The following are remarks provided by Susan Nall Bales, founding editor of Connect for Kids and president of the nonprofit DC-based FrameWorks Institute, at the May 2, 2000 White House Conference on Teenagers.

I believe we have a distorted view of today's youth. The research that I and my colleagues do at the FrameWorks Institute, with funding from the W. T. Grant Foundation, is on the perceptual barriers to valuing and supporting youth. For it is not merely that we lack the resources to invest in youth. We lack the public will and the public priority to put programs for youth in place. Why is this the case?

Adults believe that teens today are "different" than in the past, that they have rejected traditional American values. In a FrameWorks review of recent public opinion about adolescents, my colleague Margaret Bostrom reports that only 1 in 6 Americans say that young people share most of their moral and ethical values. When asked what word applies to young people today, most adults chose "selfish" and "materialistic" for youth today, compared to "patriotic" and "idealistic" for the youth of 20 years ago.

The reality is that teens place high value on honesty and hard work, and the vast majority are thinking and planning seriously for the future. Among those values teens say they rank highest are "being honest" "working hard" "being a good student," and "giving time to helping others." And majorities of teens say they volunteer, attend church or synagogue weekly, read the newspaper regularly and attend cultural events.

Yet in six focus groups FrameWorks conducted this summer, it was the rare parent who believed these statistics. People are absolutely convinced that teens are dangerous and in danger, silly and self-absorbed, lazy and corrupted by consumerism. And they blame the parents whom they believe to be uninvolved if not entirely absent.

What's going on here? Are adults simply "misinformed" about the lives and attitudes of today's youth? Where are we getting the views that fly in the face of reality? What accounts for a distortion so powerful that it reconfigures the facts to fit the negative stereotypes?

"Television is a cultural storyteller," says my colleague Katharine Heintz-Knowles. To identify the stories we are being told about teenagers today through entertainment television, she examined prime-time series aired during Fall 1999 on the six broadcast networks. She found adolescent characters on television are not connected to a wider community, including even their own family. TV teens are seen as independent and isolated, living in an adolescent world whose problems are mainly social in nature. They do not require anyone's help beyond their small immediate peer group, and in fact their parents are often portrayed as ineffective or as causing problems. This FrameWorks report concludes that TV reinforces the notion of today's teens as self-absorbed and interested only in trivial matters.

On the news side, youth are most likely to be featured in the context of crime stories. Most recently, the Berkeley Media Studies Group studied three California newspapers over the course of a year. They found that education and violence dominate the coverage, and each receives about one quarter of the news attention accorded youth. Think about that. Only 3 young people in 100 perpetrate or become victims of serious violence in a given year, but we show violence as a factor in kids lives as often as schools.

As journalist Richard Rodriguez has said, "the stories invent us." Because crime and kids are in our faces every day on the news, the fear of crime shuts out considerations of healthy child and adolescent development. We see this first in the early years, as the number one criteria for daycare becomes safety. That kind of thinking makes the daycare center into a passive container, not a rich, interactive environment in which the teachers and curriculum are understood to nurture a child's social, moral and intellectual developmental.

For adolescents too, crime eclipses healthy youth development. We fear for our children's safety and the role of parenting evolves into protection, often protection FROM the community at precisely the time when youth need to be acculturated INTO the community. This flies in the face of the literature on youth development, and puts all the responsibility on the parent, and none on the community. That's bad for both of us. If teens are isolated from the community, we are more likely to believe and act upon these depictions of silly, self-absorbed, dangerous teens that we see on TV.

We need to change the lens with which we view our kids—to see them on the track and on track for achievement. To see them in plays and soup kitchens and to know they are learning old American values like teamwork, commitment, and responsibility. We need to put our fear of crime in proper perspective, so we don't act on a bad risk assessment.

Television news and entertainment have a big part to play in whether we will make the right choices as citizens and voters to support young people. In every one of the last dozen focus groups FrameWorks conducted, adults said 'give us more news about solutions—how to help children achieve. Show us programs that work.' Everyone here knows there are hundreds of such programs around the country. Why then can't we get the news we need?

We need to tell ourselves a new story about youth in America today. And unless we do, we will put resources in metal detectors, incarceration and other remedies that hardly relate to what experts tell us youth need to succeed.