Thoughtful and introspective, but impulsive, moody, and out of control; peer-centered conformists and rebellious risk takers; being able to make adult decisions, but needing to be sheltered from the real world: Can teenagers really be all these things? In our search to explain these contradictions, let’s first look at three classic theories of teenage thinking, then explore the research related to teenage storm and stress.

Have a thoughtful conversation with a 16-year-old and a 10-year-old and you will be struck by the remarkable mental growth that occurs during adolescence. It’s not so much that teenagers know much more than they did in fourth or fifth grade, but that adolescents think in a different way. With an elementary school child in the concrete operational stage, you can have a rational talk about daily life. With a teenager, you can have a rational talk about ideas. This ability to reason abstractly about concepts is the defining quality of Jean Piaget’s formal operational stage (see Table 9.2 on p. 262).

Formal Operational Thinking: Abstract Reasoning at Its Peak

Children in concrete operations can look beyond the way objects immediately appear. They realize that when Mommy puts on a mask, she’s still Mommy “inside.” They understand that when you pour a glass of juice or milk into a different-shaped glass, the amount of liquid remains the same. Piaget believed that when children reach the formal operational stage, at around age 12, this ability to think abstractly takes a qualitative leap. Teenagers are able to reason logically in the realm of pure thought. Specifically, according to Piaget:

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ADOLESCENTS CAN THINK LOGICALLY ABOUT CONCEPTS AND HYPOTHETICAL POSSIBILITIES. Ask fourth- or fifth-graders to put objects such as sticks in order from small to large, and they will have no problem performing this seriation task. But present a similar task verbally: “Bob is taller than Sam, and Sam is taller than Bill. Who is the tallest?” and the same children will be lost. The reason is that, during adolescence, we first become capable of logically manipulating concepts in our minds (Elkind, 1968; Flavell, 1963).

Moreover, if you give a child in concrete operations a reasoning task that begins, “Suppose snow is blue,” she will refuse to go further, saying, “That’s not true!” Adolescents in formal operations have no problem tackling that challenge because once our thinking is liberated from concrete objects, we are comfortable reasoning about concepts that may not be real.

ADOLESCENTS CAN THINK LIKE REAL SCIENTISTS. When our thinking occurs on an abstract plane, we can approach problems in a systematic way, devising a strategy to scientifically prove that something is true.

Piaget designed an exercise to reveal this new scientific thought: He presented children with a pendulum apparatus and unattached strings and weights (see Figure 9.1). Notice that the strings differ in their length and the weights vary in size or heaviness. Children’s task was to connect the weights to the strings, then attach them to the pendulum, to decide which influence determined how quickly the pendulum swung from side to side. Was it the length of the string, the heaviness of the weight, or the height from which the string was released?

Think about how to approach this problem, and you may realize that it’s crucial to be systematic—keeping everything constant but the factor whose influence you want to assess (remember my explanation of an experiment in Chapter 1). To test whether it’s the heaviness of the weight, you must keep the string length and the height from which you drop it constant, varying only the weight. Then, you need to isolate another variable, keeping everything else the same. And when you vary the length of the string, keeping everything else the same, you will realize that the string length alone affects how quickly the pendulum swings.

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Elementary school children, Piaget discovered, approach these problems haphazardly. Only adolescents adopt a scientific strategy to solve reasoning tasks (Flavell, 1963; Ginsburg & Opper, 1969).

HOW DOES THIS CHANGE IN THINKING APPLY TO REAL LIFE? This new ability to think hypothetically and scientifically explains why it’s not until in high school that we can thrill to a poetic metaphor or comprehend chemistry experiments (Kroger, 2000). It’s only during high school that we can join the debate team and argue the case for and against capital punishment, no matter what we personally believe. In fact, reaching the formal operational stage explains why teenagers are famous for debating everything in their lives. A 10-year-old who wants to stay up till 2 a.m. to watch a new movie will just keep saying, “I don’t want to go to bed.” A teenager will lay out his case point by point: “Mom, I got enough sleep last night. Besides, I only need six hours. I can sleep after school tomorrow.”

But, do all adolescents reach formal operations? The answer is no. For one thing—rather than being universal—formal operational reasoning only occurs in scientifically oriented Western cultures. Worse yet, even in our society, most people don’t make it to Piaget’s final stage. In a classic study, one researcher discovered only a fraction of U.S. adults approached the pendulum problem scientifically. More disheartening, when asked to debate a controversial issue, such as capital punishment, most people did not even realize that they needed to use logic to construct their case (Kuhn, 1989).

Still, even if many of us never reason like real scientists or master debaters, we can see the qualities involved in formal operational thinking if we look at how adolescents—especially older teenagers—reason about their own lives.

