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

247 Pages·2009·1.29 MB·English

by  Joseph Allen

To Luke, Liv, and Eve
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The Endless Adolescence
PART 1.
Is Twenty-five the New Fifteen?
CHAPTER 1:
In Search of the Teenage Brain
CHAPTER 2:
Inside the Bubble
CHAPTER 3:
The Nurture Paradox
CHAPTER 4:
. Escape Routes
PART II
Chapter 5: “It’s a Good Thing I Was There!”
Chapter 6: Finding the Inner Adult
Chapter 7: Hardwired to Connect
Chapter 8: Staples of the Adulthood Diet: Challenge and Feedback
Chapter 9: Ending High School as We Know It
Chapter 10: Water for the Thirsty
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
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 inevitable—driven by
hormones and immature brains in ways that we are relatively
helpless to change. It’s this truism that we intend to challenge.
We’re going to ask you to reconsider notions about adolescence
that you’ve likely held for a long time. We want to explain why the
disturbing behaviors and attitudes that we’ve 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. There’s been a gradual,
insidious change occurring in the very nature of adolescence over
the past several generations—a 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,
we’ve learned that teenage entitlement, apathy, surliness, and
cynicism are far from inevitable. Most important, we’ve learned that
we can change teens’ behaviors and attitudes dramatically for the
better with relatively modest, well-targeted efforts to change their
environments. That’s 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 phase—a 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 today’s 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. (We’ll refer to all these young
people as adolescents, because the term so clearly applies to those
who haven’t 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,
we’ve 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 doctor’s 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 they’re 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 don’t believe that any
energy they do have is worth expending for this increasingly distant
future. It’s 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 wasn’t 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 we’ll outline the ways adolescence
has been extended. We’ll consider why it’s happened, how it fits
(and doesn’t fit) with what we know about teens’ biological
maturation, and most important, we’ll take a look at just what this
Endless Adolescence is doing to our teens. We’ll 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.
We’ll 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 we’ll 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 we’re proposing
will come from the results of successful efforts to change adolescents’
experiences of themselves and their world in ways that undo—or at
least compensate for—some of the larger societal changes we
describe. Fortunately, such evidence exists in abundance. In terms of
hard research, we’ll show that teen pregnancy rates can be
decreased by fifty percent in programs that take just a few hours per
week and don’t even need to broach the hot-button issue of sex
education. We’ll 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), we’ll show how modest, but
carefully directed, changes in young people’s lives can yield huge
benefits.
All of these approaches work on the same overarching principle,
which we refer to as “Putting the Adulthood Back into
Adolescence.” We’ll spend the second half of the book outlining
these approaches and their practical implications for the ways we
can improve our teens’ lives. Ultimately, we’ll ask the reader to
judge the ideas we present by the extent to which they can aid in
understanding and helping adolescents close to home.
Let us be clear: We do not see ourselves as misty-eyed
sentimentalists longing for a return to raising our youth in the days
of yore. The technological changes and lengthening of the human
life span that have supported an extended adolescence—both by
delaying entry into the adult labor force and by removing
restrictions on our natural tendencies to nurture and owernurture
our young—have brought much that’s positive in their wake. No
one who cares deeply about teenagers would want to return our
youth to the days of dangerous factory work, poor education, or
physical hardship (and we know that some teens today in extreme
conditions are still forced to grow up far too quickly). But just as the
automobile moved society forward while leaving us needing to
exercise our bodies in other ways to stay healthy, so too do the
changes that have extended adolescence leave us needing to find
other ways to exercise our teens’ developing cognitive and
emotional capacities, lest they atrophy. We’ll outline the kinds of
“exercise” that developing adolescent spirits need to thrive in a
changed world.
Nor are we parent-blamers. Quite the opposite. We’ve increasingly
come to recognize that the problems we face with many of our teens
are not about the lectures we give, the rules we set, the
misbehaviors we catch, or the lies they tell. Rather, the problems
reflect the fundamental structure of adolescence in our culture. Yes,
parents can sometimes make things worse, but by and large they
have their hands full trying to cope with the fallout of the massive
environmental changes that leave our teens burdened by multiple
demands, yet with very little sense that they are doing anything that
matters to anyone in the larger world. Although there are shelf-
loads of books out there on helping troubled teens, there’s very little
that goes beyond telling parents how to talk to their teens or how to
set rules for them. In this book, we aim to go a step further and
reflect on—and ultimately work to change—the very environments
in which our teens are growing up.
To make our case, we’ll draw heavily upon our own experiences
working as therapists and researchers with thousands of adolescents,
along with our experiences as parents, with teens of our own. Just
as we try to do as parents, we’ll speak with a single, first-person
voice, in order to focus most clearly on the overarching points that
we have drawn from both sets of our experiences (for the curious,
we’ll make clear which of us is speaking in the notes section at the
end). We’ll also rely heavily on the stories of the families and teens
with whom we’ve worked (which we’ve reshaped into composites to
protect their privacy), to outline key principles.
Our ultimate goal in this book is to chart routes out of the Endless
Adolescence… to use our clinical, research, and parenting
experience to provide signposts, not simply to allow us to survive
the adolescent years, but to help our teens move confidently beyond
them to grow into adults of good character. If there’s one thing that
continually strikes us in our work with teens, it’s their tremendous
potential. It’s remarkably untapped for most, even for the
apparently successful, but it’s waiting. Freeing that potential is not
only the key to unlocking a productive future adulthood, but also to
bringing our teens to life now. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The first thing we need to do is understand just what’s been
happening to adolescence in the years since most of us have lived