The number of 13-year-olds is increasing at a rate twenty times faster than the rest of the population. "Between 1958 and 1960," a recent report of the David L. Babson Company of Boston says, "the number of children crossing the 13-year-old threshold will rise by nearly 40 percent. By 1965 there will be a 35 percent increase in the 14----17 age group." The total population grows by a comparatively sluggish 2 percent a year. We are obviously reaping the whirlwind of post-World War II romance.

One of the specters that haunt our time is the sprawling expansion of the population, and it is more and more difficult not to picture the future as though it were going to be life in a sardine can. If the figures on the teenage population are correct (and they must be), it's going to be a boisterous, noisy, squirming can indeed.

There are those who view this prospect with alarm for they fear that civilization, as we know it, will be swept away by juveniles----if not entirely delinquent, then at least objectionable. Others, who have a hand in the teenager's pocket, consider the explosion the best sort of news. It seems to me unlikely that civilization is doomed, at least not by teenagers, and I would like to suggest that if we want to know what the teenagers will do to us, we should look at ourselves.

In all the brouhaha about teenagers we are inclined to forget, it seems to me, that they are primarily reflections of us, our foibles and fumblings and aspirations, our fears and frustrations, our hopes and our beliefs. They are, in effect, a magnifying mirror of their elders----like a shaving mirror in which our eyes seem to bulge, our pores to be extinct volcanoes, and our eyebrows thickets of thistles.

Consider their rebellious natures. Of a New York Times Youth Forum last year it was reported:" A group of high school students said that teenagers were increasingly rebellious toward authority----especially parental authority. And the tension behind teenagers' attitudes comes from a lack of close understanding with their parents." The students also blamed this rebelliousness on "the terrible age we live in" and the "looseness of family ties."

This is where we come in. These are not things the teenagers thought up for thelves; they are ideas that have been impressed on them by the rest of us. We have drummed into their heads their "need to be understood," and they would be less than human not to use this ready-made excuse as an escape hatch for their natural high spirits.

A few years ago two revealing studies of teenagers appeared, one of them something of a shocker, the other reassuring. They both throw some light on ourselves. The first was a book called "The American Teenager," a summary for the general reader of the findings of a fifteen-year investigation of teenagers made at Purdue University under the direction of Dr. H. H. Remmers. The second was called "Adolescent Girls" and was a study made for the Girl Scouts by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.

From "The American Teenager" one gets superficial impression that our youngsters are monsters. (One also gets this impression from the newspaper, of course.) Teenagers believe, the book says, in wire-tapping, in search without warrant, in "censorship of books, newspaper, magazines and other media as protection of the public against improper ideas." Furthermore, they believe that "most people aren't capable of deciding what' s best for thelves." and they "see no harm in the third dee." Not all of them, to be sure, but a good many, more than half of them.

I find this rather chilling, less ause of what it says about the teenagers than what it says about their parents. But the Girl Scouts' report takes a somewhat more optimistic view.

Their study found that by the large the youngsters of this era are "conservative." Far from being rebellious, the study exposed them as idealistic and practical, more eager than their mothers had been for advanced education, but not, in general, wanting to be high-powered executives or movie stars. Fewer than a fifth of them had a good thing to say for "going steady." In many respects they are more independent than their mothers were at the same age. They have weekly allowances that give them more freedom to choose their fun; they have part-time jobs, and they play a larger role in making family plans. The attitude of the family has come a long way since the "children should be seen and not heard" era. No one would now say, as my wife's grandmother used to, that there was nothing to do with children but "put them in a barrel and feed them through the bunghole until they're 21."

Somewhere along the line we stopped thinking of teenagers as just young people in transition between childhood and the state of being "grown-up", and we began to regard them as a minority pressure group in our society. We now look on them not as just "kids", as we used to, but as a sub-culture with a powerful effect on the culture as a whole.

You will look in vain (or at least I have looked in vain) for references to "teenagers" in the literature of my parents' day. You will find "youngsters" and "schoolboys" and "schoolgirls", but you will not find teenagers as a group, treated as though they were something between menaces and the hope of the world, a class by thelves, a threat to adult sanity.

The change came during and after the second World War, the result of the dislocation of families both physically and spiritually. Children were asked to adjust to change rather than to continuity, to pulling up stakes rather than to putting down roots. They began to look more than ever to their contemporaries for security, and they began to look for their own set of rules to live by. The practice of "going steady", for example, was an attempt to establish formal relationships that promised some sort of continuity and sense of belonging to some one person.

The songs popular with youth, you may have noticed, belie the old Tin Pan Alley cliche that a hit can't be made on the theme of married love. As Arnold Shaw has pointed out, "Honeycomb" and "Kisses Sweeter than Wine", both songs of marriage, have been taken to the hearts of teenagers whose popular hits are "a growing literature of protest." "Born Too Late," they sing, and "Why Won't They Understand?"

