You and Your Adolescent, New and Revised edition: The Essential Guide for Ages 10-25 - Softcover

Steinberg, Laurence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 143916603X ISBN 13: 9781439166031

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2011

Synopsis

One of the foremost authorities on adolescence provides parents with an authoritative, reassuring guidebook to this challenging period of development.

“Relax! The horror stories you have heard about adolescence are false.”

This is Dr. Laurence Steinberg’s reassuring message to parents in this newly revised edition of his classic book You and Your Adolescent, which Publishers Weekly says is “filled with solid advice for the parents of adolescents.” Among the new topics in this updated edition:

-An expanded definition of adolescence to age twenty-five, recognizing that college graduates often remain dependent on their parents for an extended period, creating a new parent-child dynamic
-A discussion of social media that addresses whether parents of preteens and young teens should monitor use of these new communication tools
-What new research into the adolescent brain tells us about teenage behavior

As Dr. Steinberg writes, “Most books written for parents of teenagers were survival guides (many still are). Nowadays, adolescence is too long—fifteen years in some families—for mere survival. Knowledge, not fortitude, is what today’s parents need. That’s where this book comes in.”

About this title

About the Author

Laurence Steinberg, Ph.D., is the Distinguished University Professor and Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology at Temple University. He is the author or coauthor of several books and his work has also appeared in many publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
Good News About Adolescence

Relax! The horror stories you have heard about adolescence are false.

Adolescence has long been a synonym for trouble in our society. “Everyone knows” that the road from childhood to adulthood is stormy. Extreme moodiness in adolescence is normal. Rebellion is an inevitable and necessary part of growing up. If your teenager doesn’t get involved in drugs, crime, and risky sex, consider yourself lucky.

The idea that adolescence equals trouble has been part of our folklore, handed down from generation to generation, and accepted by psychologists, educators, and parents alike. Psychologists attempted to explain the storm and stress of adolescence through theory. Sociologists concentrated on delinquents, dropouts, drug users, and other problem teenagers. Few questioned the conventional wisdom—until scientists began to study adolescence systematically, in the late 1970s. Over the past 30 years, a new wave of research has swept through the field. Psychologists began to study adolescents themselves—how they think, what they think about, how they feel about their lives, why they behave as they do, and how they respond to different types of parents. They looked not only at troubled young people, but also at ordinary, everyday kids. As a result of this research, many common assumptions about adolescence have been exposed as myths.

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  Adolescence is not an inherently difficult period. Psychological problems, problem behavior, and family conflict are no more common in adolescence than at any other stage of the life cycle. To be sure, some adolescents are troubled and some get into trouble. But the great majority (almost nine out of ten) do not. The problems we have come to see as a “normal” part of adolescent development—drugs, delinquency, irresponsible sex, opposition to any and all authority—are not normal at all. They are both preventable and treatable.
  
  Good kids don’t suddenly go bad in adolescence.
  
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  The evils of peer pressure have been overrated. To be sure, adolescent are concerned about what their friends think; they do want to fit in; and they are susceptible to peer pressure. But peer pressure is not a monolithic force that presses all adolescents into the same mold. Adolescents are as varied as adults are. In some adolescent crowds, earning academic honors is the “in” thing; in others, it’s dressing to the nines or excelling in sports. In some, it’s doing drugs. Peer pressure can be a force for good or evil, positive or negative attitudes toward family and school, depending on the source. Which crowd a teenager associates with is not random. Adolescents generally choose friends whose values, attitudes, tastes, and families are similar to their own. In short, good kids rarely go bad because of their friends.
  
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  The decline of the family has also been overstated. In today’s world, the story goes, parents have little or no control over their teenagers. The decline of neighborhoods, high divorce rates, women working, the youth culture, the media, and now the Internet all combine to undermine parental authority. This is nonsense. Parents remain the major influence on their child’s attitudes and behavior through adolescence and into young adulthood. Adolescents care what you think and listen to what you say, even if they don’t always admit it or agree with every point. The majority of teenagers like their parents, respect them, agree with them on the big issues (though they might disagree over matters of taste and style), and want to please them. Good parent-child relationships do not deteriorate because of adolescence. (And this is true whether parents are married, single, divorced, or remarried: Good parent-adolescent relationships do not depend on household arrangements.)
  

