adolescence: Definition, Synonyms and Much More from Answers.com

n.

1. The period of physical and psychological development from the onset of puberty to maturity.
2. A transitional period of development between youth and maturity: the adolescence of a nation.

The period of transition from childhood to adulthood. Although sometimes described as beginning in parallel with fertility or puberty and ending with maturity and independence, adolescence has a very variable and imprecise duration. The onset of adolescence cannot be pinpointed in physiological terms, although it is influenced by the same sex hormones and refers to the same general period as physical sexual development. It represents a complex and sometimes disturbing psychological transition, accompanying the requirement for the accepted social behaviour of the particular adult culture.

— Stuart Judge

See development and growth; menarche; puberty.

Adolescence, the period between childhood and adulthood, begins after secondary sexual characteristics (e.g. pubic hair) appear and continues until sexual maturity is complete. It is a period during which bones are still growing and there is a high risk of skeletal injuries. Rapid physical changes are accompanied by important psychological changes relating particularly to the way the adolescent perceives himself or herself. This can be a turbulent time. Parents and others, especially sports coaches and teachers, who work with adolescents must be very sensitive to both the physical and the psychological changes taking place during this period. It is unwise for adolescents to take part in exercises which put undue strain on the growth regions of their bones. This is one reason why they are usually excluded from taking part in long-distance running events, such as marathons.

It is not unusual for an adolescent to add more than 5 kg in body weight and to grow 10 cm in height in one year. Such rapid growth requires good nutrition. Active adolescent boys may need up to 4000 Calories a day, about twice the normal adult requirement. The protein, vitamin, and mineral requirements of adolescents of both sexes are also higher than for adults. Adequate calcium intake is especially important during adolescence to maximize bone density and reduce the risk of osteoporosis in later life. Eating habits acquired during adolescence are often retained for life. Therefore, adolescents should be encouraged to eat a well balanced diet and not to skip meals.

n

Definition: state of puberty, pre-adulthood
Antonyms: adulthood, infancy

n

The period of human development between the onset of puberty and adulthood. This period is generally marked by the appearance of secondary sex characteristics, usually from 11 to 13 years of age, and spans the teen years.

Definition

Sometimes referred to as teenage years, youth, or puberty, adolescence is the transitional period between childhood and maturity, occurring roughly between the ages of 10 and 20.

Description

The word adolescence is Latin in origin, derived from the verb adolescere, which means "to grow into adulthood." Adolescence is a time of moving from the immaturity of childhood into the maturity of adulthood. There is no single event or boundary line that denotes the end of childhood or the beginning of adolescence. Rather, experts think of the passage from childhood into and through adolescence as composed of a set of transitions that unfold gradually and that touch upon many aspects of the individual's behavior, development, and relationships. These transitions are biological, cognitive, social, and emotional.

Puberty

The biological transition of adolescence, or puberty, is perhaps the most observable sign that adolescence has begun. Technically, puberty refers to the period during which an individual becomes capable of sexual reproduction. More broadly speaking, however, puberty is used as a collective term to refer to all the physical changes that occur in the growing girl or boy as the individual passes from childhood into adulthood.

The timing of physical maturation varies widely. In the United States, menarche (onset of menstruation) typically occurs around age 12, although some youngsters start puberty when they are only eight or nine, others when they are well into their teens. The duration of puberty also varies greatly: 18 months to six years in girls and two to five years in boys.

The physical changes of puberty are triggered by hormones, chemical substances in the body that act on specific organs and tissues. In boys a major change incurred during puberty is the increased production of testosterone, a male sex hormone, while girls experience increased production of the female hormone estrogen. In both sexes, a rise in growth hormone produces the adolescent growth spurt, the pronounced increase in height and weight that marks the first half of puberty.

Perhaps the most dramatic changes of puberty involve sexuality. Internally, through the development of primary sexual characteristics, adolescents become capable of sexual reproduction. Externally, as secondary sexual characteristics appear, girls and boys begin to look like mature women and men. In boys primary and secondary sexual characteristics usually emerge in a predictable order, with rapid growth of the testes and scrotum, accompanied by the appearance of pubic hair. About a year later, when the growth spurt begins, the penis also grows larger, and pubic hair becomes coarser, thicker, and darker. Later still comes the growth of facial and body hair, and a gradual lowering of the voice. Around mid-adolescence internal changes begin making a boy capable of producing and ejaculating sperm.