If you are a traditional emerging-adult student, think back to the organizational skills it took to get into college. You may have learned about your options from an adviser, researched each possibility on the Internet, visited campuses, and constructed different applications to showcase your talents. Then, when you got accepted, you needed to reflect on your future self again: “This school works financially, but is it too large? How will I feel about moving far from home?” Would you have been able to mentally weigh these possibilities, and project yourself into the future in this way, at age 10, 12, or even 14?

The bottom line is that reaching concrete operations allows us to be on the same wavelength as the adult world. Reaching formal operations allows us to act in the world like adults.

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Judgment: Developing Internalized Moral Values

This new ability to reflect on ourselves as people allows us to reflect on our personal values. Therefore, drawing on Piaget’s theory, developmentalist Lawrence Kohlberg (1981, 1984) argued that during adolescence we become capable of developing a moral code that guides our lives. To measure this moral code, Kohlberg constructed ethical dilemmas, had people reason about these scenarios, and asked raters to chart the responses according to the three levels of moral thought outlined in Table 9.3 on p. 264. Before looking at the table, take a minute to respond to the “Heinz dilemma,” the most famous problem on Kohlberg’s moral judgment test:

A woman was near death from cancer. One drug might save her. The druggist was charging . . . ten times what the drug cost him to make. The . . . husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money but he could only get together about half of what it cost. [He] asked the . . . druggist to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said NO! Heinz broke into the man’s store to steal the drug. . . . Should he have done that? Why?

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If you thought in terms of whether Heinz would be personally punished or rewarded for his actions, you would be classified at the lowest level of morality, the preconventional level. Responses such as “Heinz should not take the drug because he will go to jail,” or “Heinz should take the drug because then his wife will treat him well,” suggest that—because your focus is solely on external consequences, whether Heinz will get in trouble or be praised—you are not demonstrating any moral sense.

If you made comments such as “Heinz should [or shouldn’t] steal the drug because it’s a person’s duty to obey the law [or to stick up for his wife]” or “Yes, human life is sacred, but the rules must be obeyed,” your response would be classified at the conventional level—right where adults typically are. This shows your morality revolves around the need to uphold society’s norms.

People who reason about this dilemma using their own moral guidelines apart from society’s rules are operating at Kohlberg’s highest postconventional level. A response showing postconventional reasoning might be, “No matter what society says, Heinz had to steal the drug because nothing outweighs the universal principle of saving a life.”

When he conducted studies with different age groups, Kohlberg discovered that at age 13, preconventional answers were universal. By 15 or 16, most children around the world were reasoning at the conventional level. Still, many of us stop right there. Although some of Kohlberg’s adults did think postconventionally, using his incredibly demanding criteria, almost no person consistently made it to the highest moral stage (Reimer, Paolitto, & Hersh, 1983; Snarey, 1985).

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HOW DOES KOHLBERG’S THEORY APPLY TO REAL LIFE? Kohlberg’s categories get us to think deeply about our values. Do you have a moral code that guides your actions? Would you intervene, no matter what the costs, to save a person’s life? These categories give us insights into other people’s moral priorities, too. While reading about Kohlberg’s preconventional level, you might have thought: “I know someone just like this. This person has no ethics. He only cares about whether or not he gets caught!”

However, Kohlberg’s research has been severely criticized. For one thing, Kohlberg was wrong when he said that children can’t go beyond a punishment and reward mentality. Remember from Chapters 3 and 6, developmentalists now know that our basic sense of morality naturally kicks in at an incredibly young age.

In a classic late-twentieth-century critique, feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan argued that Kohlberg’s stages offer a specifically male-centered approach to moral thought. Recall that being classified at the postconventional stage requires abstractly weighing ideals of justice. People must verbalize the tension between societies’ rules and universal ideals. Women’s morality, Gilligan believes, revolves around concrete, caring-oriented criteria: “Hurting others is wrong”; “Moral people take responsibility to reach out in a nurturing way” (Gilligan & Attanucci, 1988).

Gilligan’s criticisms bring up an interesting question: Is Kohberg’s scale valid? Does the way people reason about his scenarios relate to the attitudes and behaviors, which, as you learned in Chapter 6, predict acting prosocially in life? Unfortunately, the answer is “not necessarily.” When outstandingly prosocial teenagers—community leaders who set up programs for the homeless—took Kohlberg’s test, researchers rated their answers at the same conventional level as non-prosocial teens! (See Reimer, 2003.)

Concerns about whether responses to artificial vignettes predict real-world morality are heightened when we look around. We all know people who can spout the highest ethical principles but behave pretty despicably: the minister who lectures his congregation about the sanctity of marriage while cheating on his wife; the chairman of the ethics committee in the state legislature who has been taking bribes for years.