By and large, the good news about adolescence has not reached the public. One reason is that good news isn’t news. Adolescents appear in the news only when a study finds a dramatic increase in teenage pregnancy, police discover that youth gangs are involved with drug rings, or a teenager kills her stepfather or commits suicide. The many, many adolescents who have good relationships with their parents, are doing well in school, do not use drugs, and do not get pregnant aren’t news.

A second reason adolescence continues to equal trouble in the public mind is that cultural stereotypes die hard. An apron declares, “Mother Nature, in all her wisdom, gave me 13 years to love my son before he became a teenager”; a mug asserts, “Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children”; the “terrible teens” is as much a part of our language as the “terrible twos.” When parents of adolescents get together, they often play “Can you top this?” The parents who have survived the worst battles with their teenager get the most medals. Parents who haven’t run into serious problems, who actually enjoy their teenagers, end up being apologetic: “I guess we are just lucky.” It is not luck.

Parents Can Make a Difference

Your relationship with your child will not change for the worse in adolescence, but it will change. How you view this change can lay the groundwork for healthy or unhealthy development, good or bad times in your family.

When your child was small, you were responsible for directing and controlling an immature creature who saw you as all-knowing and all-powerful. In the near future, your young adult will take responsibility for his or her own life, and you will be more like friends. The adolescent still needs you, but in a different way. The parent-adolescent relationship is like a partnership in which the senior partner (the parent) has more expertise in many areas but looks forward to the day when the junior partner (the adolescent) will take over the business of running his or her own life. Parents who see the adolescent partnership as a losing proposition, or resist the adolescent’s desire for self-determination, are asking for trouble.

When parents expect the worst from their adolescent, they often get it. The most common adolescent response to suspicion and surveillance is rebellion: If the adolescent’s parents don’t trust her, why should she try to prove that she is trustworthy? Parents who assume that all teenagers are troubled also run the risk of overlooking the warning signs of serious problems that require immediate, professional attention.

When parents take the attitude that teenagers are teenagers and there’s nothing a parent can do, their child concludes that they don’t care. He may turn to his peers for guidance, or take unnecessary risks in the effort to discover for himself what his limits are, thus confirming his parents’ worst nightmares.

Parents who refuse to accept the fact that their child is maturing and attempt to keep everything as it was run into similar problems. Like it or not, your child is going to try to grow up. The adolescent doesn’t want you to solve every problem anymore. If you don’t make room for her friends, grant her privacy, and let her make her own decisions about clothes and music, when to do her schoolwork, and participation in extracurricular activities, she will find other, less benign ways to assert her independence.

In contrast, when parents welcome signs that their child is growing up and expect the best from their child, they often find adolescence the most rewarding time in their parental career. It’s interesting to have a child with whom you can have an adult conversation (the kind of open-ended all-nighters you haven’t had since you were their age); exciting to be in touch with the latest fashions in clothes and music; fun to be able to share activities with a teenager (if you don’t mind the fact that your daughter can beat you in tennis or knows more about computers than you do); and liberating to know that your child can take care of herself most of the time.

Knowing What to Expect Is Half the Battle

Many parent-adolescent conflicts are the result not of holding on too long or giving up too soon but of misinformation. For example, parents tend to think of adolescence as beginning at age 13 or 14. When their son begins playing the stereo full blast and otherwise acting like a stereotypical teenager at age 11, they assume things can only get worse. In fact, things get better: Most families find the teenage years easier than the preteens. Parents often misread interest in friends as lack of interest in family. In reality, friends don’t subtract from the adolescent’s affection for his family but add to his circle of significant others. When the adolescent begins questioning their rules and their wisdom, many parents think, “Oh, no; my son is the one in ten who is going to be trouble.” In fact, challenging the old order is a sign of intellectual growth: You’ve raised a thinker!

Adolescence is a complicated time, but it is no more mysterious than infancy or toddlerhood. Like these earlier stages in development, it is a period of rapid growth and change. Some of the changes are biological, some intellectual, some emotional and social. Each adolescent develops according to an individual timetable. But the sequence of changes is more or less predictable. Preadolescents and young teens (roughly age 10 to 13) have different needs and concerns than middle adolescents (about age 14 to 18), and late adolescents and young adults (age 19 to 25) have needs and concerns of their own. If you know what to expect at each of these stages, you are in a much better position to understand why the adolescent behaves as he does and what he needs from you. Parents who have a better and more realistic understanding of adolescence have fewer problems during this time period. The same is true for individuals who teach, coach, supervise, or work with young people.

