Youths Having It Harder Than Suspected
             Nanette Davis challenges the myth that today' s youth have it easy in her chapter titled " Youth in At-Risk society." Davis shows that being a youth today is much more difficult than the imaginable. Youth have to go through numerous obstacles in their daily lives regardless of the benefits and commodities that youth today are blessed with. They are faced with drugs, violence, pressure, and other challenges such as being successful.
             Many young people in this day and age are trying to look, act, and overall seem older. Youths face many dilemmas in their journey to adulthood, yet they still try to obtain adulthood earlier by going through the proper rites of passage. These rites create dilemmas which can help or trigger lifetime goals. Two of the dilemmas that young people face today are peer pressure, and adult pressure. Youth encounter some of the many rites of passage in modern
             society; such as : smoking, drinking, and violence.
             Peer pressure is a very major dilemma in that friends or peers try to get a person to do what they, the majority, like and not what the individual likes. Peers create some of the so-called rites, then when one follows more start to follow, then it becomes the scenario of the friends following their leader jumping off a bridge.
             Another challenge teens encounter when reaching the stage of adulthood is drugs and alcohol. Before, drinking was allowed once one was mentally mature. Age was not a matter. You initiated drinking once you felt ready. You drank because you enjoyed it, not because you were forced to. Now, some teens are influenced into thinking that drinking is a passage into adulthood because the law states you must be 21 to drink . The logic of some teens then indicates that if you drink you are considered an adult. Therefore if one teen tries it he/she is supposedly accepted as a more mature pe
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