In this book we’ve argued that adolescence can and must be restructured in fundamental ways and that this call for change is neither a naive wish nor just another ivory tower theory. Far from it. It’s a powerful idea that’s already being proven on the ground, from volunteer programs to redesigned high schools, and from years of work with our patients to countless experiences with friends, neighbors, and even the teenagers in our own family. Formal programs such as Teen Outreach and the Early College High School Initiative provide glimpses of just how dramatically we can change teens’ lives, but the approach we outline doesn’t require formal programs. The changes that are needed can begin in almost every interaction we have with teens, and they can begin today.
We’ve outlined some of the many routes by which we can bring adolescents into adulthood more successfully. We see these primarily as jumping-off points, though, which we hope can inspire others to discover and create additional routes by which to move our youth toward maturity. The essential ideas we’ve outlined are not complex, but they are also not obvious, and we’ve found it helpful in explaining them to parents to boil them down into the following five simple principles to guide our efforts:
Include them. If we want our teens to gain a sense of what the adult world requires and rewards, we need to give them the chance to participate in it, whether through volunteer activities or the right kind of paid employment. As might also be true with our metaphorical foreign visitor living in our home, if we want to make our teens at home in adult society, we need to give them not just a place at the table at dinner, but a task in the kitchen where they can help out and truly become a part of the adult world.
Go with the flow by building on the strong current of healthy, adulthood-seeking motives in teens’ behavior. The view of teens as irrational, hormone-crazed creatures not only flies in the face of much of what we’re learning about adolescent development, it actually undermines this development. In recognizing teens’ autonomy strivings as a positive force in moving them into adulthood, rather than a threat to be countered, we become their allies in helping them grow up. They’ll need some support—or scaffolding—to make the leap into adulthood, but we consistently find teens more than eager to make that leap.
Connect, connect, connect. Teens may not appear to want adult connections, but they desperately need them, provided the connections don’t just move them back into a childlike role. It takes emotional resilience for parents and other adults to keep offering adult connection in the face of apparent rebuff and disinterest, but the reward, if we can be patient, is well worth it as we slowly build mature adult relationships that can last and grow over a lifetime—and help our youth grow up in the process.
Ramp up the challenge. Adolescence is potential energy waiting to be engaged. We need to move beyond the Nurture Paradox and the idea that doing things for our teens or giving them more gadgets, activities, or lessons has much to do with helping them grow up. Rather, what they need and want is challenge: tasks just beyond their current level of competence and comfort that leave them feeling more adultlike after they’ve been mastered. Fortunately, the challenges are all around. What’s on your to-do list that your teen could do for him- or herself? Move it from your column to his or hers.
Give it to them straight. Teens thrive on feedback from the adult world. Engaging in the adult world in real ways—from the rigors of adult work to the rewards of adult relationships—can easily provide this feedback as long as we don’t step in to shield teens from unpleasant aspects of the feedback they might receive. Failure, setback, and loss—these aren’t just unavoidable problems our teens will have to face, but teachers from which our teens can learn much.
Together, these principles and the routes they suggest can not only move teens more quickly toward adult responsibilities, but also provide them with the fundamental nutrients—the adult connections and the adult rewards of autonomy, competence, and mastery—that have been missing from their diets for too long.
In our experience, some teens’ diets are deficient in just a few of these nutrients, but for others—like Perry, the young anorexic boy we described at the outset of this book—almost all are lacking. Helping young people like Perry often means addressing several deficiencies at once. But his story provides a nice illustration of how even a few modest strategic changes—working in tandem with a teen’s innate desire to move toward greater maturity—can often be enough to help even very troubled young teens begin to spring back to life.
Though it took much persuading and reassuring, Perry’s parents eventually allowed him the freedom to ride his bike to the local tennis courts to hit a ball against a wall for practice each summer morning. This small step led to a fortuitous cascade of events after Perry one day encountered a neighbor there teaching nine- and ten-year-olds in a summer tennis program. The neighbor saw him hitting the ball alone and asked if he might like to volley with some of the kids. Perry said sure, and was paired with a quiet, talented young boy who berated himself harshly after every missed shot. Perry had no trouble empathizing and being supportive, and turned out to be a great and encouraging “coach” that morning.