Still, when he describes the changes in moral reasoning that take place during adolescence, Kohlberg has an important point. Teenagers are famous for questioning society’s rules, for seeing the injustice of the world, and for getting involved in idealistic causes. Unfortunately, this ability to step back and see the world as it should be, but rarely is, may produce the emotional storm and stress of teenage life.

Elkind’s Adolescent Egocentrism: Explaining Teenage Storms

This was David Elkind’s (1978) conclusion when he drew on Piaget’s concept of formal operations to make sense of teenagers’ emotional states. Elkind argues that, when children make the transition to formal operational thought at about age 12, they can see beneath the surface of adult rules. A sixth-grader realizes that his 10 o’clock bedtime, rather than being carved in stone, is an arbitrary number capable of being contested and changed. A socially conscious 14-year-old becomes acutely aware of the difference between what adults say they do and how they really act. The same parents and teachers who punish you for missing your curfew or being late to class can’t get to the dinner table or a meeting on time.

The realization that the emperor has no clothes (“Those godlike adults are no better than me”), according to Elkind, leads to anger, anxiety, and the impulse to rebel. From arguing with a ninth-grade English teacher over a grade to testing the limits by driving fast, teenagers are well known for protesting anything just because it’s “a rule.”

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More tantalizing, Elkind draws on formal operational thinking to make sense of the classic behavior we often observe in young teens—their incredible sensitivity to what other people think. According to Elkind, when children first become attuned to other people’s flaws, this feeling turns inward to become an obsession with what others think about their own personal flaws. This leads to adolescent egocentrism—the distorted feeling that one’s own actions are at the center of everyone else’s consciousness.

So 13-year-old Melody drives her parents crazy. She objects to everything from the way they dress to how they chew their food. When her mother picks her up from school, she will not let this humiliating person emerge from the car: “Mom, I don’t know you!” She does not spare herself: A minuscule pimple is a monumental misery; stumbling and spilling her food on the school lunch line is a source of shame (“Everyone is laughing at me! My life is over!”). According to Elkind, this intense self-consciousness is caused by one facet of adolescent egocentrism called the imaginary audience. By that term, he meant that young teens, such as Melody, literally feel that they are on stage, with everyone watching everything they do.

A second component of adolescent egocentrism is the personal fable. Teenagers feel that they are invincible and that their own life experiences are unique. So Melody believes that no one has ever had so disgusting a blemish. She has the most embarrassing mother in the world.

These mental distortions explain the exaggerated emotional storms we laugh about during the early adolescent years. Unfortunately, the “It can’t happen to me” component of the personal fable may lead to tragic acts. Boys put their lives at risk by drag racing on the freeway because they imagine that they can never die. A girl does not use contraception when she has sex because, she reasons, “Yes, other girls can get pregnant, but not me. Plus, if I do get pregnant, I will be the center of attention, a real heroine.”

Are teenagers unusually sensitive to people’s reactions? Is Elkind (like other observers, from Aristotle to Shakespeare to G. Stanley Hall) correct in saying that risk taking is intrinsic to being a “hot-headed youth”? Are adolescents really intensely emotional and/or likely to be emotionally disturbed? Now, let’s turn to research related to these three core aspects of teenage storm and stress.

Are Adolescents Exceptionally Socially Sensitive?

In the last chapter, you learned that, when they reach puberty, children—especially girls—become attuned to their bodies’ flaws. In Chapter 6, you saw how the passion to fit in socially (and target people who don’t!) causes bullying to flare up during the early teens. In one revealing study, when researchers asked middle schoolers to list their priorities, pre-teens ranked socially succeeding as their top concern. Being in the “in crowd” was more important than being a scholar, being nice, or even having friends! (See LaFontana & Cillessen, 2010.)

Moreover, as Elkind would predict, when they reach puberty, children are especially sensitive to social disapproval. If presented with unfamiliar faces on a screen, and told they were unexpectedly rejected by those virtual peers, pre-teen girls’ heart rates dramatically slow (Gunther Moor and others, 2014). When scientists constructed a cyber ball game and then arranged for study participants to get ostracized (no one threw these people the ball)—as the researchers predicted, adolescents reacted to this social slight more intensely than did adults (Sebastian and others, 2010).

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More telling, young teens are prone to act impulsively, specifically in situations involving arousing social cues (Blakemore & Mills, 2014). As Figure 9.2 reveals, they selectively fail Simon Says–like tasks, but only when an enticing, smiling person says “Simon Says, ‘don’t go’” (Casey & Caudle, 2013). As the landmark study in the How Do We Know box spells out, boys tend to make risky driving decisions, but only with their friends (Steinberg, 2005; 2008). After being socially excluded (via the cyber ball game) especially teens who are highly rejection-sensitive overreact by impulsively taking these scary driving risks (Peake and others, 2013).

