Interests, Curiosities, and Hobbies

This week at my place of work has been instructive in the kinds of patience that you need to have with adolescents, and also an excellent example of how adolescent brains work, and how much they still seek connection with their peers even when, by themselves, they might recognize that a particular course of action is a bad idea.

First, however: For those of you who did not have the penis game as a part of your own adolescence, the penis game is essentially a form of chicken, where when it is your turn, the options available to you are to escalate the situation or to forfeit. Someone starts the game by saying the word "penis" as quietly as they would like. All the other participants (which can be pretty ad hoc) then have an opportunity to say the word "penis" louder than the first person. The game ends when nobody says the word "penis" louder than the last, or when the game is stopped by responsible adults who do not want young people saying "penis" loud enough to be heard. The collective goal of all the players is to say the word "penis" as loud as they can without getting into trouble with anyone else, even if the individual goal is to be the person who last said the word and didn't get in trouble for it.

Unsurprisingly, this is a favored game of young people who have penises and have been raised in a manspreading sort of culture. If you find people who are drawing penises on every available surface, they're probably also playing the penis game. The game is not segregated, however - those without penises can join in the game at any time and may end up being the person winning the game, simply because they'll be the last person to say it loudly without getting themselves or the group in trouble.

So, while I am at the help desk in my primary workplace, which was built as someone's homage to cathedrals and churches, with the attendant acoustic properties, loud and clearly from the teen area, I hear the word "penis!" As I am moving to handle the situation, I am thinking to myself, "Someone's playing the penis game. That's not a very smart decision in the library." By the time I get the space where I heard the word, I've got a bit ready to go about how playing the penis game sounds like fun for everyone involved, but it's a game that someone always loses. However, another co-worker has already been talking to them, and lets me know that this is the second strike assessed to this group for inappropriate language. So I have a message to deliver to our working staff when I get back to my spot, but before I can type up the report, once again, loud and clear, and possibly louder and clearer than the last one, the word "penis!" rings out again, and the teen librarian is immediately on the way, and I'm on my way to inform her that this is three, but by the time the staff converge, the group of teens has packed up and left.

What would possess young people to do something like this, in a space where they're definitely going to get caught and punished for it? To quote Agent Kay:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.

Also, we have a significant amount of brain research into adolescents and have been able to get the idea that the adolescent brain, through the teenage years, is very focused on building social connections and alliances so that when they get out into the world as adults, they have backup and peer connections and other people who they can use to get work, crash space, income, romance, and all the rest of the things that adults have and they want. That brain research has provided us adults with a couple of useful things to keep in mind when working with teenagers:

1. If you can, separate a teen from their peer group if you want to get them to change behavior. If you discipline a teen in front of the peer group, they may front and become deliberately difficult because they're more interested in saving face with their friends than in doing the thing that they would otherwise do if alone.


2. A group of teenagers together is more prone to make worse decisions than those individual teens would by themselves. Because games of chicken like this are also ways of demonstrating both loyalty to the group and a willingness to keep the fun going or not be the person who wusses out. Sometimes being the kid who can articulate "hey, this isn't going well, we should stop" can get the stop that everyone wants, but sometimes it only gets you made fun of. So, y'know, the whole peer pressure thing is real, and it often can drive teens to do things that in the aftermath they know are foolish and wouldn't have done individually.

Knowing all this allows us to tailor our messaging to target the behaviors that are not acceptable in the space, but also to know that if the teens are playing the penis game, or throwing food at each other, or getting up to one of the myriad ways they make mischief, sometimes even unintentionally, odds are good that it only got this far because peer pressure, and if they take a cool-down day or a cool-down set of laps, they'll come back to the library with a better attempt at behaving like people who know how to exist in public places. Which they mostly do.

Working with people and child development was not a required course in my library concentration. I picked up a lot of it from taking a course from the School of Social Work, instead, figuring that having a solid grounding in child development and their environments would help me understand what I was doing in the library. It didn't give me "classroom management skills," which I was apparently supposed to have picked up along the way as well, despite my classroom everything supposedly being limited to times where teachers or librarians would be there. It didn't give me much about how to deal with the people that I was going to encounter, outside of reference interviews, and I didn't get anything about managing subordinates or other volunteers, either. Admittedly, I don't want to ever have to manage anyone, but I appreciated being able to level up my game for how to handle difficult situations and difficult people once I was out in the working world as a professional. Most of that training, though, came after my first manager had already come within an inch of getting me fired for not having all these skills I was assumed to have and for not being able to people well in ways that she expected me to. I won't be surprised if at some point, I officially end up getting upgraded to AuDHD if and when that becomes relevant and necessary, but even the more neurotypical people in my profession don't get a lot of training about managing people, both from the position of the supervisor and from the position of the supervised, when they're in library school. And so many of them definitely don't get anything at all that has to do with how children and teens develop, unless their specific remit is children or teens, and that can cause serious friction unless the people who do have the training share it with everyone else to make sure that they're all on the same page and consistent with what they're doing to do when teenagers in their library start playing the penis game.

(Yet more reasons for us to think hard about the state of education for GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) positions and what's actually needed and what has been held on to because it makes the people who work in GLAM feel learned and professional.)