Adolescence in contemporary Western industrial society is shaped and defined by the interplay of complex biological, cultural, economic, and historical forces. This lengthy transitional state, which may last a decade or more, is a distinctive period in which a youngster is no longer a child nor yet fully adult, but partakes of some of the challenges, privileges, and expectations of both epochs.

Adolescence is a period of paradoxes, as youngsters reach physical and sexual maturity well before they are fully cognitively and emotionally mature. On one hand, a secular trend toward earlier puberty over the past century and half means that defining maturational changes often begin by age 9–12, and that by 13 years of age many youngsters are potentially fertile and sexually attuned, if not yet fully active. On the other hand, the educational demands of a complex modern economy have prolonged formal education and raised the age of mandatory school attendance to approximately 16 years, whereas social welfare concerns have abolished child labor and legally restricted adolescent employment, thus postponing entry into the world of work. [Some measure of this shift may be seen in the contrast between 1900, when many Americans still lived on family farms, and only 10% of 14- to 17-year-olds attended high school, and the present 95% high school attendance rate (1).]

As a result, full economic emancipation usually is not possible until the later teens, at the earliest, and in the case of young people pursuing college or postgraduate education, often not until the middle to late 20s.

In the United States, the legal status of adolescents is a confusing mixture of privileges and strictures that attempts to balance the need for control and protection with the incremental granting of autonomy (2). For example, a 14-year-old may fly a plane, but not legally drive a car, whereas a 17-year-old may serve in the army, but not vote until 18 years of age, when he or she still is not legally allowed to drink. In many jurisdictions, a 14-year-old may legally obtain an abortion without her parents’ knowledge or consent but needs her parents’ permission to be absent from school to do so.

Despite the restrictions on their full-time employment, young adolescent consumers are a potent economic force, controlling billions of dollars in disposable income annually. Teenagers, hence, comprise an eagerly sought-after demographic target for marketers, advertisers, and the broadcast, print, and electronic media. In turn, to attract and hold these young viewers and readers, media programming directed to them increasingly emphasizes sex and violence as prominent themes; sexual themes are estimated to make up approximately one-third of the content of prime time shows popular with teens (3).

Winnicott once remarked aphoristically, “There is no such thing as a baby,” meaning that the baby could not be considered apart from its relationship with its mother. Although adolescence is the epoch par excellence of individuation and autonomy striving, it is similarly impossible to have a full understanding of adolescent development apart from its specific biological, family, community, cultural, and historical contexts (4). Thus, while recent theoretical perspectives on adolescence acknowledge the development of independence and autonomy from parents, there is now an increased awareness of the complementary dynamic of the adolescent’s developing capacity for interdependence and the ability to form and sustain mutually supportive relationships outside the family. Paralleling this relational perspective is an increased emphasis on the ecological perspective, which sees individual adolescents and their relationships as embedded in the interconnected contexts of family, school, neighborhood, and culture (5).

The interactions among these factors are complex and multidirectional. Not only are adolescents influenced by their families, but they reshape their families’ dynamics as they grow. Although important aspects of adolescents’ development are genetically and biologically determined, the effects of these determinants may be mediated or influenced by psychosocial factors. For example, family factors influence not only the impact of the timing of puberty but may actually affect the timing of puberty itself, with earlier and more rapid maturation in adolescents raised in more conflictual, less supportive homes (6,7,8). Behavioral genetics studies that have revealed the importance of nonshared environmental factors suggest that adolescent siblings evoke different interactional and social environments even within the same family (9).

It is important to bear in mind the great diversity of social and family contexts in which today’s adolescents grow up (10,11). In the United States, despite some commonalities, the experiences of adolescent who are immigrants, gay or lesbian, or growing up in poverty, foster care, single-parent, or other nontraditional family structures differ in important ways from the general patterns presented later in this chapter. Even greater differences exist between the majority culture of the West and more traditional societies, with less emphasis on individual autonomy and fewer expectations that adolescence should be a period of vocational choice or attaining full independence from families (12). Some anthropologic studies have concluded that in such preindustrial societies, there may be less adolescent turmoil and conflict with parents (13,14).

One important research question concerns the impact on adolescence as the processes of modernization (demographic shift to longer life span, smaller families, urbanization, shift from agrarian to manufacturing and service economies,) and globalization (with development of an “information society”) expose more and more teenagers in such societies to the same media and cultural influences as in the West (11,12,13). As 85% of the world’s adolescents, age 10 to 19 years old, live in developing countries, where they comprise one-third of the national populations, these influences will play a fateful role in shaping the coming century’s culture, politics, and economy (15).

One facet of globalization transforming important aspects of adolescence is the near-ubiquitous availability, at least in the industrialized world, of various electronic media, such
as TV, video games, cellular telephones, and the Internet (including instant messaging, e-mail, downloading music and videos, and social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace). At least ¾ of American teens instant message and as many as 1/3 maintain blogs (16). The Youth Risk Behavior Survey (17) found that one-fifth of high school students reported 3 or more hours a day spent on an average school day playing video or computer games or using a computer for something other than schoolwork. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation Study (18) documented the relative amounts of time youngsters, age 8–18 years old, spent daily on these activities, compared with nonmedia activities (see Table 3.1.4.1; note that the times are not mutually exclusive; for example a youngster may talk on the phone while watching TV. Indeed, about 25% of youngsters reported multitasking (using more than one medium at the same time)). Over and above the sheer number of hours spent on these various media and their impact on youngsters’ attention and cognitive style, youngsters are now exposed, for good or ill, and often without much adult supervision, to a plethora of global influences and virtual subcommunities, ranging from pornography to fellow aficionados of various cultural, athletic, or intellectual interests. Many adolescents now live much of their lives in an on-line social context; how this will influence their emotional and social development remains a vast experiment in progress (16).