"Adolescence is the age of the final establishment of a dominant positive ego identity. It is then that a future within reach becomes part of the conscious life plan." (Erikson, 63, p306)
Adolescence, the turning point, watershed, in Greek the cairotic moment, after which the future is redirected and confirmed. It would seem reasonable that much thought would be given to how to use this critical period to reinforce the positive self-image so important for growth. Rather, many parents, teachers, and clergy are unprepared to help guide these budding personalities. Ignorant or apathetic, or in dread of this confusing, rebellious stage, techniques are used, to "deal with" teens that usually fail to maximize the tremendous potential adolescence offers.
Various researchers and scholars have marked adolescence as a critical period, if not the most critical period in human development--the fork in the road which forever shapes an individual's--and mankind's--destiny. Indeed, social scientists argue that our societies ultimately mirror the results of the adolescent development process.
The importance of adolescent development to society--especially, the tendency for societies to operate without a central ethos, to "go with the flow"--is discussed by Erik Erikson:
"What is described as a Protean personality today may, in fact, be an attempt on the part of adolescent personalities--and America has always cultivated them--to adjust to overwhelming change by a stance of deliberate changeability, of maintaining the initiative by playing at change so as to stay ahead of the game....Those who are gifted in this game, and, therefore, truly playful in it, may with luck make it an essential part of their identity formation and find a new sense of centrality and originality in the flux of our time....No wonder that the playing out of these...roles can often give a fleeting sense of identity only when reinforced by drugs which help to dull diffuse guilt....And the consequence is not greater freedom in informed permissiveness but an inability to personify and to convey to others any ethics except that of making a variety of role adjustments instead of a single one." (Erikson, 73, pp 107-108)
Erikson then draws this conclusion:
"...I think that recent developments in our national life such as the sudden shift of attention from military atrocity in foreign lands to political scandal at home, and then the dramatic public display of individuals responsible for or caught in such scandal, should leave no doubt about the psychological relationships...that between the repression of inner conflict in those who overadjust to power, the suppression of adversary opinions, and the ready oppression of foreign people. May we learn to keep this interrelatedness in full view, and not be distracted by what satisfies vindictiveness or self-vindication most sensationally at the given "point in time." (73, p 111)
This tendency to adjust to external events, rather than operating with a strong sense of self, is a behavior pattern which, surely, is strongly reinforced in adolescence. At that time, still in many ways clinging to the security of his parents, the adolescent finds himself faced with significant physiological and environmental adjustments. He is, literally, shocked by physical change, and forced to try to process new perceptions. In reaching out for stability, what does he find but a world afraid of him, too. Like learning to swim, how his mentors respond will determine whether he finds his own buoyancy or will forever require the aid of external support apparatus. It is the latter option that our society has developed most effectively, by focusing on assimilation of external, rather than internal knowledge. Add dysfunction, somewhere along the line, and the problem is significantly exacerbated.
Anne Wilson Schaef, a psychotherapist and author on co-dependence, notes that this tendency to adopt behaviors based on external priorities and authoritity figures has become a societal phenomenon. Like Rotter's theory on external locus of control (71), such behavior contains the seeds of a social paradigm, sown on no more fertile ground than the early years of adolescence:
"...co-dependents feel they have no intrinsic meaning of their own, almost all of their meaning comes from outside; they are almost completely externally referented....our major institutions--the family, the school, and the church--actively...teach us to think what we are told to think, feel what we are told to feel, see what we are told to see, and know what we are told to know." (Schaef, 86, pp 44, 46)
One of the results of learning only what others want to teach us, rather than developing our own perceptions, priorities, and values, is summarized by anthropologist Collin Turnbull:
"I think we see the consequences of this when we recognize what the plain facts tell us, that unlike the Mbuti we continue in adult life to have to be coerced to behave in a social manner. Order has to be imposed or enforced by violence or threat of violence, it lacks that inner drive that makes such external compulsion unnecessary or minimal." (Turnbull, 83, p 76)
Other consequences, for both the individual and society, are described by Erikson:
"Consider our adolescent boy. In his early childhood he was faced with a training which tended to make him machinelike and clocklike. Thus standardized, he found chances, in his later childhood, to develop autonomy, initiative, and industry, with the implied promise that decency in human relations, skill in technical details, and knowledge of facts would permit him freedom of choice in his pursuits, that the identity of free choice would balance his self-coercion. As an adolescent and man, however, he finds himself confronted with superior machines, complicated, incomprehensible, and impersonally dictatorial in their power to standardize his pursuits and tastes. These machines do their powerful best to convert him into a consumer idiot, a fun egotist, and an efficiency slave--and this by offering him what he seems to demand. Often he remains untouched and keeps his course: this will largely depend on the wife whom he--as the saying goes--chooses. Otherwise, what else can he become but a childish joiner, or a cynical little boss, trying to get in on some big boss' 'inside track'--or a neurotic character, a psychosomatic case?"For the sake of its emotional health, then, a democracy cannot afford to let matters develop to a point where intelligent youth, proud in its independence and burning with initiative, must leave matters of legislation, law, and international affairs, not to speak of war and peace, to "insiders" and "bosses." American youth can gain the full measure of its identity and of its vitality only by being fully aware of autocratic trends in this and in any other land as they repeatedly emerge from changing history." (Erikson, 63, p 322)
In a study by the National Institute of Mental Health entitled Adolescence and Stress (Moore, 81), a distinguished panel of scientists trace to adolescence many skills required for problem-solving and coping. Throughout this study are laced such basic adolescent development concepts as identity formation, cognitive development, socioemotional development, the family, schools and hormonal, physiological, and somatic changes that affect development of stress management skills. Simply put, adolescence is the first, formal opportunity an individual has to understand and analyze his interaction and efficacy in dealing with the the multitude of issues, experiences, and problems facing him. And it is at this time that he will develop and practice those coping skills he will later carry through life.