In girls, sexual characteristics develop in a less regular sequence. Usually, the first sign of puberty is a slight elevation of the breasts, but sometimes this is preceded by the appearance of pubic hair. Pubic hair changes from sparse and downy to denser and coarser. Concurrent with these changes is further breast development. In teenage girls, internal sexual changes include maturation of the uterus, vagina, and other parts of the reproductive system. Menarche, the first menstrual period, happens relatively late in puberty. Regular ovulation and the ability to carry a baby to full term usually follow menarche by several years.

Cognitive Transition

A second element of the passage through adolescence is a cognitive transition. Compared to children, adolescents think in ways that are more advanced, more efficient, and generally more complex. This is evident in five distinct areas of cognition.

First, during adolescence individuals become better able than children to think about what is possible, instead of limiting their thought to what is real. Whereas children's thinking is oriented to the here and now (i.e., to things and events that they can observe directly), adolescents are able to consider what they observe against a backdrop of what is possible—they can think hypothetically.

Second, during the passage into adolescence, individuals become better able to think about abstract ideas. For example, adolescents find it easier than children to comprehend the sorts of higher-order, abstract logic inherent in puns, proverbs, metaphors, and analogies. The adolescent's greater facility with abstract thinking also permits the application of advanced reasoning and logical processes to social and ideological matters. This is clearly seen in the adolescent's increased facility and interest in thinking about interpersonal relationships, politics, philosophy, religion, and morality—topics that involve such abstract concepts as friendship, faith, democracy, fairness, and honesty.

Third, during adolescence individuals begin thinking more often about the process of thinking itself, or metacognition. As a result, adolescents may display increased introspection and self-consciousness. Although improvements in metacognitive abilities provide important intellectual advantages, one potentially negative byproduct of these advances is the tendency for adolescents to develop a sort of egocentrism, or intense preoccupation with the self. Acute adolescent egocentrism sometimes leads teenagers to believe that others are constantly watching and evaluating them. Psychologists refer to this as the imaginary audience.

A fourth change in cognition is that thinking tends to become multidimensional, rather than limited to a single issue. Whereas children tend to think about things one aspect at a time, adolescents describe themselves and others in more differentiated and complicated terms and find it easier to look at problems from multiple perspectives. Being able to understand that people's personalities are not one-sided, or that social situations can have different interpretations, depending on one's point of view, permits the adolescent to have far more sophisticated and complicated relationships with other people.

Finally, adolescents are more likely than children to see things as relative, rather than absolute. They are more likely to question others' assertions and less likely to accept "facts" as absolute truths. This increase in relativism can be particularly exasperating to parents, who may feel that their adolescent children question everything just for the sake of argument.

Emotional Transition

Adolescence is also a period of emotional transition, marked by changes in the way individuals view themselves and in their capacity to function independently. As adolescents mature intellectually and undergo cognitive changes, they come to perceive themselves in more sophisticated and differentiated ways. Compared with children, who tend to describe themselves in relatively simple, concrete terms, adolescents are more likely to employ complex, abstract, and psychological self-characterizations. As individuals' self-conceptions become more abstract and as they become more able to see themselves in psychological terms, they become more interested in understanding their own personalities and why they behave the way they do.

For most adolescents, establishing a sense of autonomy, or independence, is as important a part of the emotional transition out of childhood as is establishing a sense of identity. During adolescence, there is a movement away from the dependency typical of childhood toward the autonomy typical of adulthood. For example, older adolescents do not generally rush to their parents whenever they are upset, worried, or in need of assistance. They do not see their parents as all-knowing or all-powerful, and often have a great deal of emotional energy wrapped up in relationships outside the family. In addition, older adolescents are able to see and interact with their parents as people, not just as their parents. Many parents find, for example, that they can confide in their adolescent children, something that was not possible when their children were younger, or that their adolescent children can easily sympathize with them when they have had a hard day at work.

Being independent, however, means more than merely feeling independent. It also means being able to make decisions and to select a sensible course of action. This is an especially important capability in contemporary society, where many adolescents are forced to become independent decision makers at an early age. In general, researchers find that decision-making abilities improve over the course of the adolescent years, with gains continuing well into the later years of high school.

Many parents wonder about the susceptibility of adolescents to peer pressure. In general, studies that contrast parent and peer influences indicate that in some situations, peers' opinions are more influential, while in others, parents' are more influential. Specifically, adolescents are more likely to conform to their peers' opinions when it comes to short-term, day-to-day, and social matters—styles of dress, tastes in music, and choices among leisure activities. This is particularly true during junior high school and the early years of high school. When it comes to long-term questions concerning educational or occupational plans, however, or values, religious beliefs, and ethical issues, teenagers are influenced in a major way by their parents.