Moreover, fMRI studies show that this predisposition to act precipitously in emotional situations is mirrored in specific brain changes (Blakemore & Mills, 2014; Peake and others, 2013). So, the answer to the question, “Are adolescents more socially sensitive?” is “absolutely yes,” especially around the pubertal years!

Are Adolescents Risk Takers?

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Doing something and getting away with it. . . . You are driving at 80 miles an hour and stop at a stop sign and a cop will turn around the corner and you start giggling. Or you are out drinking or maybe you smoked a joint, and you say “hi” to a police officer and he walks by. . . .

(quoted in Lightfoot, 1997, p. 100)

This quotation from a teen in an interview study, plus the research in the previous section, suggests that (no surprise) the second storm-and-stress stereotype is definitely true. From the thrill of taking that first drink to the lure of driving fast, pushing the envelope is a basic feature of teenage life (Dahl, 2004; Steinberg, 2010).

Consider, for instance, the findings of yearly nationwide University of Michigan–sponsored polls tracking U.S. young people’s lives. In examining data spanning 1997 to 2008, researchers found that 1 in 6 teens had been arrested by age 18. By age 23, the arrest rate slid up to an astonishing almost 1 in 3! (See Brame and others, 2012.) In the 2010 survey, roughly 2 in 10 high school seniors admitted to binge drinking (defined as having five or more drinks at a time for males and four or more drinks in a row for females) (Johnston and others, 2011). (Table 9.4 showcases some interesting research facts related specifically to alcohol and adolescents.)

The good news is that, as you can see in Figure 9.3, in contrast to our images of rampant teenage substance abuse, most high school seniors do not report using any drugs. The most recent 2013 University of Michigan poll found the lowest rates of teenage alcohol use since the survey was instituted four decades ago! (See Johnston and others, 2014.) The bad news is that—for an alarming fraction of young people in the United States—encounters with the criminal justice system are a depressing feature of modern life.

Younger children also rebel, disobey, and test the limits. But, if you have seen a group of teenage boys hanging from the top of a speeding car, you know that the risks adolescents take can be threatening to life. At the very age when they are most physically robust, teenagers—especially males—are most likely to die of preventable causes such as accidents (Dahl, 2004; Spear, 2008). So, yes, parents can worry about their children—-particularly their sons—when they haven’t made it home from a party and it’s already 2 a.m.!

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Are Adolescents More Emotional, More Emotionally Disturbed, or Both?

Given this information, it should come as no surprise that the third major storm-and-stress stereotype is also correct: Adolescents are more emotionally intense than adults. Developmentalists could not arrive at this conclusion by using surveys in which they asked young people to reflect on how they generally felt. They needed a method to chart the minute-to-minute ups and downs of teenagers’ emotional lives.

Imagine that you could get inside the head of a 16-year-old as that person went about daily life. About 40 years ago, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson (1984) accomplished this feat through developing a procedure called the experience-sampling technique. The researchers asked students at a suburban Chicago high school to carry pagers programmed to emit a signal at random intervals during each day for a week. When the beeper went off, each teenager filled out a chart like the one you can see in Figure 9.4 below. Notice, if you turn to Greg’s record, that the experience-sampling procedure gives us insights into what experiences make teenagers (and people of other ages) feel joyous or distressed. Let’s now look at what the charts revealed about the intensity of adolescents’ moods.

The records showed that adolescents do live life on an intense emotional plane. Teenagers reported experiencing euphoria and deep unhappiness far more often than a comparison sample of adults. Teenagers also had more roller-coaster shifts in moods. While a 16-year-old was more likely to be back to normal 45 minutes after feeling terrific, an adult was likely to still feel happier than average hours after reporting an emotional high.

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Does this mean that adolescents’ moods are irrational? The researchers concluded that the answer was no. As Greg’s experience-sampling chart shows, teenagers don’t get excited or down in the dumps for no reason. It’s hanging out with their friends that makes them feel elated. It’s a boring class that bores them very, very much.

Does this mean that most adolescents are emotionally disturbed? Now, the answer is definitely no. Although the distinction can escape parents when their child wails, “I got a D on my chemistry test; I’ll kill myself!” there is a difference between being highly emotional and being emotionally disturbed.

Actually, when developmentalists ask teenagers to evaluate their lives, they get an upbeat picture of how young people generally feel. Most adolescents around the world are confident and hopeful about the future (Gilman and others, 2008; Lewin-Bizan and others, 2010). In one U.S. poll, researchers classified 4 out of 10 adolescents as “flourishing”—efficacious, zestful, connected to family and friends. Only 6 percent were “languishing,” totally demoralized about life (Keys, 2007).

