Module 16 Introduction

Adolescence

16-1 How is adolescence defined, and how do physical changes affect developing teens?

At a five-year high school reunion, former best friends may be surprised at their divergence; a decade later, they may have trouble sustaining a conversation.

MANY PSYCHOLOGISTS ONCE BELIEVED THAT childhood sets our traits. Today’s developmental psychologists see development as lifelong. As this life-span perspective emerged, psychologists began to look at how maturation and experience shape us not only in infancy and childhood, but also in adolescence and beyond. Adolescence—the years spent morphing from child to adult—starts with the physical beginnings of sexual maturity and ends with the social achievement of independent adult status (which means that in some cultures, where teens are self-supporting, adolescence hardly exists).

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In industrialized countries, what are the teen years like? In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the teen years were “that blissful time when childhood is just coming to an end, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, a path takes shape.” But another teenager, Anne Frank, writing in her diary while hiding from the Nazis, described tumultuous teen emotions:

My treatment varies so much. One day Anne is so sensible and is allowed to know everything; and the next day I hear that Anne is just a silly little goat who doesn’t know anything at all and imagines that she’s learned a wonderful lot from books…. Oh, so many things bubble up inside me as I lie in bed, having to put up with people I’m fed up with, who always misinterpret my intentions.

How will you look back on your life 10 years from now? Are you making choices that someday you will recollect with satisfaction?

G. Stanley Hall (1904), one of the first psychologists to describe adolescence, believed that this tension between biological maturity and social dependence creates a period of “storm and stress.” Indeed, after age 30, many who grow up in independence-fostering Western cultures look back on their teenage years as a time they would not want to relive, a time when their peers’ social approval was imperative, their sense of direction in life was in flux, and their feeling of alienation from their parents was deepest (Arnett, 1999; Macfarlane, 1964).

But for many, adolescence is a time of vitality without the cares of adulthood, a time of rewarding friendships, heightened idealism, and a growing sense of life’s exciting possibilities.