Susceptibility to the influence of parents and peers changes during adolescence. In general, during childhood, boys and girls are highly oriented toward their parents and less so toward their peers; peer pressure during the early elementary school years is not especially strong. As they approach adolescence, however, children become somewhat less oriented toward their parents and more oriented toward their peers, and peer pressure begins to escalate. During early adolescence, conformity to parents continues to decline and conformity to peers and peer pressure continues to rise. It is not until middle adolescence that genuine behavioral independence emerges, when conformity to parents as well as peers declines.

Social Transition

Accompanying the biological, cognitive, and emotional transitions of adolescence are important changes in the adolescent's social relationships. Developmentalists have spent considerable time charting the changes that take place with friends and with family members as the individual moves through the adolescent years.

One of the most noteworthy aspects of the social transition into adolescence is the increase in the amount of time individuals spend with their peers. Although relations with age-mates exist well before adolescence, during the teenage years they change in significance and structure. For example, there is a sharp increase during adolescence in the sheer amount of time individuals spend with their peers and in the relative time they spend in the company of peers versus adults. In the United States, well over half of the typical adolescent's waking hours are spent with peers, as opposed to only 15 percent with adults, including parents. Second, during adolescence, peer groups function much more often without adult supervision than they do during childhood, and more often involve friends of the opposite sex.

Finally, whereas children's peer relationships are limited mainly to pairs of friends and relatively small groups—three or four children at a time, for example—adolescence marks the emergence of larger groups of peers, or crowds. Crowds are large collectives of similarly stereotyped individuals who may or may not spend much time together. In contemporary American high schools, typical crowds are "jocks," "brains," "nerds," "populars," "druggies," and so on. In contrast to cliques, crowds are not settings for adolescents' intimate interactions or friendships, but instead serve to locate the adolescent (to himself and to others) within the social structure of the school. As well, the crowds themselves tend to form a sort of social hierarchy or map of the school, and different crowds are seen as having different degrees of status or importance.

The importance of peers during early adolescence coincides with changes in individuals' needs for intimacy. As children begin to share secrets with their friends, loyalty and commitment develop. During adolescence, the search for intimacy intensifies, and self-disclosure between best friends becomes an important pastime. Teenagers, especially girls, spend a good deal of time discussing their innermost thoughts and feelings, trying to understand one another. The discovery that they tend to think and feel the same as someone else becomes another important basis of friendship.

One of the most important social transitions that takes place in adolescence concerns the emergence of sexual and romantic relationships. In contemporary society, most young people begin dating sometime during early adolescence. Dating during adolescence can mean a variety of different things, from group activities that bring males and females together (without much actual contact between the sexes); to group dates, in which a group of boys and girls go out jointly (and spend part of the time as couples and part of the time in large groups); to casual dating as couples; and to serious involvement with a steady boyfriend or girlfriend. More adolescents have experience in mixed-sex group activities like parties or dances than dating, and more have experience in dating than in having a serious boyfriend or girlfriend.

Most adolescents' first experience with sex falls into the category of "autoerotic behavior," sexual behavior that is experienced alone. The most common autoerotic activities reported by adolescents are erotic fantasies and masturbation. By the time most adolescents are in high school, they have had some experience with sexual behaviors in the context of a relationship. The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS), a self-reported survey of a national representative sample of high school students in grades nine to 12, indicated that in 2003, 46.7 percent of the students reported having had sex. By grade level, the rates were 32.8 percent for ninth grade, 44.1 percent for tenth grade, 53.2 percent for eleventh grade, and 61.6 percent for twelfth grade.

Common Problems

Generally speaking, most young people are able to negotiate the biological, cognitive, emotional, and social transitions of adolescence successfully. Some adolescents, however, are at risk of developing certain problems, such as:

• eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia, or obesity
• drug or alcohol use
• depression or suicidal ideation
• violent behavior
• anxiety, stress, or sleep disorders
• unsafe sexual activities

Parental Concerns

Many parents dread the onset of adolescence, fearing that their child will become hostile and rebellious and begin to reject his or family. Although it is incorrect to characterize adolescence as a time when the family ceases to be important, or as a time of inherent and inevitable family conflict, adolescence is a period of significant change and reorganization in family relationships. Family relationships change most around the time of puberty, with increasing conflict and decreasing closeness occurring in many parent-adolescent relationships. Changes in the ways adolescents view family rules and regulations may contribute to increased disagreement between them and their parents. Family conflict during this stage is more likely to take the form of bickering over day-to-day issues than outright fighting. Similarly, the diminished closeness is more likely to be manifested in increased privacy on the part of the adolescent and diminished physical affection between teenagers and parents, rather than any serious loss of love or respect between parents and children. Research suggests that this distancing is temporary, and that family relationships may become less conflicted and more intimate during late adolescence.

