On a Wednesday afternoon, I was joined outside A.P.G. by Mira, a sixth grader with an open, angelic face and an ebullient presence. It is often chilly and overcast in the Outer Sunset, but this was a warm and clear day, and Mira, who is interested in matters of fashion, wore low-slung cargo sweatpants and a white tube top. Her hair, which is long, dark, and curly, had recently been treated to a bathroom Manic Panic job, and the front strands were dyed a light peach. She smoothed a strand as one might the tail of a cat. Mira is good company: frank, funny, and self-deprecating in a way that suggests confidence rather than its lack. At four feet eight, she is small for her age, but manages to occupy space laterally. She moves with a noodle elasticity, and is prone to breaking into dance moves while going about her business: a full-body wave from wrist to wrist, an entire sequence from a Katseye music video. The first time we met, we were mid-conversation when she inexplicably dropped into a side split, grabbed her ankles, and rolled backward, placing her toes on the floor behind her head. “At the beginning of the year, I couldn’t do an aerial”—a hands-free cartwheel—“and I can kind of do one now,” she told me, harrowingly assuming the starting position.
Mira is twelve years old and lives in the Avenues, San Francisco’s foggy western neighborhoods, with her mother, Michalle, who is a nurse practitioner, her father, Patrick, who is a full-time parent, and her sibling, Dylan, who is nine. (Last year, Dylan requested to use they/them pronouns, which the family mostly remembers to honor.) Like most kids her age, Mira exists in the murky, thrilling bardo between childhood and maturity. She is a gracious host—quick to offer guests a Spindrift—who totes a lunchbox adorned with a sticker of a unicorn. She is learning to cook, mostly quesadillas, but if she could she would live on Cheetos, boba, Trü Früs, and Coke. She razzes her parents in a way that makes them laugh, but no longer tells them everything. Mira’s first middle-school dance was coming up, and there was discussion among her friends about dresses and hair styles. I was excited to see which of her dance moves would make an appearance.
For years, Mira has been agitating for more independence. Last August, she began commuting to and from school alone, hurtling around the edge of the continent on the public bus. Since fifth grade, she has worn a silver Apple Watch, a glorified tracking device, which she pushes to the outer limits of usability. She is a member of several large group chats, including one called “4th Period Baddies,” and regularly consults Siri, summoning facts and images from the ether. (“Photos of hazel eyes.” “What does A.S.M.R. stand for?”) Still, the watch is no phone. A phone would be much cooler; would be, perhaps, the coolest thing. An Apple Watch was a bridge from childhood to adulthood. A phone would be a portal.
That Wednesday, Mira went to Polly Ann with her friends Kaitlyn and Sloane. At the counter, the girls realized no one had brought money. They began plumbing their wallets—pink, pleather, flat—for stray coins. Sloane called her mother on her Apple Watch and, in a mix of English and Mandarin, requested a transfusion of Apple Cash. She hung up just as Mira and Kaitlyn discovered, miraculously, that if they pooled their assets they could afford to split something. “Never mind we found money exclamation point,” Sloane said into her watch.
“Sloane, no!” Mira said. “We were going to get money!” Giggling, the girls ordered a pint of watermelon ice cream, requested three spoons, and dropped their last dime into the tip jar. They headed to a playground, a regular hangout spot for their peers, and settled onto a boulder. Smaller children from a nearby elementary school were availing themselves of climbers, slides, and beams. But by the boulder the real action was social and discursive. Two sixth-grade boys appeared, one tall and floppy-haired, the other wiry and blond. “Mira, I have a question for you,” the floppy-haired boy said. “Are you straight?” Mira looked at him, her face grave and blank. “No, no, not for me, for one of my friends,” he said, putting his hands out in front of his body, as if to distance himself from any association with crushing. Mira wanted to know who had dispatched him, but the boy wandered off to a playground structure, singing Jimmy Eat World to himself. [...]
The literature on adolescence marks middle school as a turning point, a time when kids begin to pull away from their parents, discard childish pursuits, and pursue, full thrust, the exhausting project of individuation. It is a period of intense, hormonally driven emotional flux. Self-consciousness sets in. The adult world is studied and emulated in a manner that suggests praxis but no theory. There is an aspect of camp to it all: a kind of LARP or drag, as young people transition from play-acting adulthood to inhabiting it. Actual adults are ancillary. Tweens and teens look to each other for clarity and guidance on how to behave and how to feel, all the while gambling with each other’s social confidence and self-esteem. It is natural, and it is psychotic.
