CONTROL ISSUES

With all the curfews,dress codes and other restrictions being imposed on
kids,are we raising a generation of upstanding citizens-or future leaders
of a police state?

For Nicole Eklund,a 16-year-old cheerleader from Simi Valley,coming of age
has meant getting used to police dogs sniffing for drugs at her school
locker,dress codes proscribing bare midriffs,and an official 10 p.m. curfew
seven days a week.

Leaders in her community-a suburb so benign she calls it "Anytown, USA" -
have expelled a kindergartner for bringing a pink squirt gun to school and
are considering, as state legislators plan to, a daytime curfew for people
under age 18.

What's more, living in California, she now is subject to a $75 fine and
community service if she ever smokes a cigarette, even if her parents give
it to her. Friends applying for their first driver's licenses this year
likely will be restricted from driving late at night or with other kids.
Those who engage in vandalism or graffiti may not be able to obtain
licenses at all and may have to stay home looking at blank TV screens-if
their parents can program a V-chip.

In Nicole's opinion, some of these efforts miss the mark. She thinks adults
should be preparing their children for the real world instead of
overprotecting them. "People learn by experience and mistakes," Nicole says.

Nevertheless, emboldened by First Baby Boomer Bill Clinton-who has endorsed
daytime curfews, smoking bans and school uniforms-adults across the country
are experimenting with unprecedented controls in an effort to both protect
and punish the young, especially teenagers.

Only a few years ago, it was fashionable to talk bout children's rights,
one of Hillary Clinton's original passions. We're not talking about
children's rights today," says William Strauss, a political commentator in
Washington, D.C. "We're talking about the right of the principal to probe
into their lockers and the duty of the child not to put anything in that
locker."

High courts already have ruled that some efforts have gone too far in
restricting liberties, but in general the controls are being met with open
arms.

"The thing that's remarkable is that there's no single ideological group
you can point the finger at for this renaissance of enthusiasm for
authority," says UC Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring, whose book on
juvenile crime will be published this have discovered family values,' a
little bit 'the terror of youth violence' and a little bit of people now
interested in making laws for other people's kids."

"The public perception is that it isn't like it used to be, that kids are
doing more and more bad things at a younger and younger age, and the things
they are doing are worse than ever before," adds professor Thomas Nazario
of San Fransisco, a specialist in children's law. "It is worse," Nazario
believes. "The only question is how much worse."

Zimring disagrees. He contends that fear of youth violence-often the
genesis of curfews and dress codes-has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Most of the "increase" in youth violence since the mid-1980s, Zimring says,
can be attributed to a reclassification of minor attacks as more serious
ones. While still disturbing, even those figures have been declining in
recent years.

However, in a recent survey of American cities, many officials attributed
dramatic decreases in juvenile crime precisely to an increase in
restrictions on children, namely daytime and nighttime curfews.

An estimated 35 regional jurisdictions, including the city and county of
Los Angeles, have daytime curfews, also known as antitruancy laws,
requiring children to stay off the streets during school hours. The
majority of schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District have
implemented policies requiring students to wear uniforms. New laws, rules
and policies are gaining steam almost everywhere.

In Long Beach, parents' enthusiasm for school uniforms, required at every
elementary and middle school for the past three years, spread this fall to
a high school where freshmen will begin a four-year phase-in.

At the nation's largest mall, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.,
teenagers under 16 must have chaperons after 6 p.m.

This summer in King's County, Wash., law enforcement officials used a
helicopter to find and arrest underage drinkers partying in secluded areas.

One of the most puzzling and ironic aspects of the new wave of controls is
that they are being proposed and enforced by the Summer of Love generation,
one of the most pampered and individualistic groups of children ever raised
(see accompanying story). Some suggest the controls may be a reaction to
the disarray in the boomers' own lives.

When social problems appear overwhelming, adults historically have grasped
at whatever controls are handy, says psychologist Lawrence Steinberg of
Philadelphia, who is studying national juvenile justice reform. Steinberg
notes that clothing is a frequent target.

One of the problems with the current wave, Steinberg says, is that some
adults fail to distinguish between things that need adult control and
things that don't. In some cases, he argues, kids are given too much
freedom by the very same adults who are overly controlling in other areas.

"Censoring the kind of information that kids have access to over the
Internet is probably a lot less important than monitoring kids' whereabouts
in the after-school hours," Steinberg says.