When to Call the Doctor

Although changes—biologically, cognitively, emotionally, and socially—are to be expected during adolescence, certain inappropriate behaviors, drastic changes in personality or physical appearance, or abnormal sexual development may warrant a phone call to a physician or counselor. These include:

• extreme changes in weight (loss or gain) or excessive dieting
• sleep disturbances
• social withdrawal or loss of interest in activities
• sudden personality changes
• signs of alcohol or drug use
• talk or threats of suicide
• violent or aggressive behavior
• atypical (early or late) onset of puberty; in girls, failure to menstruate by the age of 16

See also Puberty.

Resources

Books

Steinberg, L. Adolescence, 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.

Periodicals

Blondell, Richard D., Michael B. Foster, and Kamlesh C. Dave. "Disorders of Puberty." American Family Physician 60 (July 1999): 209-24.

Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance: United States, 2003." Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 53, no. SS-2 (May 21, 2004): 12-20.

Organizations

American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. 3615 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20016-3007. (202) 966-7300. Web site: www.aacap.org.

Society for Research on Adolescence, 3131 S. State St., Suite 302, Ann Arbor, MI 48108-1623. Web site: www.s-ra.org.

Web Sites

Paulu, Nancy. "Helping Your Child through Adolescence." U.S. Department of Education. August 2002 [cited December 31, 2004]. Available online at: www.ed.gov/parents/academic/help/adolescence/index.html.

Rutherford, Kim. "A Parent's Guide to Surviving Adolescence." KidsHealth. June 2002 [cited December 31, 2004]. Available online at: .

[Article by: Laurence Steinberg, Ph.D. Stephanie Dionne Sherk]

Period of life from puberty to adulthood (roughly ages 12 – 20) characterized by marked physiological changes, development of sexual feelings, efforts toward the construction of identity, and a progression from concrete to abstract thought. Adolescence is sometimes viewed as a transitional state, during which youths begin to separate themselves from their parents but still lack a clearly defined role in society. It is generally regarded as an emotionally intense and often stressful period.

For more information on adolescence, visit Britannica.com.

The period between childhood and adulthood. Adolescence begins after the secondary sexual characteristics (e.g. pubic hair) appear and continues until complete sexual maturity. It is a period during which bones are still growing and there is a high risk of skeletal injuries. Physical changes are accompanied by important psychological ones relating particularly to the way the adolescent perceives himself or herself (see self-concept). Parents and others, especially sports coaches and teachers, who work with adolescents must be very sensitive to both the physical and psychological changes taking place during this period. It is unwise for adolescents to take part in exercises, which put undue strain on the growth regions of their bones. This is one reason why they are usually excluded from taking part in long-distance running events, such as the marathon.

Adolescence emerged as a concept in the 1890s, when psychologists began investigating the abilities, behaviors, problems, and attitudes of young people between the onset of puberty and marriage. G. Stanley Hall, a pioneer in the study of children and their learning processes, is credited with giving adolescence its first full definition in his text Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, published in 1904. Hall thought that the stresses and misbehavior of young people were normal to their particular time of life, because he believed human development recapitulated that of human society. For Hall, just as the human race had evolved from "savagery" to "civilization," so too did each individual develop from a primitive to an advanced condition. Adolescence corresponded to, or recapitulated, the period of prehistory when upheaval characterized society and logical thinking began to replace instinct.

A year after Hall's book appeared, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud published an essay in which he identified adolescence as a period of emotional upheaval, inconsistent behavior, and vulnerability to deviant and criminal activity caused by psychosexual conflicts. For the past century, the qualities of anxiety and awkwardness resulting from physiological development and sexual awareness that Hall and Freud emphasized have pervaded popular as well as scientific definitions of adolescence.

