I remember very little about 1973, the year I was 10, apart from being dimly aware that, for the first time in my life, Keith Holyoake was not the Prime Minister.
My most vivid memories aren’t the things you’d think, like family holidays or celebrations. They are shards, the merest glimpses, nearly always with a soundtrack – falling asleep to the sound of the cash registers on my parent’s new LP, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, or thrashing my vacuum cleaner-air guitar to Bennie and the Jets.
In 1974 the Prime Minister-who-wasn’t-Holyoake died, and everyone was shocked and sad, and he got his own pop song, Big Norm. Later that year, Richard Nixon resigned. I scratched ‘Nixon resigns’ on a spoon, an 11-year-old solemnly marking a historic event in a way that made sense to an 11-year-old. I immediately lost the spoon.
My inability to remember much about life before I was 12 is, apparently, perfectly normal. There is even a name for it – the ‘reminiscence bump’, an over-40 adult’s ability to vividly recall events during adolescence and early adulthood, a time of intense neurological development.
10-year-old me and 17-year-old me are separated by the oceans of puberty – a transformation which explains why I loved Billy Don’t Be a Hero by Paper Lace when I was 10 but thought it ‘cringe’ at 17.
My partner Greg has a blurry photograph of himself at 13 in mid-air, jumping on his bike over eight of his friends lying on the ground like silly little logs. Would he have tried the same stunt 10 years later?
Adolescents are not children or, yet, adults. They are rangatahi, ‘pre-adults’, ‘emerging adults’, ‘dispersers’, ‘sub-adults’, ‘fledglings’, ‘elvers’ (a term for adolescent eels), or the Japanese ‘seinenki’ (green ones, saplings).
Harvard professor Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Kathryn Bowers have written a wonderful book, Wildhood (2019), which shows that all animals have a ‘teenage’ period. Human adolescence isn’t an invention, culturally created, they say, but a quest for maturity through experience. “For a species to produce mature adults, an adolescence is essential.” Puberty strikes fruit flies at nine days, cats at six months, otters at nine months, humpback whales at four years, crocodiles at eight, elephants at 10 and Greenland sharks at 130*.
All animals, the authors write, face four fundamental adolescent challenges: 1) how to stay safe, 2) how to navigate social hierarchies, 3) how to communicate sexually, and 4) how to leave the nest and care for oneself.
The authors do a great job in making sense of otherwise impenetrable teen behaviour, reminding us of the harrowing demands of social hierarchies.
“Rising in status feels great. Plummeting in status, on the other hand, reduces an animal’s chances of survival. When animals fall in status, they are chemically punished. Status descent feels terrible… social pain is excruciating and not something to be trivialised. Newer research suggest this possibility: serotonin levels don’t control an animal’s mood. Serotonin, along with other neurotransmitters, signals a shift in an animal’s status. The status-mood connection is a powerful lens for interpreting [teen] behaviour, mood swings, anxiety and depression.”
And today’s teenagers, they point out, are barraged by constant assessment. “Home used to exist as a sort of status sanctuary. But now, through laptops and phones, a direct sorting pipeline – social media – digitally spews into adolescents’ bedrooms and dinner tables, while they’re studying, game-playing, reading or having downtime. What we have in the 21st century is ‘assessment overload’.”
The new science shines a spotlight on New Zealand’s laws on youth crime. Incredibly, a 10-year-old child can still be arrested, charged and jailed here.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has called for the New Zealand government to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility – the age at which children may be prosecuted for criminal offending – from 10 to at least 14 years old. This age, in New Zealand, is lower than China (12); Spain (14), Colombia (14); Cuba (16); DR Congo (14); Egypt (12); Finland (15); Germany (14); Japan (14); Luxembourg (18); Mexico (12); Mongolia (14); Norway (15); Russia (14). Finland (15), Switzerland (15).
Youth crime has been in the news lately, although it has, in truth, been in decline for years, likely thanks to Herculean efforts to keep kids out of the ‘prison pipeline’, a wretched but expensive school on how to be criminal.
In 2007, over 5000 young people in Aotearoa were charged for crimes. By 2022 that had fallen to 1416 teens – a 78 percent drop. A total of 1704 people aged between 10 and 17 faced court charges in 2023/24, according to the NZ Herald.
As crimes deemed worthy of headlines, like ram raids, trend down, white-collar crimes like fraud and scams are soaring. And this time, we can’t blame 10-year-olds.
(*Not a misprint – they can live for an estimated 500 years.)
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2024
