In fact, according to the latest statistics, teenagers are least likely to abuse drugs. Young people from homes in which parents smoke are three times more likely to smoke than others. The message that runs through all these statistics is not that the youth culture is uniquely defective. Instead, it is that the youth culture is heavily influenced by the adult culture. Rather, these behaviors are simply reflections of behaviors indulged in by adults and to some degree condoned by them for their own culture.
Males is very hard on the older generation.
But they are now working hard to reduce such benefits for the next generation, and that requires scapegoating, Males argues. Young people have to be seen as unworthy. He also points out in his book that, among 17 industrialized Western nations, the United States has the highest per-capita income and the highest level of child poverty. Young people don't much like the public portrait of their generation. He told an American Youth Policy Forum that his group's surveys of even the poorest, most turned-off kids in the inner cities show emphatically that they want opportunities to make their neighborhoods and lives better.