Parenting & Family Quote by Ben Lindsey

Trouble, in Lindsey's telling, isn't juvenile misbehavior so much as a busted feedback loop between generations. Kids "feel they have to shock their elders" because adolescence is partly a performance: identity built in opposition, autonomy proven by boundary-testing. He doesn't romanticize it. He frames it as social pressure, almost a job requirement of youth. The sting is in what comes next: "each generation grows up into something harder to shock". What begins as a rite of passage calcifies into desensitization. Yesterday's scandal becomes today's background noise, and the adults who once transgressed now meet the next wave with a practiced shrug.

As a judge in the early 20th century, Lindsey was watching this from the front row, when "modern" youth culture was accelerating: jazz, new dating norms, shifting sexual mores, movies, urban anonymity. The juvenile court movement he helped shape treated delinquency less as sin and more as environment, attention, and unmet needs. That reformist lens is embedded in the line: the system keeps mistaking the symptom (shock) for the disease (a generational hunger to be seen, to have power).

The subtext is a warning to elders who think moral panic is protection. If adult authority responds only with scandalized outrage, kids learn that provocation is the fastest route to significance. If adults respond with numbness, kids escalate. Lindsey is diagnosing a cultural arms race: the more society turns rebellion into spectacle, the more extreme rebellion has to become to register at all.