What exactly are teenager–parent interactions like? Now, it’s time to tackle this question, as I focus on those two adolescent agendas—separating from parents and connecting with peers.

When I’m with my dad fishing, or when my family is just joking around at dinner—it’s times like these when I feel completely content, loved, the best about life and myself.

In their original experience-sampling study, Csikszentmihalyi and Larson (1984) discovered that teenagers’ most uplifting experiences occurred when they were with their families—sharing a joke around the dinner table or having a close moment with mom or dad. Unfortunately, however, those moments were few. In fact, while peer encounters were more apt to evoke passionate highs, when adolescents were with their families, unhappy emotions outweighed positive ones 10 to 1.

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This tendency to lock horns with our parents seems built into the adolescent experience, as the global poll illustrated in Figure 9.6 shows. Notice that, while the magnitude of the gap differs from nation to nation, teens worldwide typically rank stress in the parent–child relationship as more upsetting than stress with peers (Persike & Seiffge-Krenke, 2014).

The Issue: Pushing for Autonomy

Why does family life produce such teenage pain? As developmentalists point out, if our home life is good, our family provides our cocoon. Home is the place where we can relax, be ourselves, and feel completely loved. However, in addition to being our safe haven, parents must be a source of pain. The reason is that parents’ job is both to love us and to limit us. When this parental limiting function gets into high gear, teenage distress becomes acute.

What do teenagers and their parents argue about? This global poll offers insights into unique cultural parenting priorities in different regions of the world (Persike & Seffige-Krenke, 2014). In northern Europe and the United States, arguments around academic issues loom large (“I hate that pressure to get good grades!”). For Japanese and Chinese teens, as you might imagine, these kinds of school-related conflicts outweigh everything else.

Perhaps, because it’s especially crucial in these collectivist societies to marry within “one’s own group,” in the Middle East, micromanaging peer relationships is a major stress (“My parents won’t let me see the friends I want!”). In southern Europe, where children still live with their parents well into their late twenties and early thirties, dependency and general parent–child acrimony is a serious concern (“We fight all the time!” “They won’t let me grow up!”). (More about these cultural priorities in Chapters 10 and 11.)

But it should come as no surprise that the underlying issue in every nation centers around independence (“Why can’t I do what I want? You have too many rules!”). Moreover, the most intense clashes occur just when peer group popularity pressures reach their height—around the early to middle teens (De Goede, Branje, & Meeus, 2009; Daddis, 2011.)

The Process: Exploring the Dance of Autonomy

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Actually, parent–adolescent conflict flares up while children are in the midst of puberty (Steinberg, 2005; Steinberg & Hill, 1978). From an evolutionary perspective, the hormonal surges of puberty may propel this struggle for autonomy (“You can’t tell me what to do!”) that sets in motion the dance of separation intrinsic to becoming an independent adult.

How does the dance of autonomy unfold? Based on periodically asking teens questions—such as, “Do your parents know what you do in your free time?” or “Do you tell your parents who you hang out with?”—and exploring parental rules, Canadian researchers offered a motion picture of changing parent–child relationships over the teenage years (Keijsers & Poulin, 2013).

As it turns out, children first initiate the push for independence by becoming secretive and distant in their early teens. But, parents only respond by steadily granting their children much more freedom beginning after age 15.

Why is mid- to later adolescence a crucial autonomy-granting cutting point? The reason may be that by about their Junior year of high school, parents feel their children are more responsible and mature (Wray-Lake, Crouter, & McHale, 2010). As we get closer to high school graduation, our priorities start to shift from rebelling to constructing an adult life. Now, we must get it together and think concretely about college and a career (Malin and others, 2014).

Even the major social markers of independence at around age 16 or 17 eliminate sources of family strain. Think about how getting your first job, or your license, removed an important area of family conflict. You no longer had to ask your parents for every dime or rely on mom or dad to get around.

These adult landmarks put distance between parents and teenagers in the most basic, physical way. The experience-sampling charts showed that ninth-graders spent 25 percent of their time with family members. Among high school seniors, the figure dropped to 14 percent (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1984).

So the process of separating from our families makes it possible to have a more harmonious family life. The delicate task for parents, as I suggested earlier, is to give teens space to explore their new, adult selves and still remain closely involved (Steinberg, 2001). One mother of a teenager explained what ideally should happen, when she said: “I don’t treat her like a young child anymore, but we’re still very, very close. Sort of like a friendship, but not really, because I’m still in charge. She’s my buddy” (quoted in Shearer, Crouter, & McHale, 2005, p. 674).

This quotation brings up a fascinating gender difference in the parent–child intimacy dance. Boys, the earlier Canadian study showed, maintained their new, distant pubertal communication pattern as they traveled into the late teens—not telling mothers much about their activities, avoiding sharing their lives. But, after becoming more secretive and distant as young teens, during mid and later adolescence, girls reached out to their moms to reconnect again as confidants and “best friends.”

