Youthful hijinks

In cases where respectable, well-established older/middle-aged people committed minor crimes or misdemeanours (in the general sense of the word) in their youth, these incidents are often casually written off as "youthful hijinks". This is not always unjustified, as I'm sure everyone would agree that decades of positive contributions more than make up for, say, an isolated pre-teen shoplifting incident.

However, there are some problems with this attitude.

The first problem is that the fact that a misspent youth is so easily, so casually written off, that it completely devalues a person's youth itself. So people whose youth was productive and respectable get no credit for it! I'm not saying that we should all live or die by our high school years, but it's got to be frustrating to see, say, your adolescent tormentor get treated as just as much of a good person as you are, despite the fact that they made everyone's life a living hell for 10 years while you put up with that living hell to be a model student and citizen.

The second problem is that writing off the behaviour of youth of the past also writes off the value of youth of the present. The tacit assumption of the "youthful hijinks" excuse is "they didn't know what they were doing because they were young." This then leads to the assumption that young people in general don't know what they are doing, thus immediately devaluing the actions and thoughts and ideas and goals of young people. If someone's youthful criminal record can be dismissed with a wave of the hand as inconsequential because they didn't know what they were doing, then a young person's desire to start a business or get married or pursue an unorthodox career path can be dismissed just as readily, as a young person who doesn't know what they're doing. Just a phase.

The result of these two problems is that it disenfranchises the youth of today. They see that by the time everyone is 35 nothing they did will "count" any more, and they see that anything they do now will be written off as "they don't know what they're doing". So why make the effort? People with a very active desire to be a good person and a good citizen will still make the effort - although they might not get the credit for it that they should - but people who favour the path of least resistance certainly have no motivation to better themselves.