On assumptions and adolescence

How are young people understood in American society? Why are they understood that way?

Biological bases for adolescence have strongly shaped how young people are considered. G. Stanley Hall's coining of adolescence cited biological immaturity as the reason for young people to struggle through periods of "storm and stress and to act like "pigmoid savages." Despite any biological backing, Hall's work laid the groundwork for understanding post-Industrial youth as irrational, emotional, and needing of protection due to biologically-based hormonal imbalances and wiring. Because they were born that way.

This biological explanation has been picked up by many to explain away adolescent concerns. It has influenced the DSM, and informed basic assumptions of researchers and psychologists. And this has influenced how young people are discussed and known.

Focus on the Family's James Dobson draws upon psychological research to counsel parents that that their children are so hard to understand because their hormones render them biologically (thus necessarily) irrational and entirely out of touch. "For several years," he writes to his followers in a forum titled Solid Answers, "a teenager may not interpret his world accurately." Biological changes in adolescence leads not only to young people's skewed perspective on the world, but to other things too. Their son thinks differently than their daughter because he is "wired neurologically" and because of the "influence of certain hormones". He also brushes off the validity of young females' emotions by letting parents know that they are fleeting by-products of "glandular upheaval" that should be tracked and, if at all possible, avoided. In other words, concerns and will expressed by young women are merely the unpleasant side-effect of a hormonal phase they are going through. They don't mean anything to the kid. They will pass.

Of course, certain hormones have specific types of influence over emotions and behaviors. But an influence is not a cause. Attention to biological determinants to behavior lacks attention to identities being inherently produced as a product of expectations and actions. It lacks understandings of how identities are socially produced.

NPR recently ran a piece on young professions in the workplace fully equipped with "helicopter parents" who swoop in to provide counsel and to buffer blows. Referring repeatedly to college- and full-employment-aged young people as "kid" and "child," this media portrayal further shapes young people beyond the teenage years -- which coincides with the extension of the period of adolescence -- as immature, irresponsible non-adults.


Critical scholars such as Larry Grossberg, Nancy Lesko, and Mike Males challenge these framings, and raise question about the assumptions a held on youth that lead to older and older citizens being treated as minors. I'll be drawing upon their work to look at young people's social media use as a form of resistance against the extended marginality of adolescence.

Because how we treat something has everything to do with how we understand it.