Contemporary youth are major players in the postmodern adventure because it is they who will enter the future and further shape the world to come. For youth today, change is the name of the game and they are forced to adapt to a rapidly mutating and crisis-ridden world characterized by novel information, computer and genetic technologies; a complex and fragile global economy and a frightening era of war and terrorism. According to dominant discourses in the media, politics and academic research, the everyday life of growing segments of youth is increasingly unstable, violent, and dangerous. These alarming assaults on youth are combined with massive federal cutbacks of programs that might give youth a chance to succeed in an increasingly difficult world. Hence, today's youth are at risk in a growing number of ways. Yet they also have access to exciting realms of cyberspace and the possibilities of technologies, identities, and entrepreneurial adventures unimagined by previous generations. Contemporary youth includes the best educated generation in history, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most diverse and multicultural, making generalizations about youth in the present day precarious. In this study, the authors develop some concepts to outline a critical theory of youth that articulates positive, negative and ambiguous aspects of their current situation, delineating some of the defining features of the condition of contemporary youth to indicate the ways in which they are encountering the challenges facing them, and to suggest how these may be engaged. (Contains 10 endnotes.)