The Mysterious Teenage Mind

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Wise observers have described the “hot-headed” qualities of youth for millennia. However, adolescence, first identified by G. Stanley Hall in the early 1900s and characterized by “storm and stress,” became a life stage in the United States during the twentieth century, when high school became universal and “isolated” teens together as a group.

Jean Piaget believes that when teenagers reach the formal operational stage, they can think abstractly about hypothetical possibilities and reason scientifically. Although even most adults don’t typically reason like scientists, older teenagers use the skills involved in formal operations to plan their adult futures.

According to Lawrence Kohlberg, reaching formal operations makes it possible for teenagers to develop moral values that guide their lives. By examining how they reason about ethical dilemmas, Kohlberg has classified people at the preconventional level (a level of moral judgment in which only punishment and reward are important); the conventional level (moral judgment that is based on obeying social norms); and the highest, postconventional level (moral reasoning that is based on one’s own moral ideals, apart from society’s rules). Despite the fact that Kohlberg’s criteria for measuring morality have serious problems, adolescence is when we become attuned to society’s flaws.

According to David Elkind, this ability to evaluate the flaws of the adult world produces adolescent egocentrism. The imaginary audience (the feeling that everyone is watching everything one does) and the personal fable (feeling invincible and utterly unique) are two components of this intense early-teenage sensitivity to what others think.

Studies suggest that many, but not all, storm-and-stress stereotypes about teenagerhood are true. Adolescents are highly socially sensitive. In arousing peer situations, they are apt to take dangerous risks. This risk-taking (and sometimes law-breaking) propensity, especially with friends, makes adolescence a potentially dangerous time. Research, using the experience-sampling technique, shows teens are more emotionally intense than adults. Contrary to our stereotypes, however, most adolescents are upbeat and happy. Still, teenage nonsuicidal self-injury is prevalent around the world and depression rates rise during adolescence—especially among females. The push to be popular may explain many unfortunate behaviors during the pubertal years.

The minority of teenagers who get into serious trouble tend to have prior emotional and school problems, feel distant from their families (and create more family distance), and live in a risk-taking social milieu. Being connected to academics and having personal and wider-world resources helps teens thrive. However, even adolescents

who are succeeding experiment with forbidden activities, and even serious adolescence-limited turmoil may not lead to life-course difficulties. Many problem teens construct fulfilling adult lives.

The unique characteristics of the developing teenage brain may make early adolescence a relatively dangerous life stage. The frontal lobes are still maturing. Puberty heightens teenagers’ social sensitivities and emotional states. The lessons for society are: Don’t punish teenagers who break the law in the same ways that adult offenders are punished; pass legislation that takes teenage sensitivities into account; and, most of all, channel teenage passions in a positive way through high-quality youth development programs. We also need to make high school more appealing and adjust the school day to fit adolescent sleep needs. While the “immature brain” conception of adolescence is currently in vogue, critics suggest that it minimizes teenagers’ strengths.

Teenagers’ struggles with parents are most intense during puberty, and issues relating to independence loom large in these conflicts around the world (with interesting cultural variations). After young teens initiate the push for autonomy by distancing themselves from their families, by midand later adolescence, parents respond by relaxing their rules. Eventually, the goal is to develop a more friendlike relationship with one’s parents as adults. Immigrant adolescents from families with collectivist values face unique family separation stresses, although the immigrant paradox suggests that caring for a non-English-speaking mother or father can make teens self-confident, empathic, and mature.

Teenage peer groups comprise cliques and crowds. These different sized groups convey adolescents, in stages, toward romantic involvement. Crowds, such as the jocks or the brains, give teenagers an easy way of finding people like themselves in large high schools. The popular kids and the jocks (in contrast to the lower-status brains) feel better about themselves in high school than during elementary school. Children who enter delinquent groups tend to be unhappy before high school and remain distressed during their teenage years.

Entering a “bad crowd” may smooth the way to antisocial behavior because group members model the most antisocial leader and compete for leadership by performing delinquent acts. Deviancy training, in which pre-teens egg one another on by talking about doing dangerous things, leads directly to delinquency as at-risk children travel into high school. Gangs, mainly male teenage peer groups that engage in criminal acts, are most common in impoverished communities. In poor regions of the world, young people may not have any adolescence at all.