adolescence

/ad'l es"euhns/, n.

1. the transitional period between puberty and adulthood in human development, extending mainly over the teen years and terminating legally when the age of majority is reached; youth.

2. the process or state of growing to maturity.

3. a period or stage of development, as of a society, preceding maturity.

[1400-50; late ME < MF < L adolescentia. See ADOLESCENT, -ENCE]

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Period of life from puberty to adulthood (roughly ages 12–20) characterized by marked physiological changes, development of sexual feelings, efforts toward the construction of identity, and a progression from concrete to abstract thought.

Adolescence is sometimes viewed as a transitional state, during which youths begin to separate themselves from their parents but still lack a clearly defined role in society. It is generally regarded as an emotionally intense and often stressful period.

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Introduction

 transitional phase of growth and development between childhood and adulthood. In many societies adolescence is narrowly equated with puberty and the cycle of physical changes culminating in reproductive maturity.

      Western societies understand adolescence in broader terms that encompass psychological (psychological development), social, and moral terrain as well as the strictly physical aspects of maturation. In these societies the term adolescence typically refers to the period between the ages of 12 and 20 and is roughly equivalent to the word teens.

      Adolescence occurs when the individual experiences an upsurge of sexual feelings following the latent sexuality of childhood. It is during adolescence that the individual learns to control and direct sexual urges. Issues of emotional (if not physical) separation from parents also arise at this time. While this sense of separation is a necessary step in the establishment of personal values, the transition to self-sufficiency forces an array of adjustments upon many adolescents. Furthermore, teenagers seldom have clear roles of their own in society but instead occupy an ambiguous period between childhood and adulthood. These issues most often define adolescence in Western cultures, and the response to them partly determines the nature of an individual's adult years.

      Some specialists find that the difficulties of adolescence have been exaggerated and that for many adolescents the process of maturation is largely peaceful and untroubled. Other specialists consider adolescence to be an intense and often stressful developmental period characterized by specific types of behaviour.

Troublesome transition

      There are good reasons for the stereotypes that portray adolescents as rebellious, distracted, thoughtless, and daring. Between the ages of 12 and 20, young people go through so many physical and social changes that it is often difficult for them to know how to behave. During puberty young bodies grow stronger and are infused with hormones (hormone) that stimulate desires appropriate to ensuring the perpetuation of the species. If our pubescent forebears did not get on with the tasks of earning a living and having a family at an early age, they were unlikely to live long enough to see their children grow up. Thus boys started hunting as soon as they could heft a spear, and girls began bearing babies after their first menses (menstruation).

      A seamless transition to adulthood has never been easy, but it seems to be getting increasingly difficult. In the past virtually every society had instituted formal ways for older individuals to help young people take their place in the community. Initiations, vision quests (vision quest), the Hindu samskara (saṃskāra) life-cycle rituals, and other ceremonies or rites of passage helped young men and women make the transition from childhood to adulthood. An outstanding feature of such coming-of-age rites was their emphasis upon instruction in proper dress, deportment, morality, and other behaviours appropriate to adult status.

      The Kumauni hill tribes of northern India offer a vivid example of a culture that traditionally celebrates distinct stages in every child's life. When a girl reaches puberty, her home is decorated with elaborate representations of the coming of age of a certain goddess who, wooed by a young god, is escorted to the temple in a rich wedding procession. Anthropologist Lynn Hart, who lived among the Kumauni, noted that each child grows up at the centre of the family's attention knowing that his or her life echoes the lives of the gods. No doubt Kumauni teenagers sometimes act in ways that bewilder their elders, but tribal traditions ease the passage through this stage of life, helping young people to feel a connection to their community.

Social constraints

      From a biological perspective, adolescence should be the best time of life. Most physical and mental functions, such as speed, strength, reaction time, and memory, are at their peak during the teenage years. It is the time when foods taste best, appetite is heartiest, sleep is sweetest, and music is most seductive. The impact is not purely physical, for it is also in adolescence that new, radical, and divergent ideas can make the most profound impact on the imagination.

