This is the fourth of seven posts about human development across the lifespan.
Let’s say that youth lasts from about age 12 through age 19.
By age 12, we are much more self-controlled, skilled, and logical than we were as a young child — and we have moved toward a more accurate view of our skills and abilities and how these compare to those of our peers. And over time, our child self no longer suffices.
As youth, we continue to grow. We acquire more learning, skills, customs, and values. Ideally, our growth is well-structured and we receive and accept protection to avoid harm while also learning and internalizing good values, gaining more physical and emotional autonomy, and discovering our personal interests, talents, and strengths.
At the same time, both impulses that dominated toddlerhood and the magic and fantasy that dominated our childhood seem chaotic. We want rules. We want authority. Social control now seems desirable. We identify with your groups, our organizations, and our institutions – we form a Gestalt of our self and our group – and we like things to be more orderly, familiar, predictable, and manageable.
In adolescence there are new demands, new intellectual experiences, new feelings and behaviors, and a new ability to think through conceptual, abstract, and hypothetical problems. We can engage in self-analysis and contemplate our self in various social contexts.
So we work our way toward a new sense of self, a new identity — and we try to integrate our beliefs, our values, our ideas, our understanding of relationships and roles, and our career goals.
Along with our sexual development, three of the biggest changes of our adolescence are the development of our reasoning capacity, the arrival of our capacity for introspection, and the capacity to handle much more social complexity in our life.
Concepts become more and more important. Our self-perception and self-worth – and our perceptions of others – become rooted in both concepts and human attributes.
Our self is now more than our body, age, gender, and name. Our self is now more than our race, physical characteristics, possessions, and actions that we can perform. We have begun thinking of some of our inner qualities — perhaps our friendliness, our humor, or our curiosity — as part of our self.
Our knowledge and mental capacities continue to grow. Ideally, in addition to advanced literacy and numeracy, we master by high school facts and basic conceptual knowledge about nature (from science) and about social, economic, and political institutions, history, and citizenship (from the social sciences).
Beginning around age 11 or 12, we can juggle ideas and perform mental actions on ideas. Around age 12, usually, we begin gaining a real command of abstract thinking, useful imaginative thinking, and hypothetical “what-if” thinking — and we rely on this new thinking to understand our self much better.
We can detect logical inconsistencies — one of the reasons that adolescents can be challenging. We can deal with possibilities. We can engage in hypothetical-deductive thinking. And in our later teens, usually, we can begin thinking systematically about hypothetical ideas and abstract concepts, and so we can envision better approaches and engage in systematic problem-solving.
We also develop our common sense — thinking with our crystallized intelligence. We can apply common sense to understand reality and life situations and challenges. We use common sense to apply past experience to present situations, to figure out what is actually going on, how things work, and what works best. We use common sense to make plausible guesses and interpretations by generalizing from our clues and the most relevant information. We learn more and more about life, and are better able to sense our way forward.
Emotional development accelerates. Youth begin to understand their innate emotional reactions to stimuli. They begin to learn how to check and veto impulsive reactions arising from negative emotions like fear, anger, shame, and stress.
While their brains still make it challenging, youth can learn to stay conscious of what they are feeling, to value the information that their feelings provide them, and to really feel their feelings. Youth can respond to situations from awareness beyond their emotions. Youth can hold an impulse in their awareness without acting on it. Youth can be mindful of their emotions, accept their emotions, and wisely process and contain their emotions.
And while it is more difficult than it is for an adult, youth can become emotionally resilient against stress: To stay aware that a stressor is simply any demand that arouses our mind or body. To expect stressful events each day. To confront stressful events directly, stay calm, focus on each event, figure it out, and take constructive action again and again. And to even find meaning in stressful events and renew themselves amid stress.
The social changes are wide-ranging. Teens spend extraordinary amounts of time talking and socializing. And adolescents are capable of participating in truly deep relationships.
All our life, our peer relationships bring us pleasure, affection and emotional support, advice and other practical help, and every kind of learning and growth, including physical, emotional, cognitive, and social learning and growth.
From our peers we learn intimate communication, reciprocal trust, cooperation, mutual helpfulness, generous sharing, healthy competition, ways to handle aggression, negotiation, compromise, and other social skills.
Friendly peers help us feel better about our self, weather stressful events, solve problems, and master challenges. Affirmation, agreement, and approval from our peers help validate our self-worth.
By age 9 or 10, we understand that good friends take each other’s opinions into account, share feelings, don’t betray a secret, help solve each other’s problems, and care about making each other happy. Friendships become more about loyalty, respect, kindness, affection, and attunement to each other’s perspective. And with a shared history of communication and interaction — a long-term friendship — we experience real commitment to a peer.
