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One of the most poignant moments in the psychology of man is the scene between the adolescent and the parent, glaring at each other with hopeless despair. They yearn for each other with aching desperation; they long for the familiar signs of understanding. Instead, they find that they no longer speak the same language, perceive the same dangers nor accept the same values. At the precise moment when each needs the reassuring warmth of the other, there is a breakdown of communication as though a bolt of lightning had cut the lines that bound them together. It is at this moment that they become aware of how widely they are separated by the distance of a generation. The twenty-odd years that divide them suddenly become an unbridgeable chasm.
This bleak and disheartening scene is not particularly unique to our time. “What is happening to our Modern Generation?” is an imperishable cliché which has always plagued and baffled parents, teachers, social workers, ministers, judges, psychologists and—not least of all—the youths themselves. The lament, the complaints, the bills of indictment may change like seasons but the cold (and often hot) war between adults and adolescents is as certain as springtime.
Throughout history, even to the best-intentioned, most enlightened and understanding parents, the antics, the behavior and “acting out” of their younger generations has seemed to be incomprehensible at best and, most of the time, quite bizarre. To the stuffy, inhibited, puritanical parents of the 1920's, the gin-swizzling, rowdy, belligerent, sexually-promiscuous adolescent was a shameful enigma. That was indeed a “Lost Generation” which could be found in illegal speakeasys or in the indelible pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nor was the serious-minded, socially-conscious adolescent of the 30's any less of a mystery