      Perhaps more than anything else, teenagers have a remarkable built-in resiliency, seen in their exceptional ability to overcome crises and find something positive in negative events. Studies have found that teens fully recover from bad moods in about half the time it takes adults to do so. Despite this resilience, however, for some teens these years are more stressful than rewarding—in part because of the conditions and restrictions that often accompany this period in life.

Restrictions on physical movement

      Teenagers spend countless hours doing things they would prefer not to do, whether it be labouring, in the poor and developing world, for the basics in life or, in affluent areas, spending hours behind school desks processing information and concepts that often come across as abstract or irrelevant. This sense of frustration may be magnified for girls, who, some studies suggest, lose interest in an academic environment that seems more supportive of boys. Psychologist Mary Pipher, for example, observed that some girls in the United States “begin to fade academically” in junior high school. (Other studies, however, suggest that schools discriminate against boys.) Even excellent students say that most of the time they are in school they would rather be “somewhere else.” Many Western adolescents prefer to spend their time in public places such as parks or shopping malls, where they are least likely to be under adult supervision.

 The layouts of contemporary American communities—especially suburban ones—cause some teens to spend as many as four hours each day just getting to and from school, activities, work, and friends' houses. Getting from place to place is not something most teens have control over until they obtain a driver's license (an event that has become the major rite of passage in contemporary adolescence in much of the developed world). But even with access to a car, many teenagers lack appropriate places to go and rewarding activities in which to participate. In 1990 more than half of the respondents in a nationwide survey of American high-school sophomores said that “just driving or riding around” was an activity they engaged in at least once or twice a week. Watching television and “just hanging out” were the top free-time activities.

      Adolescents generally find that activities involving physical movement—sports, dance, and drama, for example—are among the most pleasurable and gratifying. Ironically, the opportunities for participation in such activities have dwindled, largely because budget concerns have led schools to cut many nonacademic subjects such as physical education. In some American public schools, extracurricular activities have been greatly curtailed or no longer exist.

Absence of meaningful responsibility

 Beginning in the 1950s, the increasingly important teenage market became a driving force in popular music (especially rock music), film, television, and clothing. Indeed, in those countries experiencing the post-World War II economic boom, adolescence was transformed by the emergence of teenagers as consumers with money to spend. Outside of school, adolescents in the contemporary developed world face a bewildering array of consumer choices that include television programs, movies, magazines, CDs, cosmetics, computers and computer paraphernalia, clothes, athletic shoes, jewelry, and games. But while many teenagers in these relatively affluent countries have no end of material amusements and distractions, they have few meaningful responsibilities, in sharp contrast both to their counterparts in countries struggling merely to survive and to earlier generations.

       Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) was still a teenager when he set out to conquer a large part of the known world at the head of his father's Macedonian armies. Lorenzo de' Medici (Medici, Lorenzo de') (1449–92) was an adolescent when his father sent him to Paris to work out subtle financial deals with the king of France. On a less exalted level, until a few generations ago, boys as young as age five or six were expected to work in factories or mines for 70 or more hours a week. In almost all parts of the world, girls were expected to marry and take on the responsibilities of running a household as early as possible.

      In 1950 the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson (Erikson, Erik H.) described adolescence in modern Western societies as a “moratorium,” a period of freedom from responsibilities that allows young people to experiment with a number of options before settling on a lifelong career. Such a moratorium may be appropriate in a culture marked by rapid changes in vocational opportunities and lifestyles. If young people are excluded from responsibilities for too long, however, they may never properly learn how to manage their own lives or care for those who depend on them.

      Of course some adolescents create astonishing opportunities for themselves. William Hewlett and David Packard were teens when each began experimenting with electronic machines, and they founded the Hewlett-Packard Company when they were only in their mid 20s. As an adolescent, Microsoft Corporation cofounder Bill Gates (Gates, Bill) was already formulating the business strategy that just a few years later would dumbfound the IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) colossus and make him one of the wealthiest men in the world. By and large, however, most teens play a waiting game, expecting to start “really living” only after they leave school. As useful as these years can be in preparing teens for their future roles in society, this isolation from “real” life can be enormously frustrating. In order to feel alive and important, then, many teenagers express themselves in ways that seem senseless to the rest of the population.

