When Does Adolescence End?
Adolescence: Psychosocial Development
chapter ten
Invitation to the Life Span
Kathleen Stassen Berger | Fourth edition
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Identity (part 1)
Adolescent psychosocial development is a search for a consistent understanding of oneself.
Self-expression and self-concept become increasingly important at puberty.
Each young person wants to know, “Who am I?”
These are high school students in Junior ROTC training camp. For many youths who cannot afford college, the military offers a temporary identity, complete with haircut, uniform, and comrades.
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Identity (part 2)
Not yet achieved
Duration of adolescence lengthened and identity achievement more complex
Identity versus role confusion
Erikson’s term for the fifth stage of development, in which the person tries to figure out “Who am I?” but is confused as to which of many possible roles to adopt
Identity
Consistent definition of one’s self as a unique individual, in terms of roles, attitudes, beliefs, and aspirations
Identity achievement
Erikson’s term for the attainment of identity, or the point at which a person understands who he or she is as a unique individual, in accord with past experiences and future plans
Identity (part 3)
Role confusion (identity diffusion)
Situation in which an adolescent does not seem to know or care what his or her identity is
Foreclosure
Erikson’s term for premature identity formation, which occurs when an adolescent adopts parents’ or society’s roles and values wholesale, without questioning or analysis
Moratorium
An adolescent’s choice of a socially acceptable way to postpone making identity-achievement decisions (Going to college is a common example.)
Identity (part 4)
Erikson (1968/1994) highlighted aspects of identity
Religious identity
Political identity/ethnic identity
Vocational identity
Sexual identity/gender identity/cisgender
Same Situation, Far Apart: Religious Identity Awesome devotion is characteristic of adolescents, whether devotion is to a sport, a person, a music group, or—as shown here—a religion. This boy (left) praying on a Kosovo street is part of a dangerous protest against the town’s refusal to allow building another mosque. This girl (right) is at a stadium rally for young Christians in Michigan, declaring her faith for all to see. While adults see differences between the two religions, both teens share not only piety but also twenty-first-century clothing. Her T-shirt is a recent innovation, and on his jersey is Messi 10, for a soccer star born in Argentina.
Religious identity: Influenced by parents and community
Political identity: Influenced by parents and culture
Gender identity: A person’s acceptance of the roles and behaviors that society associates with the biological categories of male and female
Vocational identity: Early vocational identity is no longer appropriate
Teenage employment can interfere with school.
It takes years to acquire the skills needed for many careers.
Sexual orientation: A term that refers to whether a person is sexually and romantically attracted to others of the same sex, the opposite sex, or both sexes
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Identity (part 5)
Identity and depression
Search for identity creates vulnerability to depression and anxiety
Fluidity and uncertainty about sex and gender common during early adolescence, especially for transgender, gay, or lesbian adolescents
Gender dysphoria (DSM-5) describes distress at biological gender
Close Relationships (part 1)
Family conflict
Parent–adolescent conflict typically peaks in early adolescence and is more a sign of attachment than of distance.
Bickering
Bickering involves petty, peevish arguing, usually repeated and ongoing, about every day concerns.
Avoidance of extremes
Avoiding extremes of strictness or leniency provides best support while teens adapt to increased autonomy.
A View from Science Teenagers, Genes, and Parents
Risk score was one point for each of the following: had drunk alcohol, had smoked marijuana, had had sex.
As shown, most of the 11-year-olds had done none of these. By age 14, most had done one (usually had drunk beer or wine)—except for those at genetic risk who did not have the seven-session training.
For those at genetic risk, the special program made a decided difference.
A major challenge for developmentalists is to combine direct and practical programs that benefit adolescents with laboratory analysis of molecular genetics. Some of them had done all three, and many had done at least two. As you see, for those youths without genetic risk, the usual parenting was no better or worse than the parenting that benefited from the special classes: The average 14-year-old in either group had tried only one risky behavior. But for those at genetic risk, the special program made a decided difference.
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Close Relationships (part 2)
Four aspects of family closeness
Communication: Do parents and teens talk openly with one another?
Support: Do they rely on one another?
Connectedness: How emotionally close are they?
Control: Do parents encourage or limit adolescent independence?
Emotional dependency
Adolescents are more dependent on their parents if they are female and/or from a minority ethnic group.
This can be either repressive or healthy, depending on the culture and the specific circumstances.
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Close Relationships (part 3)
Parental monitoring: Parents’ ongoing awareness of what their children are doing, where, and with whom
Positive: Part of a warm, supportive relationship
Negative: Overly restrictive and controlling
Worst: Psychological when parents make a child feel guilty and impose gratefulness by threatening to withdraw love and support
Close Relationships (part 4)
Cultural expectations for parents of teenagers
Across cultures, parent–child communication and encouragement reduce teenage depression, suicide, and low self-esteem while increasing aspirations and achievements.