Cultural Variations on a Theme

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My parents won’t let me date anyone who isn’t Hindi—or go to parties. They never tell me they love me. I have to be at home right after school to do the grocery shopping and other family chores. Why can’t they just let me be a normal American kid?

In individualistic societies, we strive for parent–child adult relationships that are less hierarchical, more like friends. What about teens—such as the young person quoted above—whose parents have collectivist values centered on obedience and putting family obligations first? How do these immigrant teens cope with separation issues?

As researchers point out, with immigrant adolescents, the normal impulse to separate can be exacerbated by issues relating to acculturation (Kim & Park, 2011; Park and others, 2010; Wu & Chao, 2011; Kim and others, 2013). Teens want to become “real” Americans. They may think: “My parents have old-fashioned attitudes. Their values have nothing to do with my life.” As Judith Harris’s peer group socialization theory might predict (recall Chapter 7), with immigrant adolescents, parent–child disagreements may go beyond bickering about family rules to involve a fundamental difference in worldviews (Arnett, 1999).

Family pressures, as you saw in the example above, present special hurdles for immigrant teens. Straddling two cultures can upend the normal parent–child relationship—catapulting some second-generation children into becoming the family adults. As one teacher who works with Chinese immigrants commented, “The kids may be doing the interpreting and translating…, they may be the de facto parents” (quoted in Lim and others, 2009).

Given these strains, are immigrant teens at risk for poor parent–child relations? The answer is, “it depends.” Rules that seem rigid to Western eyes have a different meaning when young people understand that their parents have sacrificed everything for their well-being (Wu & Chao, 2011). As one touching, international poll showed, the core quality that makes adolescents feel loved worldwide is feeling their parents have gone out of their way to do things that are rare and emotionally hard (McNeely & Barber, 2010).

So, knowing that one’s parents made a rare sacrifice (“giving up their happiness and moving for my future”) can create unusually close parent–child bonds. Helping a non-English-speaking mom or dad negotiate this unfamiliar culture can promote self-efficacy and empathy, too. As one l9-year-old revealingly commented: “My entire childhood, I was translating simple things day to day . . . (it made me feel) . . . empowered, proud, frustrated at times, (but) understanding of my parents’ struggle” (Guan, Greenfield, & Orellana, 2014, p. 332).

This quotation may explain a phenomenon called the immigrant paradox. Despite coping with an overload of stresses (Cho & Haslam, 2010), many immigrant children living in poverty do better than their peers (van Geel & Vedder, 2011). But like all children, immigrant teens take different paths—some flourish and others flounder (Suárez-Orozco and others, 2010). One force can be critical in predicting failure or success—no surprise, it’s a person’s group of peers.

Go to your local mall and watch sixth and seventh graders hanging out to get a firsthand glimpse of the group passion that takes over during the early teens. Now that we understand peer group’s potentially destructive effects, let’s turn to the vital positive functions pre-teen peer groups serve.

Defining Groups by Size: Cliques and Crowds

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Developmentalists classify teenage peer groups into categories. Cliques are intimate groups having a membership size of about six. Your group of closest friends would constitute a clique. Crowds are larger groupings. Your crowd comprises both your best buddies and a more loose-knit set of people you get together with less regularly.

In a l960s observational study in Sydney, Australia, one researcher found that these groups serve a crucial purpose: They are the vehicles that convey teenagers to relationships with the opposite sex (Dunphy, 1963).

As you can see in the photos in Figure 9.7, children enter their pre-teen years belonging to unisex cliques, the close associations of same-gender best friends that I talked about in Chapter 6. Relationships start to change when cliques of boys and girls enter a public space and “accidentally” meet. At the mall, notice the bands of sixth or seventh-grade girls who have supposedly arrived to check out the stores, but who really have another agenda: They know that Sam or José and his buddies will be there. A major mode of interaction when these groups meet is loud teasing. When several cliques get together to walk around the stores, they have melded into that larger, first genuinely mixed-sex group called a crowd (Cotterell, 1996).

The crowd is an ideal medium to bridge the gap between the sexes because there is safety in numbers. Children can still be with their own gender while they are crossing into that “foreign” land. Gradually, out of these large-group experiences, small heterosexual cliques form. You may recall this stage during high school, when your dating activities occurred in a small group of girls and boys. Finally, at the end of adolescence, the structure collapses. It seems babyish to get together as a group. You want to be with your romantic partner alone.

You might be surprised to know that the progression outlined in this 50-year-old research still rings true (Child Trends Data Bank, 2008): First, teenagers get together in large mixed-sex crowds; next, they align into smaller heterosexual groups; then, they form one-to-one relationships, or date.