He made sure to return at the same time the next day, and was asked to help out again, and then the day after, and the day after that, and ended up serving as an informal junior coach in the program. The kids loved Perry and even argued over who would get to hit with him (though he was also asked a few times why he was so skinny). His long summer mornings of monotonous boredom at home had now been replaced with a new refrain. “I’m running late, gotta go!” he’d yell to his parents just after breakfast each morning as he hopped on his bike to head to the courts. Perry’s sense of urgency didn’t so much reflect the heavy pressure he’d always known, however, but rather a new and unfamiliar feeling: eagerness.
Perry’s dad also got him a “job” volunteering a few hours a week that summer with a political science professor at the local community college. Much of the work was clerical, but Perry sensed that it was important, and often reminded his parents, “Professor Steuben once testified before Congress, you know.” Eventually the professor asked him to skim newspaper articles for relevant information and outline what he found, and Perry eagerly dove in. When he returned to school that fall, he still found math and science a stressful chore, but could now see the relevance in his journalism and government courses—and never failed to point out instances where the course content in some way overlapped with “the project Professor Steuben and I worked on together this summer.” Perry was adding pride to his emotional lexicon.
In spite of these encouraging events, his progress was not without its fits and starts. His parents were struggling not only against his entrenched eating habits, but also against their own impulses, and even more important, against a society that reinforced many of the impulses that maintain our teens as overgrown children. Over time, however, Perry’s parents got on board, treating him as the young man he was becoming, not the child he had been. As he took on more adultlike tasks both in and outside of his home, his mood continued to improve, and as it did, his weight gradually increased. Perry was going to make it. His problems did not totally vanish, of course, and he came in for occasional booster shots of therapy when home from college over the next few years, but he was now getting enough of the nutrients he needed—figuratively and literally—to resume his growth toward adulthood.
As the human life span has lengthened and our society has advanced, it is perhaps not surprising that the fundamental nutrients—the challenge, feedback, connection, and eagerness—that were lacking in Perry’s life have also been gradually stripped from the diets of many of our teens. History is replete with such trade-offs following societal change and progress. As sailors first learned to cross oceans, for example, scurvy became a worrisome and mysteriously common illness. The nutrients that sailors had taken in effortlessly on land (in this case vitamin C) had slipped out of their diets unnoticed. Similarly, as we learned to take full advantage of the automobile, exercise that was previously built into our daily lives fell by the wayside and heart disease loomed large. And as technology let us live off processed foods, fiber tended to disappear from our diets and cancer rates shot up.
In all of these cases, though, the solutions have not required going back to the primitive ways of the prior era. In fact, the answers have often been deceptively simple, once we understood the problem. Scurvy could be avoided simply by by adding citrus fruits to shipboard diets. Thirty minutes a day of exercise would largely pay back to our bodies what we’d lost by relying upon the automobile. Fiber became a fairly easy addition to diets, once we recognized its importance.
So too with adolescence. Over and over again we’ve found that as we add missing nutrients back into teens’ diets one by one, they spring almost magically back to life with the energy and enthusiasm they seemed to have lost somewhere back in the childhood years.
Many years ago psychologist Martin Seligman began studying animals exposed to punishing environments with no chance of escape. The animals were placed in situations in which they saw no feedback or success no matter what they tried; they had no way to escape the stresses before them. These animals, Seligman found, developed a strong and fixed response that looked like depression and could at times even be fatal, a state he termed “learned helplessness.” Even when opportunities to act did present themselves to these poor creatures, they often just waited anxiously. They became passive and barely took care of themselves. Without intervention they quickly progressed from being in a helpless situation to becoming helpless organisms.
As our societal changes have shielded teens from most venues where their actions might matter to themselves or to others, it’s little surprise that we’ve come to see human behavior patterns that resemble those that Seligman observed in animals. Fortunately, Seligman’s was not the last word on the story. Not long after he conducted his research, Ellen Langer at Harvard and Judith Rodin at Yale—both aware of Seligman’s work—experimented with a simple intervention in a nursing home for the elderly. Langer and Rodin gave some of the residents—who in many ways appeared as helpless and passive as Seligman’s animals—the chance to exert modest control and have a modest impact upon their environments: to again begin acting like adults and not just as extremely old children. The residents were given simple activities—like arranging their rooms and caring for plants—and were allowed a choice of which nursing home activities to attend. The emphasis was on the residents being responsible for guiding their own lives in the home. The remarkable result from this simple intervention: Residents given even this modicum of increased control and input into their lives were only half as likely to die over the course of the study as their less-fortunate peers. The efficacy, input, and impact of Langer and Rodin’s experiment had literally saved lives.
