TEL AVIV — You can see them at 1 a.m. at the mall in the gleaming, expensive Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv — the boys dressed like fashionable boys, in baggy black long shorts inspired by American street gangs, baggy black T-shirts down to the elbow and clunky black sneakers with the laces untied.
The girls, on the other hand, don’t exactly look like young girls, but they do look fashionable. They’re dressed in skin-tight dark slacks and tops, as often as not with those high, black platform boots.
They move in and out of the throng of adults and adolescents, sitting around a table and eating at Apropos, at Yotvata, at McDonald’s, at Burger King. They spend loads of money. They lean over the escalator railing and watch for friends coming in downstairs. They eye each other walking by.
They’re 12 years old, and 11 and 10.
It’s understood that Israeli kids grow up relatively fast, that they’re independent compared to young people in most other countries, what with the impending army and the brashness and self-assertion of Israelis, which starts when they’re young. You expect to see 14- and 15-year-olds hanging out after midnight in the malls. But it’s something of a shock when you see kids of 10, 11 and 12 hanging around, looking, frankly, like teenagers on the make.
Childhood seems to be ending earlier and earlier in this country. By the time they reach bar-bat-mitzvah age, it looks like Israeli kids have already been around the block a few times.
This appearance of growing up too fast is faithful to reality in many ways. But it’s easy to get carried away with lurid images of what these preadolescents are doing when they leave the mall — and those images are false.
“They’re not using drugs, and they’re not having sex,” says Bar-Ilan University sociologist David Green, who studies young people’s behavior.
In a living room in a middle-class town in central Israel, five 12-year-old girls say the most any of their classmates do in the realm of vice is smoke a few cigarettes, and only a few of them do that.
Asked about dating, they screw up their faces, laugh with embarrassment and say, “Nah. Not yet.” Not for them. But some of their classmates have coupled off, hanging around with each other, getting close.
Professor Avner Ziv, a psychologist at Tel Aviv University who specializes in youth, says he’s been surveying young Israelis regarding their sexual behavior for the last 25 years and finds that they’re losing their innocence at younger and younger ages.
“Last year the average age for starting sex was 14. A generation ago this was unthinkable; they were starting at 17,” Ziv says. “It’s about the same here as in the United States or Western Europe.”
Drug use, meaning marijuana or hashish, also ordinarily begins at 14 or 15, Ziv adds.
So while Israeli preadolescents are not yet sexual libertines or drug-addled burnouts, they aren’t exactly kids either, says Green. “The 12-year-olds of today live like the 16- and 17-year-olds of a generation ago.”
Today’s youngsters are the first crop of Israeli kids with money, the first to grow up in 1990s prosperity, the first to grow up on commercial — and, increasingly, American — TV, the first hooked up to the Internet.
“They have tremendous buying power, and the advertisers know it. And their parents give them the money,” Green says.
Likewise, their parents are the first Israeli generation to have not only serious money, but also outlets for spending — shopping malls, American chain stores, Thai fast-food restaurants. They are the first generation to really live the conspicuous consumer’s life.
“The parents didn’t have all this when they were young. Now they’re dedicated to their careers, and they don’t have enough time or emotional energy to devote to parenthood, so they feel guilty, and they are unable to say ‘no’ to their children,” Green adds.
Israeli parents also value independence in their children — it’s a sign they’ll do all right in the army so many take pride in their kids’ gallivanting around at all hours, he says.
Consequently, Israeli preadolescents have the freedom and money of young adults and dress like young adults, but inside they’re still purely kids who are not getting the direction they need from their lenient parents. “They’re like a caricature of adults,” Green says.
“But emotionally they’re no more mature than their grandparents were at the same age,” Ziv adds.
The girls in the living room say the hot spots to go on weekend nights are Azrieli Center or the mall in Yehud. Their parents drive them there, then drive them home about midnight.
They like being 12. They all plan to go to university — to become a doctor, a psychologist, an accountant “like my mother,” maybe an actress.
“In Israel they don’t just throw you out on your own all at once. First you go to school, then you go to the army — but you still come home — then maybe you go on a trip, then you go to university, then you get married. It’s a long process,” says one of the girls.
Asked to compare their lives to what they think of as their parents’ lives at the same age, they say that from what they can gather, they have a big, unquestionable advantage.
“My mother’s parents kept her at home all the time, they kept such tight control over her, they wouldn’t let her go out,” says another. “My parents worked so hard. They did more by 9 in the morning than I do all day. They had to feed the chickens and dig in the ground” in a Galilee moshav.
Says another girl, “They had to take my grandparents [immigrants from Morocco and Yemen] everywhere and explain everything to them because my grandparents couldn’t understand Hebrew. I just have so much admiration for what my parents went through. I never would have survived.”
The kids don’t care about politics. The only “issue” they mentioned was “the haredim,” or fervently religious, whom they dislike. Asked if there was anything in the future that they feared — war, ecological disaster, that sort of thing — all but one drew a blank.
“The only thing that scares me about the future is having an overdraft at the bank,” she allows, with a little shudder.