Puberty had been a subject of medical and psychological discussion for centuries, but social, economic, and biological changes in late-nineteenth-century Western society focused new attention on the status and roles of young people. The development of industrial capitalism reduced the participation of children in the workforce, while advances in nutrition and the control of disease lowered the age of sexual maturation. As a result, individuals were isolated for a more extended period in a state of semidependency between childhood and adulthood. In the United States, as well as in Europe, researchers and writers in various fields began using the term "adolescence" to apply to the particular era of life when a new order of events and behavior occurred, thereby making it a formal biological, psychological, and even legal category. Terms such as "youth" and, later, "teenager" were used synonymously but less precisely to describe the status of individuals in adolescence. Because adolescence occurred when persons were presumably preparing to enter adult roles in family, work, and community, their needs and guidance assumed increasing importance. Consequently, educators, social workers, and psychologists constructed theories and institutions geared toward influencing the process of growing up.

Rise of a Youth Peer Culture

The age consciousness of American society that intensified in the early twentieth century sharpened the distinctiveness of adolescence. By the 1920s, especially, the age grading and the nearly universal experience of schooling pressed children into peer groups, creating lifestyles and institutions that were not only separate from but also occasionally in opposition to adult power. Compulsory attendance laws, which kept children in school until they were fourteen or older, had a strong impact in the United States, where by 1930 nearly half of all youths aged fourteen to twenty were high school students. Enrollment of rural youths and African Americans remained relatively low (only one-sixth of American blacks attended high school in the 1920s). But large proportions of immigrants and native-born whites of foreign parents attended high school. Educational reformers developed curricula to prepare young people for adult life, and an expanding set of extracurricular organizations and activities, such as clubs, dances, and sports, heightened the socialization of youths in peer groups. As a result, secondary school and adolescence became increasingly coincident.

As high school attendance became more common (in 1928 two-thirds of white and 40 percent of nonwhite children had completed at least one year of high school), increasing numbers of adolescents spent more time with peers than with family. This extended time away from parents, combined with new commercial entertainments such as dance halls, amusement parks, and movies, helped create a unique youth culture. Ironically—though perhaps understandably—the spread of this culture caused conflict with adults, who fretted over adolescents' independence in dress, sexual behavior, and other characteristics that eluded adult supervision. The practice of dating, which by the 1920s had replaced adult-supervised forms of courtship and which was linked to both high school and new commercial amusements, was just one obvious new type of independent adolescent behavior.

Adults expressed concern over the supposed problems of adolescents, particularly their awakening sexuality and penchant for getting into trouble. Indeed, in the adult mind, sexuality stood at the center of adolescence. Male youths especially were seen as having appetites and temptations that lured them into masturbation and homosexuality. Young women's sexuality could allegedly lead to promiscuity and prostitution. As a result, according to psychologists and physicians in the 1920s, adolescence was a time of life that necessitated control, not only by the self but also by parents, doctors, educators, social workers, and the police. Moreover, they believed that peer association—sometimes in street gangs—in combination with the stresses and rebelliousness natural to adolescence, contributed to the rise of juvenile delinquency; in this conception, adolescence made every girl and boy a potential delinquent. Thus, juvenile courts, reform schools, and other "child-saving" institutions were created to remedy the problems that adolescents allegedly experienced and caused.

Adolescence in the Depression and World War II

During the depression years of the 1930s, the potential for intergenerational conflict increased as the scarcity of jobs and low pay for those who were employed thwarted young people's personal ambitions and delayed their ability to attain adult independence. Economic pressures forced many young people to stay in school longer than had been the case in previous generations. By 1940, 49 percent of American youths were graduating from high school, up from 30 percent in 1930. Although adolescents in the 1930s had less disposable income than those in the 1920s, they still influenced popular culture with their tastes in music, dance, and movies.

The expanding economy during World War II brought three million youths between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, about one-third of the people in this age category, into full or part-time employment by 1945. The incomes that adolescents earned helped support a renewed youth culture, one that idolized musical stars such as Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra and created new clothing styles such as that of the bobby-soxer. Their roles in the national economy and mass culture complicated the status of adolescents, trapping them between the personal independence that war responsibilities provided them and the dependence on family and adult restrictions that the larger society still imposed on them.

Postwar Teen Culture

After the war, the proportion of adolescents in the population in Western countries temporarily declined. Children reaching teen years just after World War II had been born during the depression, when a brief fall in the birth rate resulted in a smaller cohort of people reaching adolescence. Furthermore, a marriage boom followed the war, drastically reducing the age at which young people were entering wedlock; in the United States, the median age at marriage for women declined from twenty-three to twenty-one. By 1960, 40 percent of American nineteen-year-olds were already married.

