A Fear of Young People

Tanya Byron's article, 'We see children as pestilent', speaks predominantly about the constant disdain felt through history towards young people. She mentions three striking examples that sound very similar to the things often written and spoken in regards to young people, using words that mention a lack of respect, rudeness, impatience, decaying society, riots, immodest and selfish. These span as far back as Ancient Egyptian periods, with mentions of 4th Century Plato and AD 1274 priest Peter the Hermit.

Byron believes this has culminated in a "historically nurtured and culturally damaging phenomenon", ephebiphobia, or the fear of youth. She believes the issue is worse today than ever before.
Byron states that young people are "feared because of the actions of a minority population - the violent, aggressive and antisocial", which is a population that has always been in existence throughout all manner of age and social groups.

This mistreatment and unjust stereotyping of young people has created a self fulfilling prophecy whereby the labels given to young people are internalised and become part of their self concept. After all, "why both to try when you are told you are a failure? Why bother to strive when your existence is seen as a nuisance?"

This already vulnerable group of people is targeted further, Byron claims, by the education system and its culture of targets and testing, "staffed by creatively compromised and disempowered teachers". They are often blocked from striving to achieve higher goals by "elitist and narrowly defined notions of academic competence" found in higher education systems preventing many young people from even trying to access these institutions for fear of denial and mockery.

Byron states that children are first labelled in nurseries and schools, and therefore these labels often stick as they are generally very condemning and tend to encompass a persons identity in the eyes of colleagues and parents. If a child is labelled as a troublemaker during their first year, they will most likely be treated as such, with subsequent teachers expecting them to misbehave. They may even automatically place them in lower streams and set them lower grades to fit in with this label.
As Byron states in her article, many children "develop behaviours to compensate" for the difficulties they encounter in school and often get labelled as a class clown "or worse".

She claims that "children labelled as failures in primary and secondary education have no hope of further or higher education", most likely due to resources, time, and expectations being allocated elsewhere in cases where young pupils are labelled as no-hopers. The younger age at which a child is labelled, negatively or positively, tends to have an extremely large impact on their future achievements.
Rosenthal and Jacobson conducted an experiment in an American school, testing children with an IQ test. Teachers were lead to believe that certain students were entering a year of high achievement (20% of the sample was selected at random and labelled as 'blooming') and other students were not. In reality, the test had no predictive validity.
The same test was used at the end of the school year, only this time the results were not toyed with. Differences in IQ for the children who had been targeted as 'blooming' could then be examined.
The results demonstrated expectancy effects, with the labelled children showing greater gains in IQ than those who had not been. This only occurred within the youngest age groups; reflecting the importance of a child being given support, help and most importantly, not being judged at such a young age.