As peers become more and more important, youth are more likely to excel if their parents excel at parenting them. Teens are likely to be autonomous and well-adjusted achievers if their parents are warm and supportive, enforce a reasonable set of rules, monitor their comings and goings, and consistently include them in decisions.
Generally, youth are liked by their peers if they are intelligent and competent, especially if they are socially competent: if they can initiate activities, respond positively to their peers, and resolve conflicts. In general, pre-teens and teens are popular who are positive, responsive, supportive, and cooperative and who have advanced role-taking skills and the ability to take peers’ wishes into consideration.
Even by late childhood, most of us are fairly conformist and conventional. It is important to us how we fit in with our family and peers, and so we understand, accept, appreciate, and internalize rules. By age 7, most of us can abide by the rules of games, and our favorite games are usually rule-heavy.
In adolescence, most of us do things for social approval. Most adolescents are sensitive to expectations and seek recognition and approval. Many teens view their moral values — including honesty, fairness, and caring — as an important part of their identity.
Beginning about age 12, most youth become adept at mentally juggling multiple perspectives. (Thus they also realize about the same time that rules can be changed by mutual agreement.) Many teens develop sophisticated role-taking skills. And the best role-takers usually make the most desirable of close friends; they can infer and respond sensitively to people’s needs and they excel at resolving disagreements.
As teens we spend more time analyzing people and we “read” people better. We apprehend other people’s emotions better. We read and understand people’s feelings, body language, facial expressions, interests, values, desires, motivations, and intentions. We infer and deduce more about people, including inferring each person’s traits from his or her behavior. We notice more subtle differences between people.
Now we really understand both pride and shame, and notice them more in others. We better understand the relationship between reality and desire — and we know that when people lose or fail to acquire or achieve what they desire, they are sad.
We understand that a person can feel two emotions at the same time. We understand that people can hide their emotions. Beyond the situation of the moment, we respond more to the general situation and life condition of another person.
We are able to qualify rules. At the same time, we are able to think more clearly about what might be or what ought to be. We can also better understand principles and causes. And so we are able to construct a more accurate model of experience and reality, and get to more of the truth about people and situations.
However, despite more insight into people and rising social maturity, from about age 12 to 19 we are deeply concerned about being socially accepted. We want to be independent but we want to belong — we are desperate to be well-liked — and the intensity of all this is hard to manage.
Teen girls tend to hang out in pairs and to be more affectionate, confiding, cooperative, and nurturing than teen boys. Female adolescent friendships involve a lot of intimacy and self-disclosure — a lot of confiding, a lot of sharing of inner feelings and secrets.
Teen boys tend to hang out in groups, to be more open to newcomers, and to emphasize similar interests, competition, and having fun together. In general, male adolescent friendships are less emotionally intimate.
Most teens continue to turn to their parents for advice on money, courses, college, jobs and career, life plans, and values. At the same time, most teens conform slavishly to their peer group and their chosen teen culture regarding clothing, hairstyle, music, leisure and social activities, and other matters of appearance and cultural taste.
Most teens choose friends with similar values, attitudes, and behaviors. They then often become convinced that their social lives will be ruined unless they do what their peers do. Their self-esteem soars when a friend validates their tastes or seeks their advice.
Teens compare and contrast: Is what’s happening to me happening to you? Am I normal?
Peers help each other adjust to school and social stress and confront the challenges of sex and dating, drinking and drugs, and social behaviors and identity. They reflect and interpret each other’s changing tastes and identities.
But in their own way, teen peer groups can serve as vehicles for independence. And intimacy, generosity, cooperation, and helpfulness can take hold during these years. Adolescents strive to understand each other, they share their thoughts and feelings, they form longer-term friendships, and they learn to forgive each other. Generally, a youth who is unselfish with his or her friends is also more altruistic toward other people.
Ideally, from age 12 through age 19, we weather the changes, pull the threads together, and emerge from our youthful years with clear goals, a capacity to excel in our role commitments, and an emerging coherent view of our self — an emerging cohesive new rising-adult identity.
With many exceptions, our youth self tends to be a group-scripted self. We take on learned roles with rules – scripts – and our sense of self becomes rooted in these rules, roles, and scripts.
Even as a child, we begin switching from a “Me-only” perspective to a “My-People-only” perspective. We shift our ego out to our groups: our classmates and friends, our ethnic group, people of our faith, people of our nationality. We assume that what our group wants and believes is what is right and good.
As youth, we become less egocentric as we extend our care and concern to our group. We can see other views besides our own. We can perceive what other people are perceiving. We can take on the roles of other people and relate to their experiences and views.