So the stereotypic impression that most teenagers are unhappy or suffer from serious psychological problems is false. Still, as you just read, the picture is far from totally rosy. Their risk-taking propensities make the late teens the peak crime years (Warr, 2007; see Figure 9.5). Teenagers’ emotional storms can produce other distressing symptoms, too. Again, contrary to our stereotypes, adolescent suicide is rare (Males, 2009). As I’ll describe in Chapter 13, the peak life stage for suicide is old age! But, in several international polls, researchers found an alarming fraction of teens—between 1 in 4, to 1 in 6 young people—have engaged in nonsuicidal self-injury (Muehlenkamp and others, 2012; Giletta and others, 2012). These adolescents cut themselves, or perform other self-mutilation acts, to deal with stress.

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Scientists are passionate to make sense of this global epidemic. The impulse to self-injure, they find, unlike addictions such as drinking or taking drugs, is used specifically to cope with distress. Cutting episodes erupt when emotionally fragile teens experience bouts of incredibly low self-esteem (Victor, Glenn, & Klonsky, 2012; Anestis and others, 2013). As one adolescent in an interview study explained: [It’s due to] “pure black hatred of the self that has failed at everything else” (Breen, Lewis, & Sutherland, 2013, p. 59). Still, another child who regularly self-injured admitted a poisonous positive feeling is involved: “I love looking at my scars. They are an important part of me that I know will always be with me even if nothing else is.” (p. 60) Therefore, in some distorted way, cutting may be a strategy for defining one’s identity and ironically preserving the sense of an enduring self. Which brings up an interesting question. Given that cutting can flare up—and externalizing behaviors such as risk-taking become common—do depression rates rise during the adolescent years?

Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Moreover, while the prevalence of this mental disorder is about equal for each sex during childhood, by the mid-teens, the adult gender pattern kicks in. Throughout life, women are roughly twice as susceptible to depression as are men. So, while they are worrying about their teenage sons, mothers might be a bit concerned about their daughters, too (see Oldehinkel & Bouma, 2011, for review).

Depression rates may escalate during adolescence because the hormonal changes of puberty make the teenage brain more sensitive to stress (Romeo, 2013). But why is depression a mainly female disorder during adult life? Are women biologically primed to internalize their problems when under stress, and could this gender difference have roots in the womb? We do not know. What we do know is that if a child’s fate is to battle any serious mental health disorder, from depression to schizophrenia, that condition often has its onset in late adolescence or the early emerging-adult years.

Moreover, I believe that the push to be socially successful (or popular) may explain many classic distressing symptoms during the early teens.

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So far, I seem to be sliding into stereotyping “adolescents” as a monolithic group. This is absolutely not true! Teenagers, as we know, differ—in their passion to be popular, in their school connectedness, in their tendencies to take risks or get depressed. As diversity at this life stage—and any other age—is the norm, the critical question is, “Who gets derailed and who thrives during this landmark decade of life?”

Which Teens Get into Serious Trouble?

Without denying that serious adolescent difficulties can unpredictably erupt, here are three thunderclouds that foreshadow stormy weather ahead:

AT-RISK TEENS TEND TO HAVE PRIOR EMOTION REGULATION PROBLEMS. It should come as no surprise that one thundercloud relates to elementary school externalizing tendencies and academic difficulties. Not only is the lure of getting into trouble overwhelming, when a child’s problems regulating his behavior are already causing him to fail (Hirschfield & Gasper, 2011; Li & Lerner, 2011; Sibley and others, 2011), as I will describe later, children who are not succeeding with the mainstream kids gravitate toward antisocial groups of friends, who then give each other reinforcement for doing dangerous things.

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Therefore, tests of executive functions—measures charting whether girls and boys are having difficulties generally thinking through their behavior—strongly predict adolescent storms (Pharo and others, 2011; May & Beaver, 2014). Moreover, the same self-regulation issues that lead to teenage turmoil are apt to appear earlier in life.

AT-RISK TEENS TEND TO HAVE POOR FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS. Feeling alienated from one’s parents can also be a warning sign of developing storms. When researchers explored the emotions of teens who self-injured, these children often anguished: “My parents are way too critical”; “I can’t depend on my mom or dad” (Bureau and others, 2010; You, Lin, & Leung, 2013).

In essence, these young people were describing an insecure attachment. Teenagers want to be listened to and respected. They need to know they are unconditionally loved (Allen and others, 2007). So, to use the attachment metaphor spelled out in Chapter 4, with adolescents, parents must be skillful dancers. They should understand when to back off and when to stay close. In Chapter 7’s terms, adolescents require an authoritative discipline style.