The marriage boom soon translated into the baby boom, which eventually combined with material prosperity to foster a more extensive teen culture. By 1960, the first cohort of baby boomers was reaching teen age, and goods such as soft drinks, clothing, cars, sports equipment, recorded music, magazines, and toiletries, all heavily and specifically promoted by advertisers to young people with expanding personal incomes, comprised a flourishing youth market that soon spread overseas. At the same time, radio, television, movies, and mass-market publications directed much of their content to this segment of the population. Marketing experts utilized longstanding theories about the insecurities of adolescence, along with surveys that showed adolescents tending toward conformist attitudes, to sell goods that catered to teenagers' desires to dress, buy, and act like their peers.

As in earlier years, parents and other adults fretted over children who they believed were maturing too rapidly, as adolescents began manifesting independent behavior in their tastes and buying habits. Even before the baby boomers entered their teen years, social scientists, educators, and government officials were reaching a near-panic state over premarital pregnancy and juvenile delinquency. The U.S. rate of premarital pregnancy among white women aged fifteen to nineteen doubled from under 10 percent in the 1940s to 19 percent in the 1950s. The rock-and-roll generation signified a type of rebellion that often included antisocial behavior that in turn garnered heavy media attention. Newspapers eagerly publicized gang wars and other sensational cases of juvenile crime, and police departments created juvenile units to deal with a presumed teenage crime wave.

While many of the postwar trends in adolescence, especially their influence on the consumer economy, continued past the twentieth century, by the late 1960s and early 1970s new attitudes about gender equality and birth control, stimulated in part by increased access to automobiles and generally higher material well-being, helped fashion new sexual values among adolescents. Increasingly, peer groups in high schools and colleges (in 1970, three-fourths of Americans were graduating from high school and one-third were enrolled in college) replaced dating with informal, mixed-gender "going out" and "parties." In addition, looser attitudes toward marriage, for which a date was seen as a first step, and greater acceptance (among adults as well as youths) of nonmarital sex, arose among adolescents and heightened concern over society's ability to control adolescents' sexual behavior.

By 1976, U.S. surveys showed that nearly one-fourth of sixteen-year-old white females and one-half of sixteen-year-old black females had had premarital intercourse; there were also nearly twenty-five illegitimate births for every thousand white females aged fifteen to nineteen and more than ninety such births for black females in that age group. By 1990, 55 percent of women aged fifteen to nineteen had experienced intercourse. Although this figure declined to slightly below half by century's end, the seeming sexual abandon practiced by many young people prompted some analysts to conclude that marriage was losing its special meaning. A sharp rise in average age of marriage, for men from twenty-three to over twenty-six and for women from twenty-one to over twenty-three between 1970 and 1990, reinforced such a conclusion.

In the 1960s a well-publicized and vocal minority of youths began to infuse adolescence with a new brand of political consciousness that seemed to widen the "generation gap." Much of the youth activism flourished on college campuses but enough of it filtered down to high schools that educators and other public authorities faced challenges they had not previously encountered. The civil rights movement and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy caused American teenagers to question the values of adult society, but the Vietnam War ignited them. Although the majority of youths did not oppose the war, a number of them participated in protests that upset traditional assumptions about the nonpolitical quality of high school life. In 1969, the Supreme Court declared in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School System that the right of free speech applied to high school students who wished to wear black armbands in protest of the war.

After the Vietnam War ended, the alienation of adolescents from society—as well as, in adolescent minds, the alienation of society from adolescents—seemed to intensify rather than abate. Anger over the deployment of nuclear weapons and dangers to the ecosystem worldwide sparked student protests on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, a spreading drug culture, the attraction by teens to the intentionally provocative lyrics of punk rock and rap music, the rise of body art and piercing, the increase in single-(and no-) parent households, and the high number of families with two parents employed and out of the home for most of the day all further elevated the power of adolescent peer associations.

Juvenile crime continued to capture attention, as surveys in the 1980s estimated that between 12 and 18 percent of American males and 3 to 4 percent of females had been arrested prior to age twenty-one. To the frustration of public officials, crime-prevention programs ranging from incarceration to aversion to job placement and counseling failed to stem teen violence and recidivism.

As identity politics pervaded adult society, youths also sought havens within groups that expressed themselves through some behavioral or visual (although only occasionally ideological) manner. American high school populations contained dizzying varieties of identity groups such as "Goths," "jocks," "nerds," "Jesus freaks," "preppies," "druggies," and many more. All the while, commercial interests in the new global economy, from sneaker and sportswear manufacturers to music producers and snack-food makers, stayed hot on the teenage trail.