As much or more than teenage crime or baby boomer hypocrisy, some
researchers suspect the new restrictions stem from fundamental changes in
adult attitudes toward teenagers.

Strauss theorizes that the shift is based on generational patterns that
alternate between over-and under-protection of children. "Parents tend to
raise children to become more like their own parents were than they
themselves were," Strauss says. "This is because of a self-correcting
mechanism in the way a society raises children."

The baby boomers were raised indulgently, but Generation Xers grew up in an
era when society had relaxed its grip on children, says Strauss. "'Now,
boomers are looking for their children to become like the World War II
generation: civicminded, virtuous and stalwart, says Strauss. Over the next
few years, he predicts, we will see magazine covers praising youths, and
youths themselves returning to singable songs, teamwork and community
service. A return to wholesomeness already is evident from the popularity
of such your, clean-cut singing groups as Hanson, Strauss adds.

"Our advice to government is: Don't overbuild prisons. This is not a
generation you're going to want to stuff in prison. Our society will love
them."

According to another theory, the new crackdown represents a historical
pattern in which adults tend to view young people differently depending on
economic and political circumstances.

When they are needed to serve in wars, for instance, they are considered
capable and responsible, says social psychologist Robert Enright, a
researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But in economically
insecure eras when they might be rivals for jobs, they tend to be viewed as
immature, disruptive and needing guidance for a longer developmental period.

The new "zero tolerance" and other policies represent "the first wave of a
new social experiment" to legislate social norms, says Enright. Asking for
moral improvement is not such a bad idea, he adds. "But it's a tightrope.
We might choke off their liberties, and have to be careful."

Complaints have begun to surface. Some fear that blanket policies such as
curfew allow too much discretion for officials who enforce them, opening up
the door for racial discrimination. Others say good kids get swept up in
the net.

Parents in central Los Angeles, for instance, were shocked in June when
13-year-old students on an errand for their teacher were handcuffed in the
hall by armed police looking for miscreants.

Even in family-friendly Monrovia, a group of parents is suing the city over
its award-winning anti-truancy ordinance. Rosemary Harrahill, a
home-schooling mother who has joined the litigation, says two of her
children have been stopped a total of 22 times by police. Like others, they
have been issued fluorescent identity cards to show police. Harrahill
likens the principle to Nazi restrictions in prewar Poland. "They've
targeted a class of people and they're children."

"The real question," says Mayor Robert T. Bartlett, "is do you adapt the
community to one or two families' concerns, or do you try to do the most
good you can for the most number of people in the community?" Citing
truants-and fining parents-often inspires parents to become more involved,
Bartlett says. "The gift we're giving them is, we're letting them know we
care."

Even Harrahill admits she feels safe in the "charming, little, wonderful
city" but questions the price: Children becoming accustomed to a society
where they routinely are stopped and questioned by police during the day.

Last year, an appellate court struck down San Diego's nighttime curfew
ordinance as being unconstitutionally vague. The city consequently revamped
its law, which still allows police to arrest teens in public after 10 p.m.

Some students say locker searches, for example, lead to drugs being carried
in pockets or backpacks.

Nazario calls the controls a "quick fix."

"What we really need to do something about juvenile crime in America, is a
lot more resources being poured into education and into opportunity for
kids," he says. "Something has to be done for kids with no access to
after-school programs and the number of kids who live in poverty and
families who don't care or who are not there for them.

"Those are tough issues and cost money and time and are over-whelming for
people. Instead, we go to the law and try to spank kids for getting out of
line."

Some officials who have implemented new restrictions are trying to temper
them with softer interventions as well. For instance, at the Mall of
America-where officials say as many as 4,000 kids used to gather on weekend
evenings-family activities such as basketball and choral singing have been
introduced on the weekends, along with the chaperon policy. Parents have
been recruited and paid $20 and hour to walk side by side with security
officers on patrol.

"If a security officer says, 'You need to stop that,' a young kid might
say, 'No, I don't.' With a mother, it's a lot harder to do that," says mall
spokeswoman Teresa McFarland. "In some cases, these mothers might even know
[the kid's] parents."

In the year before the new policies were enacted, McFarland says, there
were 394 arrests of youngsters under 17 for disorderly conduct at the mall.
In the year since the changes, there has been one.