ABSTRACT
Even when they are not literally so, young people in American culture sometimes feel like prisoners in the institutions controlled by adults. Their primary institutional experience during the course of a day is one of being in “the custody of” adults, from parents to teachers to athletic coaches to Scout leaders and beyond. To be sure, there are islands of autonomous children’s culture that offer refuge from adult supervision, islands located behind the locked door of the child’s bedroom, within the dark hideout of the school bathroom, or in the open space of the vacant lot, fields, or woods. But, generally, our children are an underclass perpetually in the one-down power position (Mechling 1986).
