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The emergence, in particular, of tweens as a distinct population is at once one of the most urgent and most underexamined social phenomena of the era. At a fraction of the length of Quart's book, Newsweek's October 18, 1999 cover story, "The Truth About Tweens," was more comprehensive and helpful in introducing and exploring this rapidly growing subgroup.
2. (The Tribune reported that there are nearly twice as many tweens now as there were in the early 1990s.) Physically, youth are maturing earlier; advances in public health and nutrition (and perhaps other factors still under debate) helped bring the first signs of puberty down into the tween-age years over the course of the 20th century—for girls, from age 15 to about 10—skewing our conventional boundaries between childhood and full-blown adolescence.
Indeed, the very term "tweens" reflects the tension of feeling stranded between childhood and adolescence. Tweens bear traits of both childhood and maturity, innocence and sophistication. "They are a generation stuck on fast forward, in a fearsome hurry to grow up," wrote Newsweek. They feel "the pressure to act like 8 going on 25," or, as Quart puts it, tweens are "getting older younger." In response to this pressure—from marketers, from their bodies, from their peers—to hurry along toward adulthood, tweens uphold a time-honored American method of personal expression: conspicuous consumption. But this is a "superficial sophistication," as one marketing professor put it in Newsweek. Quart all too briefly hints at this consequence of the cultural patterns she is witnessing: tweens aren't learning "how to be as much as how to be entertained."
What is most detrimentally neglected in Quart's book is how these tensions of premature maturity also perplex parents, who—confronted by ever-earlier expressions of autonomy—may feel torn between rigidity and affirmation. Torn, that is, when they're around to have pangs of conscience at all; both fathers and mothers, ever more beholden to the office (and tied to it by cell phones and laptops), may employ what Newsweek called the "bribery theory" of child-rearing, and risk raising one of the most spoiled generations ever.
But parents' facilitation of tween consumption may have less to do with guilt than with the desire to "provide a better life" for their children, or merely an unthinking perpetuation of their own affliction of affluenza. "We're in a culture where that is very prevalent among the adults in general," Jacquelynne Eccles, president of the Society for Research of Adolescence told Books & Culture. "To hold the media [solely] responsible is to ignore the fact that these kids are living in families where in a substantial number of cases parents are doing the exact same thing." For Christian parents committed to stewardship, then, one of the most important duties of a parent may be modeling reluctant and discerning participation in consumer culture. Eccles says studies show that even with the rise of marketing to youth, the majority of adolescents (however idealistically) identify their parents as their most important influences.
Although seeing tweens as a distinct group can illuminate important social and economic realities, and certainly reflects the reality of marketing strategies, it may also be reductive, says Nancy Darling, a psychology professor at Bard College who researches adolescents' social relationships. "If you look at the social context of the term 'tweens' in the media, I think you'll find that it is almost always used to describe kids who are dressing precociously and spending a lot of money on consumer goods," Darling says. "You don't see it used for kids who are being precociously responsible, hardworking, or doing a lot of volunteer work." Besides, Eccles says, the biggest problem with the effect of the media on teens and tweens isn't branding but behavior. "We sell them lots of things—points of view and habits of mind: eating junk food, solving conflicts by beating up people."
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