Joseph Allen - Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old

In this book we want to challenge you to think differently about the adolescents in your lives, whether they be your children, your students, your relatives, or your neighbors. It has become a truism not only that adolescence is a troubled and troubling part of the life span, but also that these troubles are inevitabledriven by hormones and immature brains in ways that we are relatively helpless to change. Its this truism that we intend to challenge.

Were going to ask you to reconsider notions about adolescence that youve likely held for a long time. We want to explain why the disturbing behaviors and attitudes that weve grown to believe are just part of being a teenager actually have more to do with an adolescence that has come to seem endless than with anything intrinsic to teens bodies or psyches. Theres been a gradual, insidious change occurring in the very nature of adolescence over the past several generationsa change that has been stripping this period of meaningful work and of exposure to adult challenges and rewards, and undermining our teens development in the process. The good news is that in our years of work with thousands of teens in our clinical practices, our research, and even our own family, weve learned that teenage entitlement, apathy, surliness, and cynicism are far from inevitable. Most important, weve learned that we can change teens behaviors and attitudes dramatically for the better with relatively modest, well-targeted efforts to change their environments. Thats what this book is about.

Of course, the teenage years have always involved some waiting, but lately something has changed. For most of human history adolescence was a fleeting phasea microsecond, or at most a few months, from the time when a teen first gained adultlike capacities to when some adult noticed and insisted on putting those capacities to use. Even well into the twentieth century, adolescence was brief. For the grandparents of todays teens, adolescence was pretty clearly considered to end at seventeen or eighteen. A generation later it became twenty-one or twenty-two for many. And now young people in their midtwenties are often still living at home and just starting to chart their course in the world. (Well refer to all these young people as adolescents, because the term so clearly applies to those who havent yet established adult-level maturity, whatever their chronological age.) While we may have noticed that this extension of the adolescent phase has been unfolding for several generations, weve failed to notice what pushing adulthood further and further back into the future is doing to our teens.

Think of it this way: Waiting at a doctors office for thirty minutes is annoying; three hours becomes a problem; and three days would be a qualitatively different and surreal experience. Similarly, the extension of adolescence from months to years to more than a decade has led to a qualitatively different and often surreal experience for most teens. The period of preparation has expanded so boundlessly that many teens no longer have any realistic sense of what theyre ultimately preparing for, or even that they are preparing for something. Their motivation, morale, and character all ultimately take hits.

Even for highly successful teens, school has become less about learning and more about getting good grades to get into good schools to prepare for the next hurdle. Work is no longer about future careers or saving, but about pocketing quick spending money. Adults are no longer guides to future maturity, but annoying rule-setters to be avoided. Worse yet, just as waiting drains adults energy, waiting for years is sapping teens energy for the hard work needed to grow up. And many teens simply dont believe that any energy they do have is worth expending for this increasingly distant future. Its simply not clear to them that adolescence will ever end. And that makes preparing for an eventual adulthood a rather low priority. They can hardly be blamed.

It wasnt always this way. Through much of human history teenagers energy and efforts were routinely and immediately put to full use in their communities (and they still are, in societies that differ from our own). Teens were put in charge of younger children, relied upon to carry out important household tasks, and enlisted as crucial assistants in the family restaurant, business, or farm. Over summers, teens were often sent to help extended family with a new baby, sick elders, or home projects. Adolescence, to the extent it existed as a separate phase at all, was productive and short. Not coincidentally, societies (including our own, not all that long ago) in which teens skills were heavily used frequently even lacked the words for phenomena such as juvenile delinquency that plague our current culture. The idea that the teenage years must inevitably be filled with surliness, entitlement, passivity, and anxiety was simply alien to such societies.

In the first half of this book well outline the ways adolescence has been extended. Well consider why its happened, how it fits (and doesnt fit) with what we know about teens biological maturation, and most important, well take a look at just what this Endless Adolescence is doing to our teens. Well revisit and debunk long-held beliefs that most problematic teenage behavior is just the result of raging hormones and immature brains. One of the things we know for certain about teens development, for example, is that our species did not evolve over millions of years to prepare its young to spend a decade nearing peak physical and mental capacity by passively waiting to someday take a useful role in the world. Well examine the effects of our placing our teens in a bubble, removed from much of the responsibility, challenge, and gratification of the adult world, and well shine a spotlight on the ways our efforts to parent our teens through this period often exacerbate their difficulties.

But ultimately we know that any argument that suggests that problems with our youth are a result of social and cultural factors must overcome years of assumptions that adolescence is inevitably a period of great struggle. We are not only clinicians, but social scientists, well-versed in the caveat that correlation does not equal causation. Maybe society has changed, maybe teens do struggle. But are these two really connected?

In the end, the most persuasive evidence for what were proposing will come from the results of successful efforts to change adolescents experiences of themselves and their world in ways that undoor at least compensate forsome of the larger societal changes we describe. Fortunately, such evidence exists in abundance. In terms of hard research, well show that teen pregnancy rates can be decreased by fifty percent in programs that take just a few hours per week and dont even need to broach the hot-button issue of sex education. Well show how otherwise stultifying high school classrooms can come alive, with both students and teachers finding meaning and motivation in their work. Closer to home, in our own clinical practices (and our own family), well show how modest, but carefully directed, changes in young peoples lives can yield huge benefits.