At the same time they want to be a self-sufficient and rebellious group, they reach out for a hand to guide them. Their accusation that adults "fail to understand" them is a reflection of our "wanting to understand", and their "rebelliousness" is, in part at least, a reflection of our fairly new belief in "permissiveness" and in our encouraging them to make up their own minds. They seem to be in a terrible hurry to be grown-up, to have grown-up respect paid to them, at the same time that they resent the group they most want to be part of----a not uncommon human condition.

They have reason to resent us, and if the reflection of ourselves that we see in them is not a pretty one, we should not be surprised. Let's look a little deeper into the mirror of our society and see theirs.

There was a time not long ago when parents not only preached the virtues of work but practiced them. The work week was ten or fifteen hours longer than it is now for father, and his day off each week was a restorative to enable him to do a better job on the other six days. Now leisure has ome a kind of job in its own light, and it is going to ome still more of a job. When the work week shrinks, as economists say it will, to twenty hours, it is going to be difficult indeed for father to preach to his children the old gospel that "the devil finds work for idle hands." There is plenty of evidence around us now of what happens to young people deprived of the opportunity to work and without the resources, either cultural or social, to put their time to good use.

But time on parental hands has still further effects. At its worst it is corrosive and it is stultifying. It passively accepts what is put before it. It wallows in ways to make time pass----hours of sitting before the television or in aimless puttering. Or it can be dangerously agssive against society, or against self, as in dope addiction or alcoholism.

Less spectacular, but also corrosive, undirected leisure takes itself out in consumption for consumption's sake, in buying gadgets that save time, when time is the thing that least needs saving for the already time-ladened. It shows itself in ostentation and in competition with one's neighbors. Everyone wants to be the biggest Jones in the block. These are the lessons that the young learn when leisure is not constructive and does not enrich the spirit. It can, of course, be otherwise, but it is the parents who show the direction.

There is another direction they show. A good deal of journalistic space is occupied these days by articles about the number of young people who cheat on exams. Is this, after all, very different from padding an expense account or, more important, shading the truth on an income-tax return? If colleges and universities promote gifts in such a way that it is sometimes possible for a donor to make money by giving gifts to them, doesn't the line of academic honesty ome a little blurred?

Or take another matter that is related to schools. It is not uncommon today to find youngsters who, when they have graduated from high school, wished they had been made to work harder. Why? Suddenly adults have been spurred into believing that only education will save us from lagging behind the Russians; suddenly bright students have a few status which a few years ago they sadly lacked----often to the point of being ostracized by their contemporaries. The "grind" and the "brightie" were looked down upon, a reflection of intellectual distrust on the part of parents. Now the

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winds blow in a different direction.

Or take the shibboleth of "conformity" with which the critics of our society plague us. (In my opinion this is a convenient tag that has been atly overused to describe one aspect of a highly industrialized nation.) How is the teenage custom of "going steady" a reflection of our own insecurity?" To what extent is it, as I have suggested, an attempt to inject a kind of formality into relationships among young people that they miss in this age of informality?

The Girl Scouts may say that they are against it, but it has ome a tribal custom of the young that they observe with almost universal respect all the same.

We are inclined to be indulgent about the hero-worship of the teenager for the movie glamour boys, for the Presleys and the James Deans and Eddie Fishers and Ricky Nelsons. We should be. We are hero-worshipers ourselves. It is evident in our political attitudes, in the numbers of us who don't even bother to vote, presumably ause we are willing to "leave it to the boss." It is evident in our reverence toward leaders of business and industry, toward scientists, toward anybody who we think can lead us by the hand through the maze of complications that beset us.

To what extent is our fear of the Russians, for example, responsible for the teenager's belief in censorship, in wire-tapping, in search without warrant? If we are worried, as we should be, about their attitudes toward personal liberties, hadn't we better look to our own?

It is easy to take this subculture, this minority group, the teenagers, and read our characters and future in them as though they were tea leaves. We can adumbrated in them our attitudes toward religion, toward the arts and toward education more clearly than we can by looking at ourselves. We are likely to be more indulgent in looking at ourselves than at them; we smooth over our own exaggerations while we view theirs with alarm.

But I can see no reason why the simple statistical fact that there are going to be a at many more teenagers in the next few years should be cause for anything more than the usual alarm. Unquestionably they will cause problems, just as we caused problems when we were teenagers. But they will also give delight. There will be more noisy households than we are accustomed to, more telephones endlessly tied up, more records strewn around the living-room floor, more starry-eyed young lovers, more hard questions to answer, more nonsensical fads to throw up the hands about.

There will be something that will take the place of rock and roll, bobby socks, and hot rods, something that will seem ludicrous to those who will have recently grown out of their teens into adulthood, and alarming to the parents who have to put up with it.

Possibly I am lucky. I have just lived through the teenages of a son and a daughter. There were moments when I thought murder was too good for them; there were moments when they thought murder was much too good for me. Sometimes their anguish was my anguish; sometimes their cussedness was my fury; occasionally their pleasure was my despair. But I saw myself sometime distorted, sometimes all too clearly, in them as a mirror. I suspect I learned from them as much as I taught them, and I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

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