The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described the period between twelve and eighteen as one of essential identity formation: a time of trying on personas and roles. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Erikson was sensitive to the ways that society could shape personality, but no one could have anticipated the explosion of potential identities, interests, aesthetics, subcultures, and life styles that children would be exposed to by globalization and, later, the internet: now there are clean girls, tomato girls, vanilla girls, office sirens, femboys, e-boys, looksmaxxers; one can be avant basic, old money, new money, quiet luxury, cottagecore, goblincore, fairycore. Adolescent anxiety and depression have been on the rise for years, and there is abundant public debate about why: economic inequality, strained family ties, sleep deprivation, smartphones. Childhood has never been easy, but these days the on-ramp to adulthood seems somehow shorter and more perilous.
by Anna Wiener, New Yorker | Read more:
Mira is twelve years old and lives in the Avenues, San Francisco’s foggy western neighborhoods, with her mother, Michalle, who is a nurse practitioner, her father, Patrick, who is a full-time parent, and her sibling, Dylan, who is nine. (Last year, Dylan requested to use they/them pronouns, which the family mostly remembers to honor.) Like most kids her age, Mira exists in the murky, thrilling bardo between childhood and maturity. She is a gracious host—quick to offer guests a Spindrift—who totes a lunchbox adorned with a sticker of a unicorn. She is learning to cook, mostly quesadillas, but if she could she would live on Cheetos, boba, Trü Früs, and Coke. She razzes her parents in a way that makes them laugh, but no longer tells them everything. Mira’s first middle-school dance was coming up, and there was discussion among her friends about dresses and hair styles. I was excited to see which of her dance moves would make an appearance.
For years, Mira has been agitating for more independence. Last August, she began commuting to and from school alone, hurtling around the edge of the continent on the public bus. Since fifth grade, she has worn a silver Apple Watch, a glorified tracking device, which she pushes to the outer limits of usability. She is a member of several large group chats, including one called “4th Period Baddies,” and regularly consults Siri, summoning facts and images from the ether. (“Photos of hazel eyes.” “What does A.S.M.R. stand for?”) Still, the watch is no phone. A phone would be much cooler; would be, perhaps, the coolest thing. An Apple Watch was a bridge from childhood to adulthood. A phone would be a portal.
That Wednesday, Mira went to Polly Ann with her friends Kaitlyn and Sloane. At the counter, the girls realized no one had brought money. They began plumbing their wallets—pink, pleather, flat—for stray coins. Sloane called her mother on her Apple Watch and, in a mix of English and Mandarin, requested a transfusion of Apple Cash. She hung up just as Mira and Kaitlyn discovered, miraculously, that if they pooled their assets they could afford to split something. “Never mind we found money exclamation point,” Sloane said into her watch.
“Sloane, no!” Mira said. “We were going to get money!” Giggling, the girls ordered a pint of watermelon ice cream, requested three spoons, and dropped their last dime into the tip jar. They headed to a playground, a regular hangout spot for their peers, and settled onto a boulder. Smaller children from a nearby elementary school were availing themselves of climbers, slides, and beams. But by the boulder the real action was social and discursive. Two sixth-grade boys appeared, one tall and floppy-haired, the other wiry and blond. “Mira, I have a question for you,” the floppy-haired boy said. “Are you straight?” Mira looked at him, her face grave and blank. “No, no, not for me, for one of my friends,” he said, putting his hands out in front of his body, as if to distance himself from any association with crushing. Mira wanted to know who had dispatched him, but the boy wandered off to a playground structure, singing Jimmy Eat World to himself. [...]
The literature on adolescence marks middle school as a turning point, a time when kids begin to pull away from their parents, discard childish pursuits, and pursue, full thrust, the exhausting project of individuation. It is a period of intense, hormonally driven emotional flux. Self-consciousness sets in. The adult world is studied and emulated in a manner that suggests praxis but no theory. There is an aspect of camp to it all: a kind of LARP or drag, as young people transition from play-acting adulthood to inhabiting it. Actual adults are ancillary. Tweens and teens look to each other for clarity and guidance on how to behave and how to feel, all the while gambling with each other’s social confidence and self-esteem. It is natural, and it is psychotic.
The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described the period between twelve and eighteen as one of essential identity formation: a time of trying on personas and roles. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Erikson was sensitive to the ways that society could shape personality, but no one could have anticipated the explosion of potential identities, interests, aesthetics, subcultures, and life styles that children would be exposed to by globalization and, later, the internet: now there are clean girls, tomato girls, vanilla girls, office sirens, femboys, e-boys, looksmaxxers; one can be avant basic, old money, new money, quiet luxury, cottagecore, goblincore, fairycore. Adolescent anxiety and depression have been on the rise for years, and there is abundant public debate about why: economic inequality, strained family ties, sleep deprivation, smartphones. Childhood has never been easy, but these days the on-ramp to adulthood seems somehow shorter and more perilous.
by Anna Wiener, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ok Causland
