"And let's be honest. A lot of kids out there don't necessarily know the MOST current terms, but they are familiar with slanguage. The media keeps them current. I'm not just talking about hip hop; I'm talking about mainstream TV and movies. Even in Disney movies and other popular cartoon movies... the Zebra walks up on the beach and says to the lion, "What's crackalackin'?" So now, many home schooled kids are familiar with some of those terms. And kids that watch MTV... they watch shows like "pimp my ride" where slanguage is a staple.

Most kids have easy access to slanguage through these forms of media. 64% of teenagers have a TV in their bedroom. 69% of them view it on cable. The average time that an 8 to 18 year old watches TV or movies per day is 3 hours 51 minutes. The media keeps them current.

...I'd say two thirds of our youth culture listens to hip hop. As a matter of fact, according to Kaiser's most recent study, hip hop is the most popular music genre. 65 percent of 7th - 12th graders listen to hip hop, where second place to hip hop is alternative rock which is 32%.  Below that there is country and other stuff. If you'd like to see for yourself, pop onto Billboard.com or iTunes and check out the top charts and top downloads.

Now, some people think, "Oh well, are you sure that's all kids? What about white kids?" That's what I love about most of these studies, including that particular Kaiser study. It is detailed by race. Check this out: 60 percent of WHITE kids listen to hip hop each day, where only 38 percent of them listen to alternative rock, then country... And you've got to realize that when kids are averaging 6 1/2 hours per day of media exposure, which is what that same survey reports, this is a lot of influence. So when this video that Fred's talking about comes out, most kids... actually... let me reiterate to be completely accurate, 65% of kids are current with that term within a week."

"To anyone who knows 17-year-old Esther Mobley, one of the best students at one of the best public high schools in the country, it is absurd to think she doesn't measure up. But Esther herself is quick to set the record straight.

'First of all, I'm a terrible athlete,' she said over lunch one day.

'I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly,' she continued. 'This is one of the things I'm most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, 'What sports do you play?' I don't play any sports. It's awkward.'

Esther, a willowy, effervescent senior, turned to her friend Colby Kennedy. Colby, 17, is also a great student, a classical pianist, fluent in Spanish, and a three-season varsity runner and track captain. Did Colby worry, Esther asked, that she fell short in some way?

'Or,' said Esther, and now her tone was a touch sarcastic, 'do you just have it all already?'

They both burst out laughing.

Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. 'Amazing girls' translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns). Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do.

But being an amazing girl often doesn't feel like enough these days when you're competing with all the other amazing girls around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.

An athlete, after all, is one of the few things Esther isn't. A few of the things she is: a standout in Advanced Placement Latin and honors philosophy/literature who can expound on the beauty of the subjunctive mood in Catullus and on Kierkegaard's existential choices. A writer whose junior thesis for Advanced Placement history won Newton North's top prize. An actress. President of her church youth group.

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be - what any young person can be - when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.

It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A's. Do everything. Get into a top college - which doesn't have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a 'name' school.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don't work too hard.

And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.

You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther's classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, 'It's out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.'"

Most theorists believe that anti-social behavior begins in childhood or early adolescence.  However, researchers at Rutgers University and the University of Minnesota have recently drawn attention to the considerable number of young people-especially young women-whose pathological pattern of antisocial behavior first manifest itself in mid- to late adolescence.  And their data indicate that parental divorce helps incubate this late-emerging pathology.

The authors begin their study by carefully scrutinizing epidemiological data collected for 358 young participants in the Minnesota Twin Family Study.   The researchers then identify and classify the 142 youths who have been engaged in antisocial behaviors: a third (33%) of this group manifest such behaviors in early adolescence but stop such behaviors by mid-adolescence; almost one half (47%) begin adolescence entangled in such behaviors and persist in such behaviors through late adolescence; and one fifth (20%) begin their antisocial behavior in mid- to late adolescence. 

The Rutgers and Minnesota scholars acknowledge that the course of antisocial behavior that begins in mid- to late adolescence is "less common than other courses of antisocial behavior."  Yet they note that this pattern "clearly exists" and is "pathological," even if it does not fit within "commonly accepted taxonomies of antisocial behavior."  What is more, those young people who begin manifesting antisocial behavior in mid- to late adolescence are at "particularly high risk of substance dependence during the transition to young adulthood."   The researchers indeed note that "youths with late-onset antisocial behavior evidenced rates of substance dependence that were higher [than those of peers involved in no antisocial behaviors] for all three classes of substances [alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana; p < 0.001 for all three]." 

The pattern of substance abuse among young adults involved in late-onset antisocial behavior very much resembles the pattern seen among young adults involved in persistent antisocial behavior throughout their adolescence.   But the researchers highlight a "striking" gender difference separating these two antisocial groups: females account for almost three-fourths (72%) of late-onset antisocial behavior, while males constitute more than three-fourths (78%) of persistent antisocial behavior.  In other words, the commonly accepted taxonomies of antisocial behavior-which do not account for late-onset antisocial behavior-"particularly fail to capture antisocial behavior among young women." 

But as striking as the gender difference is between the largely female late-onset antisocial group and the largely male persistently antisocial group, the similarity in risk factors is in some ways just as striking.  In particular, the researchers highlight evidence that "youths with persisting antisocial behavior and youths with late-onset antisocial behavior experience similar levels of family-based risk."  This family-based risk is clearly evident in statistics for parental divorce: only 8% of the youth manifesting no antisocial behaviors had experienced parental divorce and only 6% of the youth who had stopped such behaviors by mid-adolescence, compared to 23% of the youth manifesting persistent antisocial behavior and 31% of the youth manifesting late-onset antisocial behavior.  The researchers in fact highlight the "similarly high rates of parental divorce" linking the persistent and late-onset antisocial-behavior groups. 

Among males who start their disruptive behaviors early and among females who throw over the traces years later, parental divorce is all too likely to have helped write the turbulent life script.