Given what you learned in previous chapters, it comes as no surprise that parent–child problems appearing years earlier foreshadow teenage distress. From disorganized infant attachment (Spangler & Zimmermann, 2014) to lack of maternal warmth (Morgan, Shaw, & Forbes, 2014)—what happens relationship-wise during infancy and early childhood may epigenetically alter how the adolescent brain reacts to stress. Moreover, it comes as no shock that, just as conflict-ridden parent–child interactions evoke pre-teen depression, being depressed impairs a young person’s ability to communicate with her mom or dad (Brière, Archambault, & Janosz, 2013).

This brings up the fact that the attachment dance at any age is bidirectional. When we see correlations between teenagers’ reporting distant family relationships and having troubles, it’s not simply parents who are at fault. Imagine that you are a 15-year-old who is having unprotected sex, taking drugs, or withdrawing from the world. Would you tell your parents about your life? And when you withdrew to your room or lied about your activities, wouldn’t you feel even more alienated: “My family knows zero about who I am” (Bradley & Corwyn, 2013).

Yes, it’s easy to say that being authoritative is vital in parenting teens. But take it from me (I’ve been there!), when your teenager is on the road to trouble, confronting him about his activities is apt to backfire. So, it can be difficult for frantic parents to understand how to really act authoritatively in a much-loved son or daughter’s life.

AT-RISK TEENS LIVE IN A RISK-TAKING ENVIRONMENT. Focusing on parent–child relationships neglects the role the social milieu plays in seeding teenage storms. If your much-loved older brother is into drugs (Solmeyer, McHale, & Crouter, 2014), your boyfriend is robbing stores (Monahan, Dimitrieva, & Cauffman, 2014), or the values at your school encourage risk-taking (Rambaran, Dijkstra, & Stark, 2013), your chance of getting into trouble as an adolescent accelerates. To rephrase the old saying: “It may take a village to raise a child, but it really takes a nurturing village to help a teenager thrive.” Now, let’s look at who thrives during their teens.

Which Teens Flourish?

In high school I really got it together. I connected with my lifelong love of music. I’ll never forget that feeling when I got that special prize in band my senior year.

At about age 15, I decided the best way to keep myself off the streets was to get involved in my church youth group. It was my best time of life.

As the quotations show, these attributes offer a mirror image of the qualities I just described: Teenagers thrive when they have superior executive functions and can thoughtfully direct their lives (Gestsdottir and others, 2010; Urban, Lewin-Bizan, & Lerner, 2010). They flourish when they are connected to school (Lewis and others, 2011). Having a mentor or VIP (very important non-parental adult) boosts young people’s self-esteem (Haddad, Chen, & Greenberger, 2011)—and so does having a life interest, like music, provided caring adults nurture your passion (Scales, Benson, & Roehlkepartain, 2011). In two-parent families in particular, attending religious services in later childhood with your parents and siblings promotes thriving later on (Petts, 2014).

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Thriving does not mean staying out of trouble. Adolescents who are flourishing may also engage in considerable risk taking during the early and middle teens (Lerner and others, 2010). So again, we need to approach adolescent behavior by adopting the developmental systems approach. Those human beings called teens, like human beings of any age, are not all angel or devil, but complex mixtures of frailties and strengths (Larson & Tran, 2014). Testing the limits is a normal adolescent experience even among the happiest, healthiest teens.

And let’s not give up on children who do get seriously derailed. Developmentalists make a distinction between adolescence-limited turmoil (antisocial behavior during the teenage years) and life-course difficulties (antisocial behaviors that continue into adult life) (Moffitt, 1993). Perhaps you have a friend who used to stay out all night partying, drinking, or taking drugs, but later became a responsible parent. Or you may know an extremely “troubled teen” who is succeeding incredibly well after finding the right person–environment fit at college or work. (For a compelling example, stay tuned for page 276.) If so, you understand a main message of the next chapter: We change the most during our emerging-adult years. (Table 9.5 offers a checklist so you can evaluate whether a child you love might have a stormy or sunny adolescence.)

Now, let’s put it all together: the mental growth; the morality; the emotionality; and the sensitivity to what others think. Give teenagers an intellectual problem and they reason in mature ways. But younger teens tend to be captivated by popularity, and get overwhelmed in arousing situations when with their friends.

According to adolescence specialists, these qualities make sense when we look at the developing brain. During the teens, a dramatic pruning occurs in the frontal lobes (see Table 9.6). The insulating myelin sheath has years to go before reaching its mature form. At the same time, puberty heightens the output of certain neurotransmitters, which provokes the passion to take risks (Guerri & Pascual, 2010; Steinberg, 2010). As Laurence Steinberg (2008; Smith, Chein, & Steinberg, 2013) explains, it’s like starting the engine of adulthood with an unskilled driver. This heightened activation of the “socioemotional brain,” with a cognitive control center still “under construction,” makes adolescence a potentially dangerous time.