What Is the Purpose of Crowds?

Crowds have other functions. They allow teenagers to connect with people who share their values. Just as we select friends who fit our personalities, we gravitate to the crowd that fits our interests. We disengage from a crowd when its values diverge from ours. As one academically focused teenager lamented: “I see some of my friends changing. . . . They are getting into parties and alcohol. . . . We used to be good friends . . . and now, I can’t really relate to them . . . . That’s kind of sad” (quoted in Phelan, Davidson, & Yu, 1998, p. 60).

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Crowds, actually, serve as a roadmap, allowing teens to connect with “our kind of people” in an overwhelming social world (Smetana, Campione-Barr, & Metzger, 2006). Interestingly, it’s mainly in large high schools that teens align into defined crowds such as “the Goths” or “the brains,” who share activities, attitudes, and a special type of dress. Therefore, one developmentalist suggested that a school’s size plays a vital role in promoting the teenage crowd (Cotterell, 1996). When your classes are filled with unfamiliar faces, it is helpful to develop a mechanism for finding a smaller set of people just like you. Teenagers adopt a specific look—like having blue hair and wearing grungy jeans—to signal: “I’m your type of person. It’s okay to be friends with me.”

What Are the Kinds of Crowds?

In affluent societies, there is consistency in the major crowd categories. The intellectuals (also called brains, nerds, grinds, or geeks), the popular kids (also known as hotshots, preppies, elites, princesses), the deviants (burnouts, dirts, freaks, druggies, potheads), and a residual type (Goths, alternatives, grubs, loners, independents) appear in high schools throughout the West (Sussman and others, 2007).

How much mixing occurs between different crowds? Although teens do straddle different groups (Lonardo and others, 2009), adolescents tend to have friends in similar status crowds. So a popular boy, as suggested earlier in the chapter, associates with the popular kids. He shuns the socially more marginal groups, such as the deviants (bad kids) or nerdy brains. Moreover, as being brainy and especially advertising that you work for high grades can go against the group norms, intellectuality does not gain teenagers kudos in the peer world, at least in the standard public school (Sussman and others, 2007).

A study tracking children’s self-esteem, as they moved from elementary school into high school, documents exactly how being brainy can be transformed from a plus to a greater teenage liability, and also charts the wider peer group scene (Prinstein & La Greca, 2002). Notice in Figure 9.8 that children who end up in the popular kids and jocks crowds became more self-confident during adolescence. (These are the people who would tell you, “I wasn’t very happy in elementary school, but high school was my best time of life.”) The brains group followed the opposite path—happiest during elementary school, less self-confident as teens.

Finally, notice that the teenagers in the deviant burnout group tend to be most depressed before adolescence and stay at the low end of the happiness continuum in high school (see also Heaven, Ciarrochi, & Vialle, 2008). We already know that failing in middle childhood predicts gravitating toward groups of “bad” peers. Now, let’s explore why joining that bad crowd makes a teenager even more likely to fail.

“Bad Crowds”

The classic defense that parents give for a teenager’s delinquent behavior is, “My child got involved with a bad crowd.” Without ignoring the principle of selection (birds of a feather flock together), there are powerful reasons why bad crowds do cause kids to do bad things.

For one thing, as we know, teenagers are incredibly swayed by their peers. Moreover, each group has a leader, the person who most embodies the group’s goals. So, if a child joins the brains group, his school performance is apt to improve because everyone is jockeying for status by competing for grades (Cook, Deng, & Morgano, 2007; Molloy, Gest, & Rulison, 2011). However, in delinquent groups, the pressure is to model the most antisocial member. Therefore, the activities of this most acting-out leader set the standard for how the others want to behave.

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So, in the same way you felt compelled to jump into the icy water at camp when the bravest of your bunkmates took the plunge, if one group member begins selling guns or drugs, the rest must follow the leader or be called “chicken.” Moreover, when children compete for status by getting into trouble, this creates ever-wilder antisocial modeling and propels the group toward taking increasingly risky actions.

Combine this principle with the impact of just being in a group. When young people get together, a group high occurs. Talk gets louder and more outrageous. People act in ways that would be unthinkable if they were alone. From rioting at rock concerts to being in a car with your buddies during a drive-by shooting (recall the earlier Experiencing the Lifespan box), groups do cause people to act in dangerous ways (Cotterell, 1996).

By videotaping groups of boys, developmentalists have documented the deviancy training, or socialization into delinquency, that occurs as a function of simply talking with friends in a group (Dishion, McCord, & Poulin, 1999; Rorie and others, 2011). The researchers find that at-risk pre-teens forge friendships through specific kinds of conversations: They laugh, egg one another on, and reinforce one another as they discuss committing antisocial acts. So peer interactions in early adolescence are a medium by which problem behavior gets established, solidified, and entrenched.

