How is late childhood/early adolesence in Europe (ie around 10 years old to 18) especially in it being different from an American one? Recent testimonies in particular (ie in the last decade or so).
Better nutrition apparently; European height and the skull size of European children has been surpassing that of America in recent years. That evil socialism in action.
I think a more accurate assessment would be that since we are a more diverse nation, there are lots of people from countries where the average height is far lower than in Europe.
Yeeaah, that’s the ticket. :rolleyes: No, seriously, it’s nutrition, there have been studies.
More free. One of the my largest sources of culture shock (well, culture surprise may be more like it) in interacting with Americans is the amount of restrictions put on your youths, by parents, school, and even the law.
I remember watching The Breakfast Club in a hostel with a couple of Americans and Brits. The Americans were agreeing that yeah, the pressures of high school are like that. But the Brits were mystified: Being a young teenage lad is such a happy-go-lucky time without a care in the world, why all the angst?
My experience with kids was in rural Eastern Europe. It shouldn’t be taken as an example of anything but life anywhere else. I think there is a REALLY wide generation gap, much stronger that there is between generations in the US, or in Western Europe. My students grew up in a free market, multiparty democracy. Their parents grew up behind the Iron Curtain. I know that every generation feels like their parents don’t get what they’re going through, but in this situation, so many aspects of the country have changed in such dramatic ways, it seems like a really extreme case of generation gap.
A lot of my students lived with one parents, or with their grandparents, because their parents were working in Spain or Italy or Greece. That is very different from my own experience in the US.
Open displays of sexuality are more common than in the US. It often tends toward the misogynistic, to my chagrin. I saw this vodka ad while accompanying my 9-year-old host niece to the market, and kind of freaked that she was seeing this kind of message in such an innocuous place. (This version of the ad doesn’t have the caption that the one in the store did: “Аз им казах, че паднах по стълбите”. [“I told them that I fell on the stairs.”]) IMHO, this manifested in them dressing in a way that there is NO WAY my mom would have let me out of the house in when I was their age. Hell, my school would have sent kids dressed like that home.
There’s no way to answer this question. America’s pretty varied as it is, but at least it has similar schooling systems and healthcare and so on.
Europe has the Western side which has been prosperous for centuries, the former Communist countries, the Baltic states that were very recently in a genocidal war, countries that are majority protestant, or Catholic, or Muslim (rather than there being a mix), countries with lots of immigrants and citizens whose recent ancestors were immigrants, countries with hardly any people like that at all, countries where the age of consent is 12 (with restrictions about the age of the partner) and countries where it’s 16…
You have to compare a country, not a continent, or at least restrict yourself to Western Europe.
Wow, I totally missed that.
I can understand why it isn’t a good idea for 9-year-old girls to be exposed to images like this, but what’s misogynistic about it? The dictionary defines misogyny as a hatred, dislike or mistrust of women. I see none of those in this ad. In fact, I would think this is an image that non-Andrea Dworkin feminists would applaud. The woman in the ad appears to be in charge of her life and her sexuality and amused and pleased at the experience she’s obviously had thanks to the hootch. Isn’t the freedom to engage in sex at will and without guilt something women have been striving for?
What?
I don’t see anything wrong with that ad - kids are just going to think ‘that woman fell over and grazed her knees, ouchy!’ I don’t particularly like the message ‘get drunk and have wild sex,’ even though TBH that’s pretty much what most people I know do. 
scifisam2009, the Baltic states are Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, on the Baltic coast between Poland and Finland. The countries that were involved in a very nasty war in the 1990s were the Balkan states in Southern Europe, basically the remains of exploded Yugoslavia.
An understandable typo, and I think that Kyla was poking a bit of fun at it 
Oh Christ - I really shouldn’t type in such a hurry.
Does England count? (I guess that’s another discussion…)
A lot more booze, as far as I can tell, thanks to more lenient laws and the general culture. I was drinking at 15 with my parents at restaurants. There seem to be fewer moral outrages about violence in the media, sex in video games, that type of stuff; very few “Won’t somebody please think of the children!?” types.
Coming from Sweden, and knowing people who studied in the states during high school, I’d say that restrictions and freedom are the biggest difference.
The (second hand) descriptions of American high school is that they are authoritarian places where it isn’t considered a universal right to go to visit the toilet without asking permission.
Drinking under the age of 21 seems to be considered a cardinal sin, while in Sweden is largely universal from the mid teens and on, and going out on the town at 18 is nothing out of the ordinary.
Swedes seem to be far more open about sex, and a 15 year old can be relatively open about being sexually active (with peers of course), while I had the impression that American youths do far more (as in sex, and also drugs) outside their parents’ knowledge.
The legal age of consent here is 15, but many of my peers are completely open about having had sex before then. On the other hand, unwanted pregnancies don’t seem all too common (though they have happened among my friends), but day-after pills are easily available and getting an abortion isn’t considered controversial. This is mostly true for metropolitan area I think though, in the boondocks teenage pregnancy seems far more common.
It seems more common for Swedish youths to be politically active in any of the parties’ youth organizations.
I’m 28, so I think that this fits in to the OPs age range.
But it’s not legal (as if teenagers care).
It’s not illegal for the teenagers - it’s illegal for the people selling or giving it to them.
(The Wiki article on drinking ages is a concise summary).
In the UK, teenagers getting drunk is a big deal, but drinking alcohol per se isn’t. Most families I know, of all classes, allow their kids from the age of 11 or 12 to have a glass of wine or beer on special occasions (this is legal, too) and wouldn’t be bothered at all by 16-year-olds drinking.
I’m a high school teacher and I’d say the big difference between adolescence in the US and adolescence in Norway is the feeling of safety. Norwegian teens can take the bus to the movies or downtown or to a shopping mall and, while parents may be rightly concerned about drugs/alcohol or perhaps fights, no one believes there are child predators hiding behind every bush. Teens, at least city teens, get themselves to sports practice or a concert with friends, they don’t get driven everywhere. Their world is larger and they are to a greater extent the masters of it.
The high school experience is also completely different. Norwegian teens start high school at age 16 and will continue for three years; they choose a general course of study (from 12 possibilities) the first year and may have to choose a specialty for their second or third year. Generally the teachers move from classroom to classroom, and the pupils may spend much of the day with the same classmates in the same room, depending on the school. They do not have the same class schedule each day, and may not even start and end at the same time each day. For some courses of study they will divide their time between school and work (in a job supervised by the school) starting in the second or third year. In general they are treated as young adults, not large children.
Teens in Norway cannot drive a car until the age of 18. At 16 they may get a license for a moped or light motorcycle, which is not particularly practical from about November through April.
Driving. This is anecdotal, but I think far, far more 18 year old Americans have a car they use regularly than in the UK.
A caring man would have given her knee pads. Those look painful.