Albert Bandura, as a panel member, describes four principal bases on which an adolescent judges coping abilities: personal experience with a similar situation; observations of success/failure by others; what we have learned from others about severity of problems and likelihood of resolution; and physiological capabilities. As students of adolescent psychology, we learn that self-discovery in these areas is first encountered in adolescence, and it is likely that it is on the basis of our adolescent experience that future success in problem-solving and stress management are scripted.
Notwithstanding the apparently obvious importance of youth in laying the foundations for future healthy, constructive behaviors, our social institutions pay little heed. Jean Piaget notes that our educational system, for example, continues to teach intellectual development, rather than instrinsic worth. He describes the difference, as follows:
"In the first case the child is called upon to receive from outside the already perfected products of adult knowledge and morality; the educational relationship consists of pressure on the one side and receptiveness on the other. From such a point of view even the most individual kinds of task performed by students (writing an essay, making a translation, solving a problem) partake less of the genuine activity of spontaneous and individual research than of the imposed exercise or the act of copying an external model; the student's inmost morality remains fundamentally directed toward obedience rather than autonomy. Whereas, on the other hand, to the degree in which childhood is thought of as endowed with its own genuine form of activity, and the development of mind as being included within that activity's dynamic, the relation between the subjects to be educated and society becomes reciprocal: the child no longer tends to approach the state of adulthood by receiving reason and the rules of right action ready-made, but by achieving them with his own effort and personal experience; in return, society expects more of its new generations than more imitation; it expects enrichment. (Emphasis added) (Piaget, 35 & 65, pp 695-696)
If we are to avoid the tendency towards reactionary, survival behaviors associated with adolescence--that later evolve into autocratic styles of parenting and governance--we must reach a deeper core within the individual. Whether we call it Spirit, Soul, Conscience, or simply Self-esteem, we must focus on that part of adolescent, as early and as often as possible.
Turnbull summarizes:
"In adolescence we are in many ways like empty but organic receptacles, fully formed though still growing, waiting to be filled. And like receptacles we are capable at that stage of life of receiving with all our being, becoming one with what is within us. Sexual and spiritual awareness as modes of experience are just as valid as physical and intellectual awareness; and like those other modes of apprehension they can be turned in any direction, inward or outward, restricted to the individual self or encouraged to expand and encompass the infinitely greater social self....Education and socialization can be accomplished in the solitude of the rational domain, but it is the intensity that these other modes of perception can bring to each and every experience that gives such education an inner significance, endowing it with a vital force. It is this intensity of perception, together with integrity of being, that can make of human society a living, thriving, truly loving, joyously full and exuberant organism, rather than a cold, mechanical, empty theoretical concept. That is the magic of transformation, and that is the potential of adolescence." (Turnbull, 83, pgs. 122-123)
References:
Erikson, Erik H. (1963). Childhood and Society. New York: W. W. Norton & Company
Erikson, Erik H. (1974). Dimensions of a New Identity: The 1973 Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities. New York: W. W. Norton & Company
Rotter, J. B. (1971). Who rules you? External control and internal control. Psychology Today 5:37-42
Schaef, Anne Wilson (1986). Co-Dependence; Misunderstood-Mistreated. New York: Harper & Row
Moore, Charlotte D., Editor (1981). Adolescence and Stress--Report of an NIMH Conference. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office; DHHS Publication No. (ADM) 81-1098
Piaget, Jean (1935 & 1965) Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child. The Essential Piaget. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Turnbull, Colin M. (1983) The Human Cycle. New York: Simon and Schuster
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