Expectations, interactions, and behavior vary by and within cultures and within U.S. ethnic groups.
Familism versus adolescent autonomy
Supportive family environment
Close Relationships (part 5)
Peers and parents
Peers do not negate need for parental support
Healthy parent-adolescent relationships enhance later peer friendships and more reciprocal romances
Parenting buffering of stress is less effective in adolescence
Close Relationships (part 6)
Peer pressure
Provides encouragement to conform to one’s friends in behavior, dress, and attitude
Is usually considered a negative force, as when adolescent peers encourage one another to defy adult authority
Can also be positive influence of either gender
Close Relationships (part 7)
Adolescents use social media to strengthen existing friendships.
92 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds go online daily; 24 percent are online almost constantly.
Internet may provide support for non-normative adolescents.
Close Relationships (part 8)
Immediacy of peers
Peers nearby at moment are most influential
Deviancy training
Destructive peer support in which one person shows another how to rebel against authority or resist social norms
Close Relationships (part 9)
Selection and facilitation are evident lifelong, but the balance between the two shifts.
Selection
Teenagers select friends whose values and interests they share, abandoning friends who follow other paths
Facilitation
Peers facilitate both destructive and constructive behaviors in one another
Makes it easier to do both the wrong thing and the right thing
Helps individuals do things that they would be unlikely to do on their own
Close Relationships (part 10)
Romantic partners
Influence each other on a wide variety of things
Typically first occur in high school; selection fluidity and rapidity mitigate against permanency
Peer support help coping; perception of peer sexual activity influential
Close Relationships (part 11)
Many Virgins
For 30 years, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey has asked high school students from all over the United States dozens of confidential questions about their behavior. As you can see, about one-fourth of all students have already had sex by the ninth grade, and more than one-third have not yet had sex by their senior year—a group whose ranks have been increasing in recent years. Other research finds that sexual behaviors are influenced by peers, with some groups all sexually experienced by age 14 and others not until age 18 or older.
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Close Relationships (part 12)
Sexting
Includes sending explicit message or picture via cell phone
Involves norms that vary from group to group; school to school; city to city; and nation to nation
Increases sexual experiences; oral sex (seven times more likely); sex without condom (five times more likely)
May encourage revenge porn
Not considered pornography by many teens
Close Relationships (part 13)
Same-sex romance
Some cultures accept and others criminalize youth who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.
Parental and peer support help, but there is a higher risk of depression and anxiety.
Sexual orientation is fluid during adolescence.
Sexual orientation can be strong, weak, overt, secret, or unconscious.
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Close Relationships (part 14)
Sexual orientation
Person’s sexual and romantic attraction to others of the same sex, the other sex, or both sexes
Fluid during teen years
Culture and cohort are powerful influence
Acceptance
Criminalization
Young and Old
Everyone knows that attitudes about same-sex relationships are changing. Less well-known is that cohort differences are greater than the shift over the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Those most at risk of sexual violence and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) were those who had partners of both sexes.
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Close Relationships (part 15)
Learning about sex
From media
Internet provides information about STIs; often frightening or misleading
Intense exposure linked to increased sexual activity
From parents
Parents are most important influence; underestimate child sexual activity
Communications are often incomplete
Close Relationships (part 16)
Learning about sex
From peers
Same sex friends are most common confidants
Partners teach each other more about pleasure than consequences
From educators
Teacher sex education varies dramatically by school and nation
Sexual abstinence-only approach does extend average age of beginning sexual activity, but higher rate of STIs occurs.
Vocal minority sometimes blocks evidence-based sex education.
Sadness and Anger (part 1)
Depression
Self-esteem tends to be higher for boys, African Americans
Self-esteem dips at puberty; less confidence and more depression; gradual self-esteem increase
Universal trends, gender, cultural, ethnicity, and family effects
Clinical depression
Feelings of hopelessness, lethargy, and worthlessness that last two weeks or more
Combination of biological and psychosocial stresses
Differential susceptibility (5-HTTLPR)
Causes include genes, early care, puberty and hormones, and individual vulnerability.
