Is It True Trees Live to Be Less Than One Year Old?

Studies, and the articles that report them, often say doing x leads to y. Like, marriage makes men live longer or having children as a teenager means you won’t graduate from college. 

These studies are definitely helpful for certain things. But the next step of applying the knowledge to people’s lives is often bungled and abuses the science of connecting the dots, connecting the causes to the effects.  These often assume it is useful to know what the average is, and how far people may stray from the average.  Married men may live longer than single men in general, but what if the man I’m marrying is an alcoholic trapeze artist with a history of depression?  How might those factors work in concert with other factors to produce what we might think of as a path?  Will he fall off the trapeze drunk, or will he lose his job and start drinking himself to death?

When we gossip about people, we often talk about going down paths.  “He’s going down the wrong path.” “That could turn into something bad very fast.” “She’s on a path to success.” In my work I take this kind of approach, producing different kinds of conclusions than studies that talk about averages.  

One part of my work with undocumented youth is the development of their identity, and how it is impacted by their legal status. So I hang out with them and listen to their stories and try to represent their lives as a multi-layered path. 

This of course means I make my own simplifications, and have my own assumptions. For example, I try to take a messy relationship and put a label on it.

What I am most interested in is how the various layers work together. The different layers I think about are family, neighborhood (from friends to organizations), romantic relationship (and maybe having kids), work (part and full-time), school (relationships with teachers, school activities, grades), and outside organizational and political commitments.

Sometimes people have aspirations on all of these points; sometimes they don’t. Usually youth say they feel more mature, more adult when they are able to juggle several of these at once. Some make decisions to concentrate on certain layers and come back to others later. Some feel that certain layers are not possible or are uninteresting to them. 

For example, Tiger mom Amy Chua raised her daughters obsessing on grades and school activities.  Only!  Some kids have to take care of their parents and ignore most life outside the family. Others are swallowed up by the neighborhood level, and become gang members. Then there is the person who goes from relationship to relationship but doesn’t develop lasting friendships. Others only have friends and don’t develop romantic relationships, like Sydney Fife in I Love You, Man. So I look for these patterns and give them names: Caretaker; Gang member; Serial monogamist; Celibate friend.

A lot of the immigrant youth I talk with tell me how much more important family is to them than ‘Americans’.  But this one “layer” can play out in different ways, can connect to other factors in different ways. While one person says they will stave off having kids until after they have finished an education, all to be able to meet family expectations, another person will forgo education to help support parents or their own newborn.

Bristle Cone Pine

This perspective provides a needed focus on the context of people’s lives that shape their paths, the forest around the tree if you will. The average life of a tree is less than a year.  Of trees that make it past that threshold, some trees grow ever so slowly but for thousands of years, like the Bristle Cone Pine; others like the Southern Red Cedar tend to die out when they hit their twenties.  The different species live in different forests and have different relationships with other plants around.  Sometimes you want to check if Southern Cedars are dying earlier; other times you want to talk more specifically about how Southern Cedars work in one type of forest. 

Southern Red Cedar

Certain types of teenage moms seem to do pretty well continuing their education. What could other similar teenagers learn from them about how to balance several things? When is hanging out with friends a problem, and when is it an important support network? When does working in high school help youth, and when does it hurt them?