Our relatedness and social responsibility are growing. We can take the role of the other. Our courtesies and love extend to our groups — to “my people”. We learn to treat members of our groups the way that we want to be treated. In extending our identity into our groups, we are learning relatedness and social responsibility and we become capable of more love, benevolence, and altruism.
However, as long as we stay in this My-Group-only mindset, we are group-centric and often ethnocentric or nationalistic. We assume that what our group wants is what is right and good. Our morality is conventional and conformist: in general, we only do good because our group expects it – and what is right and good is what pleases or what is approved of by other people. Most adolescents do what they think most people would do and what they think other people would expect them to do. We do things for social approval.
We struggle to find reasonable, rational, and acceptable ways to satisfy our instinctual desires. And our conduct is controlled not only by punishments and rewards but by praise, criticism, and blame.
We think that only people in our groups share our values, interests, ideals, and dreams. We only love or even accept certain people: my family, my schoolmates and friends, my community, my nationality, my ethnic group, my gender, my faith.
Often we come to think that “my people” are the only people who matter. And we tend to ignore, exclude, think poorly of, condemn, or even mistreat people who are not in our group.
This stage of life is spiritually deficient. We are not truly moral or even spiritual yet. We are just following the code we’ve picked up from our family, peers, society, and culture. We are just following our group’s script.
At this stage, rules and roles give life its direction and its sacred purpose and meaning. There is only one right way to think and behave — and with discipline, guilt, and obedience we can follow it. Our authoritarian “God”, we think, will surely help us control our impulses and rarely violate our faith’s rigid discipline code.
If we are theists, we assume that Deity only accepts or loves certain people. My groups are so favored by Deity that other groups don’t count with Deity at all. We come to believe in an all-powerful Deity or other Ultimate Reality that determines all outcomes in life – and we assume that those outcomes favor our group.
We are absolutists. We are fundamentalists. We are members of a social circle sharing belief in an unvarying set of rules within a firm order of absolute right and wrong. In such versions of faith, we look to authority to impose discipline and enforce the code.
Let’s consider again what happens to our consciousness or soul when order and stability are the main values. When our life is all about structure, rules, laws, hierarchy, authority, compliance, conformity, obedience, duty, and sacrifice to our group.
On the surface, it may seem to work. You’re embedded in that group, you draw your identity and sense of belonging and purpose from that group, and you’re confident that that group has found the one right way to think and behave. You do what is proper according to proper authority, which you rarely or never question, and you are kind to people in your group.
But history has shown us that individuals, faiths, and societies at this level of development have done incalculable harm.
There are spiritual dangers and pitfalls in everyone being nothing more than a member of a group, operating from the script of the group members. This conventional, group-centric, code-and-rule-based, authoritarian, and fundamentalist level of human development (and form of faith) can turn evil.
Fortunately, the seeds of growth can be found in this stage of life. Moving beyond this stage of development requires reason, active introspection, and deeper and more widely embracing empathy.
Since most adolescents ask serious questions about the self — and answer those questions, or try to — they grow in moral reasoning. They can begin to scrutinize their culture and society from a transcendent perspective and they can begin to judge rules and roles and the views of our groups.
Many youth carefully consider, scrutinize, and judge their group’s views and values. Youth can begin to think beyond conventional views when they do not seem right, just, or fair to them.
Many youth reach the point where they can perform a role without being lost in it. Some youth are better than others at differentiating their self from their groups. They become less embedded in their groups — less group-centric — as they realize “my people are not the only people”.
Our identity moves beyond the social roles that they have taken for granted up to that point. We no longer exclusively identify with our social roles. We can decide which rules and roles we agree with and which ones we do not, and we can consciously identify with a role or consciously transcend rules and roles we wish to transcend (if we are free to transcend them).
As we do this, at whatever age, we enter the next stage of development.
So what do we do when we encounter a youth age 12 to 19?
Let’s advise them about practical matters of life and a wide range of questions and issues.
Let’s help them become more logical, master knowledge and skills, make the most of what-if thinking, and hone their common sense.
Understanding that their sense of self-worth is on the line, let’s help them adapt to social complexity, excel in their roles without getting lost in them, navigate relationships with their peers, infer more truth about people and situations, respond more fully to people’s needs, and deepen their friendships. And let’s help them resolve disagreements and become more resilient through adversity and stress.
Let’s help them engage in introspection and moral reasoning, think through rules and roles, and expand their circle of care beyond their immediate groups, and (amid all the exploration of cultural tastes and sub-cultural identities) develop and internalize genuinely good values.