For adolescents, the good and somewhat surprising news is that none of the problems we’ve been discussing appears to come prebaked into their brains or into their hormones. And there is every reason to believe that teens can gain as much from our modest, well-directed interventions to address their learned helplessness as Langer and Rodin’s nursing home residents. What we’ve found most striking about the approach we’ve described is just how responsive teens are to it. Perry’s growth is the rule, not the exception. As we view the modern adolescent environment, it’s not a matter of asking whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. Rather, like water to the person dying of thirst in the desert, it’s simply the case that even a little goes a long way. In part, this is a testament to natural human resilience. But the responsiveness of our teens to the right kind of interventions doesn’t just tell us how resilient they are, it also tells us just how thirsty they’ve been for the chance to enter the adult world in a meaningful way.
Once we’re attuned to it, we can see this thirst all around us. The power of the Harry Potter series, for example, derives at least in part from J. K. Rowling’s success in creating a world in which teenagers get the chance to play an active, indeed central, role in the adult world which they magically enter via Platform 9¾ of a London train station. Part of the appeal of the series lies in its description of young people discovering adult powers they didn’t know they had, which lets them influence the adult world in ways no one thought they could. Indeed, a little reflection reveals that this theme of youth’s deep thirst for adulthood has been a growing part of successful young adult fiction for at least a generation. From the Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, young people have been feeling the same pull and thrill at the fantasy of being given the chance to perform as adults in the adult world. This vision needn’t be a fantasy.
There’s one final benefit to the changes we’ve been suggesting, and it’s one we’ve left largely implicit thus far. Perry’s story hints at it. For if we look at Perry’s environment, we see that a few other things of note changed in the world Perry inhabited that summer a few years back. The neighbor who was running the tennis program found it useful to have an extra person help tend to the young kids on the courts. The political science professor enjoyed chatting with Perry and having some of the more mundane parts of his work taken off his hands. Perry, like most of our teens, had something real to offer.
Over the years, we’ve found that parents often start out worrying that they’re simply too busy and overtaxed to implement the suggestions we offer. In the end, of course, it’s far more taxing to live with a bunch of perpetual children in one’s midst (cloaked as teenagers) than to live with budding adults. Once parents realize this, their energy for making the changes we suggest typically skyrockets—and, of course, they then find that the changes make their lives as parents easier, not to mention far more gratifying. But while the practical contributions teens can make to our households and our communities are not to be underestimated, we’ve found over and over again that when we engage them in the adult world, what teens have to offer actually goes far beyond such practical help. Adolescence is a challenging age, but the challenges have at times been of immense benefit—not just to teens, but to the larger society.
While modern society struggles to shape and socialize its future generations, it’s important to remember that the role of young people since at least the dawn of recorded history has been to look afresh at the mores of the larger society. And that fresh look can at times bring real benefits. The challenges presented by engaged, contributing, and questioning adolescents are at times uncomfortable and even irritating, but irritants don’t just annoy, they can also prompt an organism, or a society, to grow stronger.
Whatever you may have thought about the war in Vietnam, there is little question that the movement that brought our country home from Southeast Asia derived its greatest energy from mid- to late-adolescents. Some of the most heated (and no doubt productive) debates of this era occurred not on the floor of the Senate, but within millions of homes across America, as teens and parents discussed and disagreed. Teens were forced to grow in maturity and sophistication to put forth their arguments effectively. Equally important, their parents almost inevitably also found themselves extending and broadening their own perspectives as they listened to their teens’ views of the world. These adolescents were engaged in changing society in part because they were forced to contribute to it in a large way (and for some, the largest possible way) via military conscription. Much of what those in the “youth movement” back then supported and indeed pushed upon their parents’ generation—from civil rights to attention to the environment—turned out to represent real advances. Engaged youths not only learned from their parents, they also taught their parents … just as those parents had themselves done with their parents a generation earlier, and so forth back into time immemorial.
But for any of this to happen, youths must actually be engaged with the larger society. “Society gets the teenagers it deserves,” author J. B. Priestley has observed. Throughout this book, we’ve made the point that strong and vital connections between teens and the adult world determine not simply how teens act, but who they become. At least as important, these connections also go a long way toward determining who we will become and what we will learn from future generations as we all march forward together.