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Sadness and Anger (part 2)
Major depressive disorder
Feelings of deep sadness and hopelessness that disrupts all normal, regular activities
Doubles during adolescence
Differential susceptibility (5-HTTLPR)
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Sadness and Anger (part 3)
Gender differences
Studies find that girls have much higher rates than boys, usually about twice as high
Cause for the gender disparity may be biological, psychological, or social
Cognitive explanation: rumination
Repeatedly thinking and talking about past experiences
Can contribute to depression
More common in girls
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Sadness and Anger (part 4)
Suicide
Suicidal ideation
Parasuicide
Cluster suicides
Sad Thoughts
Completed suicide is rare in adolescence, but serious thoughts about killing oneself are frequent. Depression and parasuicide are more common in girls than in boys, but rates are high even in boys. There are three reasons to suspect that the rates for boys are underestimated: Boys tend to be less aware of their emotions than girls are; boys consider it unmanly to try to kill themselves and to fail; and completed suicide is also higher in males than in females.
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Sadness and Anger (part 5)
Delinquency and defiance
Resistance
Assumption of out-of-control adolescents is challenged by data on contemporary adolescents.
Adolescent rebellion may be a social construction.
Teenage acting out, while not unusual, is not essential for healthy development.
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Sadness and Anger (part 6)
Delinquency and defiance
Breaking the law
Prevalence and incidence of criminal action is higher in adolescence.
Arrests are more likely with boys and youth of minority ethnic groups and low-SES families.
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Sadness and Anger (part 7)
Delinquency and defiance
Juvenile delinquent
Person under the age of 18 who breaks the law
Life-course-persistent offender
A person whose criminal activity typically begins in early adolescence and continues throughout life; a career criminal
Adolescence-limited offender
Person whose criminal activity stops by age 21
Moody adolescents could be both depressed and delinquent because externalizing and internalizing behavior are connected during these years.
Juvenile delinquent
Person under the age of 18 who breaks the law
Life-course-persistent offender
A person whose criminal activity typically begins in early adolescence and continues throughout life; a career criminal
Adolescence-limited offender
Person whose criminal activity stops by age 21
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Sadness and Anger (part 8)
Three signs that predict delinquency
Stubbornness
Can lead to defiance, which can lead to running away
Shoplifting
Can lead to arson and burglary
Bullying
Can lead to assault, rape, and murder
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Drug Use and Abuse (part 1)
Variations in drug use
Most teenagers try psychoactive drugs that activate the brain.
Prevalence and incidence increase from about ages 10 to 25.
Youngest most likely to try inhalants
Cohort differences exist for every drug
U.S. adolescent drug synthetic narcotics and prescription use and smoking has decreased; vaping has increased.
Cigarettes, alcohol, and many prescription medicines are as addictive and damaging as illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin.
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Drug Use and Abuse (part 2)
Rise and Fall
By asking the same questions year after year, the Monitoring the Future study shows notable historical effects. It is encouraging that something in society, not in the adolescent, makes drug use increase and decrease and that the most recent data show a continued decline in the drug most commonly abused—alcohol.
Includes use of amphetamines, sedatives (barbiturates), narcotics other than heroin, or tranquilizers without a doctor’s prescription.
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Opposing Perspectives: E-Cigarettes: Path to Addiction or Healthy Choice?
Support
Electronic cigarettes are less damaging to lungs and may help adult smokers quit smoking.
Distributors suggest that people should make their own choices and fear of adolescent vaping is exaggerated.
Challenge
Electronic cigarettes deliver benzene (a carcinogen).
Nicotine is addictive no matter how it is delivered.
Drug Use and Abuse (part 2)
Harm from drugs
Drug use before maturity is particularly likely to harm the body and brain growth.
Few adolescents notice harm from drugs as use proceeds to abuse and then to addiction.
Harm from Drugs (part 1)
Tobacco
Slows down growth (impairs digestion, nutrition, and appetite)
Can damage developing hearts, lungs, brains, and reproductive systems
Harm from Drugs (part 2)
Alcohol
Most frequently abused drug among North American teenagers
Heavy drinking may permanently impair memory and self-control by damaging the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex
Adolescents typically deny that they experience any harm or could ever become addicted.
Increased binge drinking and substance use disorder is related to parent provision of alcohol to teenagers.
Harm from Drugs (part 3)
Marijuana
Adolescents who regularly smoke marijuana are more likely to drop out of school, become teenage parents, and be unemployed.
Habitual use in adolescence is linked to memory, language proficiency, and motivation.
Drug Use and Abuse (part 3)
Results for Monitoring the Future study in 2016
16 percent of high school seniors report having had five drinks in a row in the past two weeks.
2 percent smoked cigarettes every day for the past month.
6 percent smoked marijuana every day.
This suggests that addiction is next step for the high school students in the study.
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Drug Use and Abuse (part 4)
Preventing drug abuse: What works?
Generational forgetting
Each new generation forgets what the previous generation learned.
As used here, the term refers to knowledge about the harm drugs can do.
What works
Florida and California ad campaigns appealing to young
Graphic image ads
Parental example and social changes
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