Risk-Taking, Carnival,
and the Novelistic Self:
Adolescents' Avenues
to Moral Being and Integrity
Cynthia Lightfoot
Pennsylvania State University
There is no alibi for being.
—Mikhail Bakhtin (1993, p. 64)
According to the buzz and chatter in the popular press, and aided and abetted by the scientific community, adolescents either are running with scissors or on the high road to a quality of life that their progenitors could only imagine. By the first account, they have never been more poorly educated, prematurely pregnant, reckless, drugged, depressed, apathetic, suicidal, and violent. Responding to this apparent moral crisis is a legion of studies marshaled to rout out the blameworthy, pointing fingers in turn at broken families, chaotic neighborhoods, declining religiosity, eroding social controls, peer group exclusion, violent media, inattentive parents, and just plain boredom (e.g., Polakow, 2000). It was written of boys in particular:
Americans are worried about their boys. Large numbers of boys roam the streets without much adult supervision or even surveillance. They gather in peer groups and seem to flaunt adult values in their dress and speech. Large numbers of them are foreign-
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