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But from an evolutionary standpoint, it is logical to start with an emotional engine in high gear. Teenagers’ risk-taking tendencies propel them to venture into the world. Their passion to make it with their peers is vital to leaving their parents and forming new, close attachments as adults. The unique qualities of the adolescent mind are beautifully tailored to help young people make the leap from childhood to the adult world (Dahl, 2004; Steinberg, 2008).

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Don’t punish adolescents as if they were mentally just like adults. If the adolescent brain is a work in progress, it doesn’t make sense to have the same legal sanctions for teenagers who commit crimes that we have for adults. Rather than locking adolescents up, it seems logical that at this young age we focus on rehabilitation. As Laurence Steinberg (2008) and virtually every other adolescence expert suggest, with regard to the legal system, “less guilty by reason of adolescence” is the way to go.

Is the U.S. legal system listening to the adolescence specialists? The answer is “a bit, but only recently.” In 2005, the Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for adolescents and, in 2012, eliminated mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for teens (Shulman & Cauffman, 2013). Still, today, as the Experiencing the Lifespan Box suggests, officers and prosecutors can transfer selected adolescents accused of violent crimes out of the juvenile justice system and have those teens tried as adults. Yes, as my amazing interview with Jason suggests, with luck and a resilient temperament, a shockingly punitive approach can help turn a person around. However, statistically speaking, there is no evidence that condemning adolescents to the gulag of dysfunctional adult prisons deters later criminal acts (Fabian, 2011). Do you believe that it’s ever acceptable to try teenagers as adults?

Pass laws user-friendly to the teenage mind. Putting adolescents in adult prisons is counterproductive, simply because it exposes this socially-sensitive age group to the kind of social milieu that encourages criminal acts. Therefore, we need to craft legislation taking teenagers mental processes into account. One good example is graduated driving rules, which limit young people just getting their license from operating cars while in groups of peers. Better yet, let’s draw on adolescents’ social sensitivities and passion to connect with the wider world in a positive way.

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Provide group activities that capitalize on adolescents’ strengths. How can we help teenagers forge growth-enhancing peer relationships and promote their inner development?

Youth development programs fulfill this mission. They give adolescents safe places to explore their passions during the late afternoon hours, when teens are most prone to get into trouble while hanging out with their friends (Goldner and others, 2011). From 4-H clubs, to church groups, to high school plays, youth development programs ideally foster qualities that developmentalist Richard Lerner has named the five C’s: competence, confidence, character, caring, and connections. They provide an environment that allows young people to thrive (Bowers and others, 2010; Lerner, Dowling, & Anderson, 2003).

I wish I could say that every youth program fostered flourishing. But as anyone who has spent time at a girls’ club or the local Y knows, these settings can encourage group bullying and antisocial acts (Rorie and others, 2011). Therefore, youth programs must be structured and well supervised. They have to promote the five C’s. At the same time, they should be places where young people can exercise their autonomy and relax, let loose, or joke around (Adachi & Willoughby, 2014). So, rather than just saying, “Afterschool activities are great,” we need to consider what each specific program actually provides.

It also helps to embed less academic offerings into the school day. In one heartening study, having strong high school arts programs boosted children’s academic performance, making students feel more engaged in all of their classes (Martin and others, 2013). Intense involvement, specifically in high school clubs, predicts work success years down the road (Gardner, Roth, & Brooks-Gunn, 2008; Linver, Roth, & Brooks-Gunn, 2009)—which brings me to that important issue: For the sake of both their present and future, how can we get more teens connected to school?

Change high schools to provide a better adolescent–environment fit. Adolescents who feel imbedded in nurturing schools tend to feel good about themselves (Hirschfield & Gasper, 2011; Lewis and others, 2011) and the world (Flanagan & Stout, 2010). School can offer at-risk teens a haven when they are having problems at home (Loukas, Roalson, & Herrera, 2010).

Unfortunately, however, many Western high schools are not nurturing places. In one disheartening international poll, although teenagers were generally upbeat about other aspects of their lives, they rated their high school experience as only “so-so” (Gilman and others, 2008). How can we turn this situation around?

In surveys, teenagers say that they are yearning for the experiences that characterize high-quality elementary schools (described in Chapter 7)—autonomy-supporting work that encourages them to think and teachers who respect their point of view (LaRusso, Romer, & Selman, 2008); courses that are relevant to their lives (Wagner, 2000).

In addition to injecting more creativity into the day through the arts, service-learning classes can make a lasting difference in later development (McIntosh, Metz, & Youniss, 2005). Here is what one African American young man had to say about his junior-year course in which he volunteered at a soup kitchen: “I was on the brink of becoming one of those hoodlums the world so fears. This class was one of the major factors in my choosing the right path” (quoted in Yates & Youniss, 1998, p. 509).