Questions About Adolescence As a Universal Concept

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, multiple models of American adolescence brought into question whether or not the historical concept had as much uniformity as some twentieth-century experts implied it had. Certainly almost all adolescents, regardless of race or class, undergo similar biological changes, though characteristics such as the age of menarche have shifted over time. But the social and psychological parameters appeared to have become increasingly complex and diverse. Although the most common images of adolescents set them inside the youth-oriented consumer culture of clothes, music, and movies, the darker side of growing up had captured increasing attention. Poverty, sexual abuse, substance abuse, learning disabilities, depression, eating disorders, and violence had come to characterize youthful experiences as much as the qualities of fun-and freedom-seeking depicted by the media and marketers. Popular theory still accepted that almost all adolescents confront similar psychological challenges of stress and anxiety, but the processes involved in growing up display complexities that confound attempts to characterize them. A continuing rise in age at marriage, which approached the late twenties for males and mid-twenties for females, made family formation less of an end point for adolescence, and the assumption by preteens of qualities and habits once exclusive to teenagers challenged the cultural definition of the age at which adolescence begins. The trend of young people assuming adult sexual, family, social, and economic behavior—and their attendant problems—blurred many of the qualities that previously gave adolescence its distinctiveness.

Bibliography

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Bailey, Beth L. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Chudacoff, Howard P. How Old Are You?: Age Consciousness in American Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Coleman, James S. The Adolescent Society. New York: Free Press, 1961.

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Graff, Harvey J., ed. Growing Up in America: Historical Experiences. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1987.

Hine, Thomas. The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager. New York: Avon Books, 1999.

Jones, Kathleen W. Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Kett, Joseph F. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

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—Howard P. Chudacoff

In psychoanalysis, adolescence is a developmental stage, a key moment during which three transformations occur: the disengagement from parental ties that have been interiorized since infancy; the sexual impulse discovering object love under the primacy of genital and orgasmic organizations; and identification, the impetus for topographic readjustment and the affirmation of identity and subjectivity. These transformations begin with the onset of adolescence, concluding when infantile sexual activity has reached its final form. Adolescence is, therefore, a completion of the process of ego maturation. It is characterized by the conflict that these transformations bring about and the ensuing crisis resulting from the wish for adult sexual activity and the fear of giving up infantile pleasure.

There is little discussion of the concept of adolescence in Freud's own writing. However, the term "puberty" is frequently found. More than two hundred and fifty references to the concept have been found in his work, even outside of the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Referring to the Standard Edition, the majority of entries catalogued for the word "adolescence" are found in the Studies on Hysteria (1895d) and half of them are by Joseph Breuer. However, the references do not fully take into account linguistic issues and the associated problems of translation. For example, in the majority of French translations of Freud's work, there is frequent reference to the term "adolescence."

Although adolescents appear among the first cases of clinical psychoanalysis, such as that of Katharina, who was eighteen at the time, and especially that of Dora, most references to the role of puberty from the perspective of development appear in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). In Some Reflections on Schoolboy Psychology, (1914f), a text that is often mentioned in connection with adolescence, the problem of growing up is presented by Freud as an extension of the oedipal complex. The schoolboys see their teachers as substitute parents. They transfer to them the ambivalence of the feelings they once had for their father. From this point of view, adolescence works toward a separation from the father.

Although adolescence in Freud and in subsequent psychoanalytic thought is often presented as an infantile screen-memory, that is, as the formation of a compromise between the repressed elements of infantile sexuality and the defenses typical of adolescence, it is also, through the theory of deferred action, an opportunity for new psychic activity, a kind of rebirth in which the past can only be understood in light of the present. Human history is understood in terms of its past, but its past is illuminated in terms of its present, and, in the case of adolescence, in terms of the traumatic present.

In fact, psychoanalysts have always had, whether manifestly or latently, a bipolar idea of adolescence. First, as the occasion of two instinctual currents through which the adolescent, burdened by the re-emergence of infantile impulses on the one hand and the discovery of orgasm (arising in adolescence) on the other, must confront oedipal conflicts, the now realizable threat of incest, and the parricidal and matricidal feelings as condensations in fantasy of the aggression associated with all growth: "growing up is by nature an aggressive act" (Donald Winnicott). Second, as an expression of the bipolarity of the ties between impulse and defense (Anna Freud), between identification and identity (Evelyne Kestemberg), between object libido and narcissistic libido (Philippe Jeammet), and between the "pubertary," which reflects the powerful sensual current that no longer recognizes its goals, and "adolescens," which reflects the category of the ideal (Philippe Gutton). This leads contemporary psychoanalysts to consider that the capacity of the psychic apparatus to perform the work of binding can be seen as a fundamental indicator of the fact that the process of adolescence has been harmoniously completed. Dreams and action represent the creative activities of this capacity (François Ladame) whereas unbinding (Raymond Cahn) is the source of serious psychic pathology. The enigmatic discrepancy between the bipolarity of the impulse and the transformational object (Alain Braconnier) constantly underlies the analysis of transference and counter-transference during adolescence.

