Youth culture
[1] An emphasis on clothes, popular music, sports, vocabulary, and dating typically sets youth apart from other age groups.
Additionally, peer influence varies greatly among contexts, gender, age, and social status, making a single "youth culture" difficult to define.
[7] This liveliness showed in their new attitudes in life in which they openly drank, smoked, and, in some cases, socialized with gangster-type men.
Mods emerged during a time of war and political and social troubles, and stemmed from a group called the modernists.
[8] The Mods' style and embrace of modern technology spread from the UK overseas to North America and other countries.
Erik Erikson theorized that the vital psychological conflict of adolescence is identity versus role confusion.
Some psychologists have theorized that forming youth culture is a step to adopt an identity that reconciles these two conflicting expectations.
For example, Talcott Parsons posited that adolescence is when young people transition from reliance on parents to autonomy.
Compulsory schooling keeps them socially and economically dependent on their parents, while young people need to achieve some sort of independence to participate in the market economy of modern society.
As a means of coping with these contrasting aspects of adolescence, youth create freedom through behavior—specifically, through leisure-oriented activities done with peers.
[12] For decades, adults have worried that youth subcultures were the root of moral degradation and changing values in younger generations.
[14] These perceptions have led many adults to believe that adolescents hold different values than older generations and to perceive youth culture as an attack on the morals of current society.
Some researchers have noted the simultaneous rise in age segregation and adolescent adjustment problems such as suicide, delinquency, and premarital pregnancy.
[17] One study challenged the theory that adolescent cohorts had distanced themselves from their parents by finding that between 1976 and 1982, their problems increased, and they became less peer-oriented.
A study by Lerner et al. asked college students to compare their attitudes on several issues to their peers and parents.
[21] Sports, language, music, clothing, and dating tend to be superficial ways of expressing autonomy—they can be adopted without compromising one's beliefs or values.
Research demonstrates that many factors may influence youth to engage in high-risk behaviors, including "a lack of stable role models, heightened family stresses, lowered levels of family investment, weakened emotional bonds between parents and their children, lowered levels of social capital and social control, and a lack of hope in ones [sic] future".
[27] Additionally, this movement utilized social media (which is considered an aspect of youth culture)[citation needed] to schedule, coordinate, and publicize events.
