Understanding emo

A music genre is now also a teen social group that's often targeted by bullies. "On LiveJournal… one of the top blogs is called 'Die Emo Kids'," the Toronto Star reports. According to the Chicago Tribune, mood swings and therapy are now cool, and both the emotions and an almost stylized neediness are readily depicted on social-networking sites. "You can find the ever-more-youthful emo trend in cities and suburbs. And it has spread, thanks to the Internet, faster than you can type, 'Seeking desolate landscape populated by preteens.'… You can Google 'emo' and find step-by-step pictorial guides for 'emo makeovers.' That is, how to transform a geeky guy with a pencil tucked behind his ear, working at a copy store, to a 'bona fide emo boy' … shown dying his hair black, ditching the smile, slipping on a black T-shirt and scarf and, in the final photo, putting razor blade to wrist, from which something red is spilling." Besides the bullying and cutting, another risk the Tribune cites is kids swapping prescriptions the way they used to swap Twinkies for chips in school lunches. Don't miss the insights into all this from Trib source Michael Lacocque, school counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, "who has been working with 7th graders for much of his professional life." (Now kids as young as 12 are experimenting with being emo.)