There are other theorizations as well: Adolescence as a "crisis" (Pierre Mâle, Evelyne Kestemberg) or breakdown (Moses Laufer), as an impasse in the process of development, that is, in the integration of the sexualized body into the psychic apparatus. These approaches reveal the difficulties and resistances the subject experiences in giving up the forms of libidinal satisfaction in which his infantile body was engaged, difficulties and resistances that are manifest in the transference through the representation and acting out of the "central masturbation fantasy."

Although it is no longer psychoanalytically possible to consider adolescence in terms of a traditional genetic psychoanalytic psychology, that is, as the final stage of development that makes it possible to access an adult stage, it is still difficult to provide a comprehensive interpretation centered on any given aspect of adolescence. The psychic impact of puberty determines the remodeling of identification, the expression of fantasies, and self and object representations. The psychic impacts of the social and the cultural determine the alterations of these same intrapsychic elements, as well as presenting psychoanalysts with the problem of addressing the contradiction between a focus on external objects versus a focus on internal objects. From the point of view of psychoanalytic practice, the attention given to mental functioning, and to affects in particular, enables psychoanalysts to understand many of the disturbances found in adolescence in a way that broadens and extends the notion of crisis or the process of individuation, as well as their relationship to anxiety and, especially, depression. The concepts of "depressive threat" and "self-sabotage" help describe, clinically and theoretically, the process of change specific to the adolescent, whose pathology reveals the failures and avatars that are so magnificently exemplified in our culture through the heroic figures of Narcissus, Oedipus, Hamlet and Ophelia, Electra and Orestes, and, of course, Romeo and Juliet.

Bibliography

Blos, Peter. (1987). L'insoumission au père ou l'effort adolescent pour être masculin. Adolescence, 6 (21), 19-31.

Cahn, Raymond. (1998). L'Adolescent dans la psychanalyse: l'aventure de la subjectivation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 130-243.

Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48-106.

Jeammet, Philippe. (1994). Adolescence et processus de changement. In D. Widlöcher (Ed.) Traité de psychopathologie (pp. 687-726). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Laufer, Moses. (1989). Adolescence et rupture du développement: une perspective psychanalytique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Further Reading

Blos, Peter. (1962). On adolescence. a psychoanalytic interpretation, New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.

——. (1979). The adolescent passage: developmental issues, New York: International Universities Press.

Emde, Robert. (1985). From adolescence to midlife: remodeling the structure of adult development. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 33(S), 59-112.

Esman, Aaron. (ed.) (1975). The psychology of adolescence, essential readings, New York: International Universities Press.

Hauser, Stuart T. and Smith, Henry F. (1991). The development and experience of affect in adolescence. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 39(S), 131-168.

Novick, Kerry Kelly and Novick, Jack. (1994). Postoedipal transformations: latency, adolescence, pathogenesis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 42,143-170.

Sarnoff, Charles. (1987). Psychotherapeutic strategies in late latency through early adolescence, Northvale, NJ: Aronson.

—ALAIN BRACONNIER

IN BRIEF: The time between childhood and adulthood.

Adolescence is a time of many changes.

Tutor's tip: "Adolescence" (developmental stage between childhood and adulthood) can be a very difficult time for "adolescents" (teenagers) and their parents.

See more famous quotes about Adolescence

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - pubertet, tidlig ungdom

Nederlands (Dutch)
puberteit

Français (French)
n. - adolescence

Deutsch (German)
n. - Zeit des Erwachsenwerdens, Adoleszenz

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - εφηβεία, εφηβική ηλικία

Italiano (Italian)
adolescenza

Português (Portuguese)
n. - adolescência (f)

Русский (Russian)
юность

Español (Spanish)
n. - adolescencia

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - uppväxttid, tonår

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
青春期, 青少年时期, 发育成形阶段

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 青春期, 青少年時期, 發育成形階段

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 청년기, 사춘기, 청춘

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 青年期, 思春期, 青春期

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) سن المراهقه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮התבגרות, בחרות‬

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