Chapter 16 Introduction

Adolescence: Psychosocial Development

  • Identity
    • Not Yet Achieved
    • Four Arenas of Identity Formation
  • Relationships with Adults
    • Parents
    • A VIEW FROM SCIENCE: Parents, Genes, and Risks
    • Other Adults
  • Peer Power
    • Peers and Parents
    • Peer Pressure
    • Romance
    • Sex Education
  • Sadness and Anger
    • Depression
    • Delinquency and Defiance
    • OPPOSING PERSPECTIVES: Teenage Rage: Necessary?
  • Drug Use and Abuse
    • Variations in Drug Use
    • Harm from Drugs
    • Preventing Drug Abuse: What Works?

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WHAT WILL YOU KNOW?

  1. Why do some teenagers seem to markedly change their appearance, their behavior, and their goals from one year to the next?

    Because teenagers are experiencing the identity versus role confusion psychosocial crisis, their primary task is to establish their own identity. They reconsider the goals and values of their culture, accepting some and discarding others, forging their own identity. During the period of role confusion, their thinking is disorganized, they procrastinate, and they avoid issues and actions.

  2. When teenagers disagree with their parents on every issue, is it time for the parents to give up, become stricter, or do something else?

    They should do something else—relax. Disputes are common because the adolescent’s drive for independence, arising from biological as well as psychological impulses, clashes with the parents’ desire to maintain control. Each generation misjudges the other: Parents think their offspring resent them more than they actually do, and adolescents imagine their parents want to dominate them more than they actually do. Unspoken concerns need to be aired so both generations better understand each other. Some bickering may indicate a healthy family, since close relationships almost always include conflict. The parent–child relationship usually improves with time.

  3. Does knowing about sex make it more likely that a teenager will be sexually active?

    Teens who became sexually active and who were most likely to develop an STI had parents who warned them to stay away from sex. In contrast, adolescents were more likely to remain virgins if they had a warm relationship with their parents—specific information was less important than open communication. Especially when parents are silent, forbidding, or vague, adolescent sexual behavior is strongly influenced by peers.

  4. Is delinquency a temporary phase or a sign that a person is likely to commit serious crimes in adulthood?

    We need to distinguish two kinds of teenage lawbreakers. Most juvenile delinquents are adolescence-limited offenders, adolescents whose criminal activity stops by age 21. They break the law with their friends, facilitated by their chosen antisocial peers. More boys than girls are in this group, but some gangs include both sexes (the gender gap in law breaking is narrower in late adolescence than earlier). The other kind of delinquents are life-course-persistent offenders, people who break the law before and after adolescence as well as during it. Their law breaking is more often alone than as part of a gang, and the cause of their problems is neurological impairment (either inborn or caused by early experiences), the symptoms of which include problems with language and learning from childhood.

  5. Since most adolescents try alcohol, why do laws forbid it?

    Many researchers find that drug use before maturity is particularly likely to harm body and brain growth. However, adolescents are especially likely to deny that they ever could become addicted to drugs. Few adolescents notice when they or their friends move past use to abuse and then to addiction. Alcohol is the most frequently abused drug in North America. Heavy drinking impairs memory and self-control by damaging the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, perhaps distorting the reward circuits of the brain life-long. Adolescence is a particularly sensitive period, because the regions of the brain that are connected to pleasure are more strongly affected by alcohol during adolescence than at later ages, which makes adolescents less conscious of the effects.

It’s not easy being a teenager, as the previous chapters make clear, but neither is it easy being the parent of a teenager. Sometimes I was too lenient. For example, once my daughter came home late; I was worried, angry, and upset, but I did not think about punishing her until she asked, “How long am I grounded?” And sometimes I was too strict. For years I insisted that my daughters and their friends wash the dinner dishes until all my children told me that none of their friends had such mean mothers.

At times all parents probably ricochet, surprised by their adolescents. When our children were infants, my husband Martin and I had discussed and decided how we would raise them when they became teenagers: We were ready to be firm and consistent regarding illicit drug use, unsafe sex, and serious law-breaking—but none of those issues ever became a problem for us. Instead, our children presented unanticipated challenges and we reacted, sometimes at cross-purposes. As Martin said, “I knew they would become adolescents some day. I didn’t know we would become parents of adolescents.”

This chapter is about adolescent behavior and relationships with friends, parents, and the larger society. As you see, it begins with identity and ends with drugs, both of which might appear to be matters of private and personal choice, but both of which are strongly affected by the social context. My children’s actions, my reactions, and the results were affected at every moment by past history (I washed had dishes for my family, as was the norm when I was young) and by my children’s current social world (their friends did not).