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The lure of entering an antisocial peer group is especially strong for at-risk kids because they are already feeling “it’s me against the world” (Veenstra and others, 2010). Put yourself in the place of a child whose impulsive behavior is causing him to get rejected by the “regular” kids. You need to connect with other children like yourself because you have failed at gaining entry anywhere else. Once in the group, your buddies reinforce your hostile attributional bias. Your friends tell you that it’s fine to go against the system. You are finally finding acceptance in an unfriendly world.

In middle-class settings, popular kids sometimes get into trouble. “Self-identifying” as a jock is actually a risk factor for abusing alcohol or having unprotected sex (Cook, Deng, & Morgano, 2007). (At this point, any reader who has lived through adolescence is probably saying, “Duh!”) But in affluent communities, children with prior problems tend to gravitate toward the druggy or delinquent groups. In economically deprived neighborhoods, however, there may be few achievers to hang out with. Flourishing is difficult because the community is a toxic place. The only major crowd may be the antisocial group called a gang.

Society’s Nightmare Crowd: Teenage Gangs

The gang, a close-knit, delinquent peer group, embodies society’s worst nightmares. Gang members share a collective identity, which they often express by adopting specific symbols and claiming control over a certain territory or turf (Shelden, Tracy, & Brown, 1997). This mainly male group appears in different cultures and historical eras. However, with gangs, the socioeconomic context looms large: Adverse economic conditions promote gangs (again for a vivid example, turn back to the Experiencing the Lifespan box on page 276).

Gangs provide teenagers with status. They offer physical protection in dangerous neighborhoods (Shelden, Tracy, & Brown, 1997). When young people have few options for making it in the conventional way, gangs offer a pathway to making a living (for example, by selling drugs or stealing). So, in dangerous neighborhoods, what starts as time-limited adolescent turmoil is more likely to turn into a life-course criminal career.

This suggests that moving inner city children to middle-class communities might turn them around. Not so fast! When impoverished ghetto families were randomly assigned by lottery to move to subsidized housing in an affluent suburban town, the “mover” teenagers actually did worse than the children who were left behind! (See Fauth, Leventhal, & Brooks-Gunn, 2007.) When we think more deeply, it makes sense that relocating disadvantaged children to a potentially unfriendly place might backfire. If a specific group is defined as “not like us”—in this case, rejected as “those scary kids who live in subsidized housing”—these young people will feel more isolated from a caring community than before. Again, it takes a nurturing village for adolescents to thrive.

It also takes a kinder, gentler society for adolescence to exist. So, children growing up in impoverished areas of the world are less apt to have this extra decade insulated from adult life. Unfortunately, adolescence has been eliminated for the approximately 1 million children who enter the sex trade every year (United Nations Children’s Fund [UNICEF], 2002). Some of these boys and girls are street children, living in gangs in cities in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Or destitute parents may sell their daughters into the sex industry in order for the family to survive (Gajic-Veljanowki & Stewart, 2007). In poor regions of the globe, parents may force their female children into unwanted marriages as early as age 13 (Erulkar, 2013).

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Adolescence has been eliminated for the hundreds of thousands of child soldiers. Many combatants in the poorest regions of the globe are teenage boys. Some are coerced into fighting as young as age 10 or 8 (Child Soldiers Global Report, 2008; UNICEF, 2002a).

Yes, many teenagers in the world’s affluent areas are flourishing. But children in the least-developed regions of the globe may not have the chance to be teenagers or construct a decent adult life. Although critics, such as Robert Epstein, bemoan the shackles of Western teens, having an extra decade liberated from grown-up responsibilities can be critical to flourishing during the adult years.

How can you personally flourish during your adult years? Stay tuned for research relating to this question in the next part of the book.

Question 9.8

At age 12, the arguments would be most intense; by age 16, Chris’s parents would be giving her much more freedom

Question 9.9

1. Heather and her friends will begin going on dates with the boys.

2. Heather and her clique will meld into a large heterosexual crowd.

3. Heather and her clique will form another small clique composed of both girls and boys.

b

Question 9.10

Mom #3 is correct.

Question 9.11

Checklist: (1) Is this child unusually aggressive? (2) Is he failing at school and being rejected by the mainstream kids? (3) Does this child have poor relationships with his parents? (4) Does he live in a dangerous community, or a risk-taking environment? (Or, because he is poor, is he being defined as “dangerous” by the community?) Your possible program: Provide positive extracurricular activities that nurture each child’s interests. Offer service-learning opportunities. Possibly, institute group sessions with parents to solve problems around certain issues. Definitely try to get these teens connected with caring mentors and a different set of (prosocial) friends.