One crucial understanding parents need to have is that adolescence is now a much longer period than it was in previous generations.

Adolescence Lasts Longer Than Ever

Adolescence has changed since most of today’s parents were teenagers. Once limited to the years from roughly 13 to 18, adolescence—at least as a psychological stage—now begins as early as 10 (because puberty occurs earlier than in previous eras) and extends into the mid-20s (because individuals remain financially dependent on their parents much longer). As a consequence, parents now confront many of the classic adolescent issues earlier in their child’s development than they had expected (e.g., having their authority questioned or discovering cigarettes in their child’s dresser drawer), and they continue to deal with others for a much longer time than they ever imagined they would (e.g., conflicts over money or battles over household chores).

This latter change has been particularly dramatic. Parental responsibilities, financial and otherwise, now extend over a greater period of time than they did in earlier generations. Today’s parents are often perplexed, sometimes anxious or even annoyed, about what they may perceive as their child’s excessive dependence, floundering, or reluctance to grow up. And today’s young people may be equally confused about drawing appropriate boundaries between themselves and their parents, creating new conflicts and tensions in the relationship. Parents of these older adolescents have different concerns than parents with preteens, but they nonetheless have questions and need guidance. When I speak to parents, I now get almost as many questions about parenting 20-somethings as I do about parenting teenagers.

A fair amount has been written about the fact that adolescence has been lengthened at both ends. But virtually everything that has been said about this transformation has focused on the individual adolescent, and very little has been said about how it has changed what it means to be a parent. A couple of generations ago, it was possible (although not advisable) for a parent to simply try to “survive” the period, because the worst-case scenario was five or six years of difficulty. Most books written for parents of teenagers were survival guides (many still are). Nowadays, adolescence is too long—15 years in some families—for mere survival. Knowledge, not fortitude, is what today’s parents need. That’s where this book comes in.
Note
A NOTE ON THE PRONOUN PROBLEM

Like many authors today, I object to using the male pronoun he as a generic term to refer to people of both sexes. Nor am I comfortable with always using the plural forms, or constantly resorting to the cumbersome he or she. My solution is to refer to the adolescent sometimes as male and sometimes as female. In either case, what I say about one sex applies to the other. For the most part, the concerns of female and male adolescents are similar, and boys and girls are even more alike today than they were a generation ago. If I am talking about something of special concern to one sex, I’ll say so.

The Purpose of This Book

When your child was small, you probably kept one or more baby books on the shelf. These books told you what to expect at three months, six months, and a year and a half. You skimmed the book to get a preview of what lay ahead, pulled it out when something came up you hadn’t anticipated, and reviewed it now and then to reassure yourself that your child was developing normally. When the book did not give you the answer you needed, you called your pediatrician. This book is written in the spirit of those baby books.

One purpose of this book is to describe the normal developmental changes young people undergo as they enter and move through adolescence. I will talk about what adolescents at a given age are likely to be thinking and feeling, what is probably happening at school and in their social world, how they are likely to perceive you and why. I’ll also explain why you are feeling the way you do, and what you can do to improve your own mental health. One of the lessons of recent research on adolescence is that the period turns out to be much harder on parents than it is on teenagers.

The second purpose of this book is to suggest effective ways of relating to your adolescent. There is no magical formula for raising a healthy, well-adjusted child—and indeed, no one definition of well-adjusted. But research does show that some strategies are more effective than others. I suggest general guidelines, offer concrete suggestions, and highlight mistakes parents often make. But you know your son or daughter better than anyone. The best advice anyone can give you is to get as much information as you can, then follow your intuition.

In line with this view, the third purpose of this book is to provide practical information that both you and your adolescent should have. For example, I tell you what happens in an adolescent’s body during puberty, what the dangers of unprotected sex are, including sexually transmitted diseases and early pregnancy, and how teenagers can protect themselves. Likewise, I discuss how the demands on students change as they move from middle school, or junior high, to high school and on to college. Much of this information is intended for parents to share with their child. There is nothing in this book an adolescent should not see.

The fourth purpose is to alert you to potential problems and tell you when you should be concerned and what you should do. Adolescence is not inevitably a bad time for families, but it is almost always a challenging one. There are many professionals trained to deal with the special medical and psychological needs of adolescents and their families. Help is available if and wh...

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 143916603X
• ISBN 13: 9781439166031
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 432