The Sudden, Terrible Onset of Caring What Other People Think
One reason it sucks to be a tween: you lose the sturdy indifference of childhood
A change has come over my son and his friends, now that they're 12 or 13. I don't mean the obvious one, though no doubt that is related. I mean their newfound, crushing awareness of themselves as objects in the gaze of other people. As children they were simply unaware of others' opinions of them. That's gone.
As my son put it the other night, remembering third grade: "Those were the good old days, when nobody cared about looks or being cool or anything." No more, no more. The brain has changed, along with the body. A few words from a stranger will turn a fun activity into a pathetic waste of time, which they suddenly deplore, disdain and vow never to do again. ("But you were just enjoying that!" "Nope, it's stupid.") They don't even need to hear that critical word. Just imagining what any random stranger might say will say pitch these boys into angst. (I write boys here because that's whom I see. And because I wonder if this sudden tween self-consciousness strikes girls differently, about which more below.)
I remember well the year when this psychological catastrophe struck me. I felt as if my soul had betrayed me — given me up into the hands of friends, enemies, bullies, total strangers. Where at age 10 I took feedback from the world as it came ("your art project stinks, kid" "OK, whatever"), by age 12 I was paralyzed just imagining that feedback. Before, I'd perceived people's words, glances, gestures as flat, simple data. She said hello. He nodded at me. But now every look and word seemed weighted with meanings, most of them bad. Everything said to me was a hall of mirrors, in which I saw myself, distorted. Why did she say hello like that!? What did I do?
Indifference to others hadn't disappeared entirely. But where it had been a kind of armor, now it was more like an unwieldy bag of balloons that never seemed to go where I needed it to be. I wanted to not-care when the mean kid in Shop class said something cutting. But I could not manage it. On the other hand, I wanted to care about my grandmother's maladies — I was supposed to! — but I didn't.
I don't mean to suggest that I, or most other children, were psychopaths before puberty. On the contrary, there's evidence that even toddlers will unselfishly act to help others, at least in some circumstances. Kids aren't apathetic to all pain and suffering around them, or unmoved by others' concerns. It's just that their reactions are in-the-moment. A kid acts, and if you say, "why did you put your sister in the trash can?" he will be upset because you and the sister are upset. But when you move on, and stop being upset, it's all over. A kid takes judgment as it arrives, and moves on.
The tween (and teen) mind, though, sees (and feels) judgment everywhere. Happening now, happening an hour ago, happening a week from now. It imagines you upset before you even walk in. It wonders if you're still upset about that thing last month. It rebels at anxiety and says "whatever, I don't care." Then it worries about saying that, or appearing to mean it.
This may be why teen-agers seem suddenly to love cruel stereotypes and injustices.
I think this state of psychological siege might be one reason teens sometimes lean into cruel stereotypes and injustices. When I was in high school, for example, if some bigger kid shoved me into a locker for no reason I might tell myself "well, I don't care, in five years I'll be out of here and he'll be in jail." (The kid could be Black, Hispanic or White — in this instance I was availing myself of a class prejudice, College-Bound joining in society's disdain for Non-College Bound.) If some girl made me feel geeky and awkward I'd think that she looked stupid in her [fill in teen fashion statement of the moment]. Or I'd stare sullenly at her body, imagining it undressed. Thus I, having felt weak, borrowed the indifference of society in order to feel stronger.
This isn't to claim that all prejudice is rooted in personal psychology. Group hatred — fantastical, insane hatred, easy to gin up because it involves fantasies, not real individuals — is a menace from which no society is immune. I know this. I wrote a book about it. What I am claiming, though, is that some "hate speech" in young people is motivated by their struggles with one another and their anguished perceptions of how others see them.
I did not believe or consciously defend the idea that it's great for society to throw so many young men in jail. I did not believe or defend the idea that women's bodies are available for male inspection. I was borrowing those idiocies as I might borrow a rock to throw. The prejudices I invoked were instrument of petty revenge. A kid doing this is different from an ideologue. But of course these petty moments add up, become a habit. A supposed "belief" can turn into a real belief, a notion the kid will actually try to defend, because it feels a part of him.
As I said above, I am not sure that this pattern is seen so often in girls. Pressured as girls are from an early age to care about others, and for others, are they more familiar with anxiety about others' opinions? I wonder. For tween boys, socialized to care about things more than people, this sudden awareness that they exist in others' gaze — not as they want to be seen or as they are, but as those others see them, as unjustly or unreasonably as that might be — comes as a shock.