Isolation from adults

      In many public schools in the West, the student-teacher ratio is at least 20:1, meaning that classroom atmosphere is influenced considerably more by peers than by teachers. At home teenagers spend an average of about three and one-half hours each day without parents or other adults present. Moreover, during the little time when adolescents are at home with their parents, the family typically watches television or the child disappears to study, play games, listen to music, or talk to friends on the telephone.

      Estrangement from parents has clear effects. Teens who do little and spend little time with their parents are likely to be bored, uninterested, and self-centred. Lack of positive interaction with adults is particularly problematic in urban settings that had once enjoyed a lively “street-corner society,” where men traditionally shared their experiences with younger ones in a setting that was casual and relaxed. This vital facet in the socialization of young men has largely disappeared to the detriment of individual lives and communities. In its place, peer influence can be counterproductive by reinforcing a sense of underachievement or sanctioning deviant behaviour.

Deviance

      With little power and little control over their lives, teens often feel that they have marginal status and therefore may be driven to seek the respect that they feel they lack. Without clear roles adolescents may establish their own pecking order and spend their time pursuing irresponsible or deviant (crime) activities. For example, unwed teen motherhood is sometimes the result of a desire for attention, respect, and control, while most gang fights and instances of juvenile homicide occur when teenagers (boys and girls alike) feel that they have been slighted or offended by others.

      Such deviance can take many forms. Insecurity and rage often lead to vandalism, juvenile delinquency, and the illegal use of drugs and alcohol. Violence and crime, of course, are as old as humankind; French historian Philippe Ariès, author of Centuries of Childhood (1962), noted that in the 12th century, Parisian boys as young as age seven carried daggers to defend themselves.

      Contemporary juvenile violence is often driven by the boredom young people experience in a barren environment. Even the wealthiest suburbs with the most lavish amenities can be “barren” when viewed from an adolescent's perspective. Ironically suburban life is meant to protect children from the dangers of the big city. Parents choose such locations in the hope that their children will grow up happy and secure. But safety and homogeneity can be quite boring. When deprived of meaningful activities and responsible guidance, many teens find that the only opportunities for “feeling alive” are stealing a car, breaking a school window, ingesting a mind-altering drug, or having a baby. A middle-class adolescent caught with jewelry that he had stolen from a neighbour's house claimed that the act of stealing had been fun. Like other teenagers, by “fun” he meant something exciting and slightly dangerous that takes nerve as well as skill. In parts of Asia and Africa, similarly, rebel groups have conscripted teens who go on to find excitement and self-respect behind machine guns. Millions of them have died prematurely as a result.

      Behavioral scientists have gained some valuable insights into the conditions that cause teenage strife. In many cases adults are in the position to alleviate some of the frictions that make intergenerational relations more strained than they need to be. Research indicates that those adolescents who have the opportunity to develop a relationship with an adult role model (parental or otherwise) are more successful than their peers in coping with the everyday stresses of life.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi Ed.

Additional Reading

Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (1962, reissued 1996; originally published in French, 1960), offers a historical view of adolescence, while contemporary suggestions for peer and community involvement are found in Peter L. Benson, All Kids Are Our Kids: What Communities Must Do to Raise Caring and Responsible Children and Adolescents (1997); and William M. Bukowski, Andrew F. Newcomb, and Willard W. Hartup (eds.), The Company They Keep: Friendship in Childhood and Adolescence (1996, reissued 1998). Books on adolescent development include Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson, Being Adolescent: Conflict and Growth in the Teenage Years (1984); and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Kevin Rathunde, and Samuel Whalen, Talented Teenagers: The Roots of Success and Failure (1993, reissued 1997).

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