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Finally, we might rethink the school day to take into account teenagers’ unique sleep requirements. During early adolescence, the sleep cycle is biologically pushed back (Colrain & Baker, 2011; Feinberg & Campbell, 2010). Although adolescents often need at least nine hours of sleep to function at their best, because they tend to go to bed after 11 and must wake up for school at 6 or 7 a.m., the typical U.S. teen sleeps fewer than 7 hours each day (Colrain & Baker, 2011). Worse yet, children who strongly show this evening circadian shift are generally at risk for a stormy teenage life. They tend to have poorer family relationships (Díaz-Morales and others, 2014), are often lonely, and are less mentally tough (Brand and others, 2014; Doane & Thurston, 2014). Because sleep deprivation throws the cognitive and socioemotional control systems more out of whack, these adolescents are apt to be impulsive (Peach & Gaultney, 2013) and engage in deviant acts (Telzer and others, 2013), in addition to (no surprise) doing poorly in class.

For this reason, researchers are exploring how strategies such as reducing ambient light at night might better promote teenage sleep (Shochat, Cohen-Zion, & Tzischinsky, 2014; Short and others, 2013). But perhaps these scientists should consider a simpler route: Start school at 10 or even 11 a.m.!

Think back to your high school—what you found problematic; what helped you cope; what may have allowed you to thrive. Do you have other ideas about how we might change schools, or any other aspect of the environment, to help teenagers make the most of these special years?

Until now, I’ve been highlighting the mainstream developmental science message: “Because of their brain immaturity, teens need protection from the world.” Let’s consider some different views: Do we know enough about how the brain functions to make these kinds of neural attributions? Given the somewhat confusing findings in Table 9.6, some experts legitimately answer no (Epstein, 2010; Sercombe, 2010). Might scientists be over-invoking biology, to inappropriately label teenagers as out-of-control?

Consider, for instance, that the brain evidence targeting the early teens as a time for trouble is out of sync with many real-world risk-taking facts. From the frequency of arrests, to bingeing on alcohol, the peak age-zone for deviant behavior is late adolescence and early emerging adulthood—when the frontal lobes are almost fully mature. Furthermore, is teenage risk taking that dangerous compared to the impulsive activities we engage in throughout adult life—from marrying multiple times, to making investments we can’t afford, to starting unprovoked wars (see Willoughby and others, 2013)?

The most innovative critique of the immature adolescent brain was put forth by psychologist Robert Epstein. Epstein (2010) reminds us that the life stage called adolescence is an artificial construction. Nature intended us to enter adulthood at puberty. Now young people may be forced into depression and dangerous risk taking by languishing for a decade under the ill-fitting label “child.” How many “predictable” teenage symptoms of storm and stress, Epstein argues, have little to do with faulty frontal lobes and everything to do with a poor contemporary body–environment fit? Do teenagers really have immature brains, or are adults to blame for shackling teenagers’ minds? Let’s keep these thoughts in mind, as we turn now to explore parent–teenager relationships in depth.

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Question 9.1

1. The high schoolers will be able to memorize poems.

2. The high schoolers will be able to summarize the plots of stories.

3. The high schoolers will be able to debate different ideas even if they don’t personally agree with them.

4. The high schoolers will be able to develop their own moral principles.

c and d

Question 9.2

If your arguments centered on getting punished or rewarded (the coach needs to put Terry in because that’s his best shot at winning; or, the coach can’t put Terry in because, if someone finds out, he will be in trouble), you are reasoning at the preconventional level. Comments such as “going against the rules is wrong” might be classified as conventional. If you argued, “Putting Terry in goes against my values, no matter what the team or the rules say,” your response might qualify as postconventional.

Question 9.3

the imaginary audience; the personal fable; adolescent egocentrism

Question 9.4

depression

Question 9.5

worried, because he is at risk for acting out behaviors such as aggression

Question 9.6

1. Push the state legislature to punish teenage offenders as adults. Let them pay for their crimes!

2. Encourage the local high school to expand its menu of arts classes.

3. Think about postponing the beginning of the school day to 10 a.m.

b and c

Question 9.7

Trying teens as adults. Pro arguments: Kohlberg’s theory clearly implies teens know right from wrong, so if teens knowingly do the crime, they should “do the time.” Actually, the critical dimension in deciding on adult punishment should be a person’s culpability—premeditation, seriousness of the infraction, and so on, not age. Con arguments: The research in this chapter shows that teens are indeed biologically and behaviorally different, so it is cruel to judge their behavior by adult standards. Moreover, if the U.S. bars young people from voting or serving in the military until age 18, and won’t let people buy alcohol until age 21, it’s unfair to put teens in adult prisons.