Justin Bieber and Todays Youth

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Justin Bieber, a future-oriented Generation Y striver, is emblematic of a sea change in how our culture now regards childhood.

Justin Bieber has had it rough of late. Even before this weeks news that his neighbor was accusing him of battery, the 19-year-old Canadian superstar endured a public breakup with his girlfriend, Selena Gomez; was photographed supposedly reveling with codeine-spiked cough syrup and marijuana, and was snubbed by the Grammys. He retaliated with a live-stream ! Internet performance that hit technical snags.

He also walked bare-chested through airport security, fainted onstage and canceled another concert, was kicked out of a London nightclub on his birthday for bringing in the 14-year-old performer Jaden Smith and nearly came to sailor-mouthed blows with one of the British paparazzi (above, hes restrained by his bodyguard).

And then, in what is now de rigueur in the age of social-media celebrity, he issued a strident defense of his behavior and an attack on the press via Instagram, in which he also took a potshot at Lindsay Lohan. He later apologized and removed the post.

A sampling of substances that have come his way, which some members of the public and the media have long saved up: bile, vitriol, acid.

Well, big deal. This concerns a tiny subset of the population: child performers and those who read about them in supermarket tabloids. The bitter spitballs tossed from the back of the classroom are the same ones aimed at anyone in a station above us, regardless of age. Right?

Maybe not. The response to Mr. Biebers crackup says much about our cultures discomfort with changing notions of childhood, a decade-long shift in values and conventions that he exemplifies better than anyone.

In her book The Cultural Significance of the Child Star, Jane OConnor argues that the demonization of young celebrities stems from their contradict! ory relat! ionship to both innocence and sexuality. Think of Britney Spears as a midriff-baring Catholic schoolgirl in the video for ...Baby One More Time, released when she was 16, and the excoriation she faced once she tried, shakily, to become a woman.

Highly paid, hard-working underage performers disrupt our sense of childhood as a period of all play and no work, liberated from adult responsibility. We cast child performers as doe-eyed angels, worshiping their idealized but, in fact, carefully constructed goodness.

Of course, like other under-the-thumb teenagers, child stars eventually rebel: they take drugs, dress provocatively, shave their golden locks. Their inevitable fall from grace becomes the object of petty schadenfreude. Theyve let us down, and we let them know it.

One reason Mr. Bieber has captivated our attention, beyond his talent and charisma, is that, alongside Mark Zuckerberg, he is the paragon of the millennial celebrity. Born in 1994, he has hardly known a world without broadband Internet, smartphones, social media and digital imagery (and, yes, public apologies by celebrities through those same conduits). He has exploited and been exploited by these tools to great effect, currently ruling the Twitter roost with more than 36 million followers. Thats a lot of people for anyone, let alone a teenager, to have direct access to with a thoughtless swipe of his iPhone.

And because Mr. Bieber is so ambitious and enterprising, he can also be considered an emblem of the overscheduled, future-oriented! Generati! on Y striver. Instead of regimented piano lessons, soccer practice and SAT classes, the entertainer has committed himself to the steady, if largely self-directed, cultivation of singing, dancing and interview skills since he was 12.

I was born in 1979, part of the final cohort to leave high school without complete immersion in the technologies that Mr. Biebers contemporaries take for granted. While we all have a tendency to be nostalgic about our own in-my-day youth as the last era of true innocence, I contend that there has been a sea change in how our culture regards childhood in the 21st century. Let us count the ways:

Every moment from cradle to diploma is captured by a camera; teenagers are always findable with a cellphone, sometimes to the geo-locational coordinate; and previously sprawling entries in locked-away diaries are truncated and tweeted to scores of followers.

The television screen, once perceived by adults as the gravest threat to the brains of their offspring, has been miniaturized, replicated and made even more addictively distracting: according to a 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation report, children age 8 to 18 spent 77 minutes more per day with entertainment media than they did 5 years earlier. Pressure is more intense than ever to land a spot in an elite college and, in certain socioeconomic strata, in the nursery school that is a fast track to one.

In addition, children have diminished physical independence, about which Michael Chabon has written eloquently: The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked staff only.

Instead of whiling away the hours discovering wilderness with friends, young people are exploring in solitude the warrens of the less pristine Internet.

Its not surprising, then, that Mr. Bieber indulges in the Instagram habit of posting photos of himself as a child. Whereas Michael Jackson created a warped, alternative-reality childhood, Mr. Bieber showcases the one that has long since vanished, whether out of personal romanticizing or authenticity-staking public relations.

Thus, the gleeful reaction by some to Mr. Biebers misbehavior may connect to two directives imposed upon children today: the need to overprepare for the demanding and perilous world of work, and the loss of innocence that preparation entails.

When we laugh at his meltdown one that many of us would have suffered much sooner in our teenage years had the global press hounded us, had we put in 16-hour workdays, had millions of dollars rested on our shoulders we are doing more than merely relishing the downfall of a formerly squeaky-clean (Tiger Woods) moral crusader (Eliot Spitzer) who has a few irksome personality traits (Anthony Weiner). We are channeling our cultural anxiety over the ways we have corrupted and effaced childhood.

Teddy Wayne is the author, most recently, of the novel The Love Song of Jonny Valentine.