, Michael Landon ran around a public high school foaming at the mouth and pretty much out of control. Since there was little difference between his behavior and that of the normal students, he got away with it for two semesters. As I watched the film, I remember thinking that it was going to be tough for Landon to get into college with that on his resume. But then the 1960s happened, so that was that. This...

FORT LEE, N.J. (AP) — Police say a 16-year-old New Jersey boy was killed after he put his head out of an emergency hatch of a double-decker bus and his head hit the underside of an Interstate 95 overpass.

ELLICOTT CITY, Md. (AP) — A train hauling coal derailed on a bridge in this city’s historic district, killing two college students who had been drinking together and hanging out on the tracks. Nearly two dozen railroad cars flipped over, including some that fell onto vehicles in a parking lot below the bridge, officials said. The students, both 19-year-old women, posted photos and comments from what appeared to be the bridge shortly before the train derailed around midnight Monday, according to Twitter feeds with the same names as the victims.

Seems like teens have gotten the memo that cigarettes are bad for you; however, the same isn’t true for marijuana, according to a study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.Released late last week, the government study revealed that in a nationwide study of 15,000 high school students, pot is now more popular among teens than cigarettes, CBS reports. Eighteen percent of surveyed students in 2011 reported smoking a cigarette in the past month, while 23% reported smoking marijuana in the last 30 days. Perhaps thanks to the anti-smoking campaigns in ads and in schools, or to the personal...

Kids under 17 would not be allowed to go to tanning beds in West Virginia in a bill passed Tuesday by the state Senate. The bill, approved 30-4, sets up a regulatory process for tanning beds, including business registration and puts the state Bureau of Public Health in charge of regulating the facilities. The highlight of the bill is the ban for kids under 17. "The committee recommends doing this after we were given some statistics including one from the Yale School of Public Health that found that people who tanned on indoor beds had a 69 percent increased chance...

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/15/time-for-a-new-approach-to-alcohol/ "Material from independent.co.uk cannot be posted to FR per publisher’s copyright complaint," but see link. In Firefox you can select url and right click choose "Open in new tab." It is very relevant to the Nat. health care mandate