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Adolescence's neglected anniversary
This past year, a
significant anniversary passed virtually without notice. Exactly a
century ago, the term “adolescence” entered American popular culture.
Although the word has Latin roots, it did not acquire its modern
associations with puberty, psychological storm and stress, defiance, and
risk-taking until 1904. At the beginning of the 20th century, the
extended period of suspension between childhood and adulthood that we
call adolescence was confined to a small fraction of the population.
Some 1.75 million children (18 percent of the 10 to 14 population)
worked in factories, stores, or on city streets, while millions more
toiled on farms. Just 6 percent of teens graduated from high school. But
in 1904 G. Stanley Hall, the first American Ph.D. in psychology,
published a massive two-volume work entitled “Adolescence: Its
Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology,
Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education.” Working primarily from his
observations of the small number of middle-class youngsters whose lives
did not follow the traditional path from childhood to work, he argued
that adolescents were not equipped to make choices on their own or take
on adult responsibilities. Instead, he advocated that all teens be
sheltered from adult society in age-segregated institutions designed to
meet their special psychological needs.
Hall's ideas about the need to protect
youths from adult institutions coincided with economic changes that made
it harder for youths to work their way into adult occupations through a
series of informal apprenticeships, and made adult workers correctly
perceive child labor as a threat to their emerging wage bargains. In the
early years of the century, educators, jurists, psychologists, and youth
workers — worried about teens trapped in dead-end jobs who spent their
time in pool halls and dance halls or on street corners — radically
reconstructed the adolescent experience. They restricted child labor,
constructed a new juvenile court system, and expanded and extended
schooling. A new high school opened every day for the first 30 years of
the 20th century.
The Great Depression made adolescence a normative experience,
transcending class and ethnic lines. Out of a mixture of altruistic and
selfish motives, child labor was finally outlawed. In 1936, for the
first time, a majority of 17-year-olds attended high school. Inside high
schools and junior highs (a product of the 1920s), young people created
their own distinctive peer culture, with its own styles, language, and
customs, including dating, which first appeared during the 1910s. In
1941, the word “teenager” entered the language, referring to a
distinctive culture and market rather than to a biological stage of
life. During the early post-war era, adolescence was a brief but intense
period of freedom before early marriage or entry into the military or a
career. But during the 1960s and 1970s adolescence began to expand at
both ends, with pre-adolescents adopting the behavior and fashions
associated with the teen years and young people in their 20s delaying
marriage and remaining financially dependent on their parents. The
result was fear that kids were growing up too fast while their older
siblings weren't growing up at all. Today, the very forces that are
transforming the lives of adults — globalization, the information
revolution, the rise of the service economy, the emergence of the "work-centered"
family, and the triumph of the unregulated marketplace — are
revolutionizing adolescence. The new economy has contributed to widening
economic inequalities. As a result of global migration, a fifth of
American adolescents are the children of immigrants, facing the same
family and language problems as did earlier first and second generation
immigrants, and frequently having to lead their parents through the
intricacies of a new society. More affluent kids also carve out new
relationships with their parents, as they rapidly grasp the changing
technologies that leave many of the older generation puzzled. And with
the growth of the service sector, nearly a quarter of 14-year-olds, 38
percent of 15-year-olds, and three-quarters of high school seniors have
a regular job during the school year — contributing substantially to
teen buying power.
Adolescents' lives
are marked by contradictions within contradictions. Physiologically,
they mature earlier than ever before. They are surrounded by
sex-saturated advertising and popular culture and half have intercourse
prior to graduation. Yet adults, hoping that kids will remain abstinent,
hesitate to provide instruction in or access to birth control.
Meanwhile, schooling has become a more important but less pleasurable
experience. Financially-stressed high schools and middle schools offer
fewer extracurricular activities, even as they raise graduation
requirements and place more emphasis on high-stakes testing.
As we mark
adolescence's 100th anniversary, we must recognize that this term refers
not to a timeless category but to a historical construct, one in
desperate need of revision. Today, many adolescents find scant
satisfaction in the roles they are assigned, as students, consumers, and
low-wage service workers. Many feel deprived of constructive ways to
demonstrate their growing maturity and competence. Our challenge is to
reinvent adolescence as a more meaningful period of life, rather than
mere an extension of childhood dependence or odd mixture of adult
monitoring and self-indulgent irresponsibility.
Steve Mintz
20 January 2005
http://www.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/behold.pl?ascribeid=20050110.170352&time=17%2035%20PST&year=2005&public=1
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