Perspectives

Many have captured the pain, alienation and insecurities that plague that time of life with vividness and sensitivity, in a manner that theories and abstractions cannot.

Young adult fiction has become more edgy, hard-hitting and today explores profound issues like rape, sexual abuse, racism, gender discrimination

There is great discussion today about whether books are appropriate ways to reach adolescents because of all the technological innovations that have dramatically altered adolescents’ use of media.

Often, the culmination of the novel results in adolescents learning that institutions are important and possess more power than individuals.

The stories predominantly featured girls and women in the form of short stories in magazines because girls read a lot more than boys

books aimed at youth are future oriented while those about young people aimed at an adult audience are more likely to depict in a realistic fashion, the challenges that adolescents face.  In addition, some writers suggest that the YA novel is a 20th century marketing phenomenon – in many countries YA novels are called “jeans prose” because of their emphasis on the material culture of adolescents

The aim of most young adult literature aimed at young readers is to help “grow up” the adolescents themselves.

Perspectives

ver the last 40 years there has been a stripping away of youth rights, replaced by harsh conditions under which youth infractions will only tend to increase as abuse and other socially unacceptable behavior goes underground

aspirin is the most abused drug by teens and most often lands them in emergency rooms

adult men are the impregnators and yet there is silence around this latter issue

The US has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the developed world.

There is evidence that when there is violence involving youth, it is often inflicted by adult members of a family against children and youth in the family.

Advocates argue that while adults (especially wealthy ones) are paying some of the lowest taxes in this country’s history, the proportions of children in poverty has grown

adolescents are really an oppressed minority group that need to organize to demand their rightful place in society

erspectives

how youth with disabilities are perceived to be asexual

It is no wonder they are represented disproportionately among those who drop out of school, commit suicide and abuse drugs and alcohol

It may shorten or lengthen traditional adolescence and change their psychological and physical makeup as they go through teenage hood.

While boys tend to get louder and more confident as they go through middle school, girls do not feel like they have the permission to voice their opinions

girls’ self-esteems plummet when they move from elementary to middle school.

Both poor and minority youth have higher identification rates of physical and mental health issues, adding to the discrimination that they face from social institutions

The digital divide between lower class and middle- and upper-class youth, white and minority youth has grown wider

Critiques

High schools are particularly important settings to train youth in the external corporate culture that students will eventually be members of

conceptions of maturity are Eurocentric, male-centered and biased towards the upper-class.

Once the basic framework was laid down, the stereotypes and prejudices against youth were further ‘substantiated’ and popularized by the sciences

adolescents learn to regulate their behavior in accord with societal expectations

These norms ignored the specific social and cultural contexts in which people lived in

Fear of Loss of European Masculinity

The project was extended to individual human lives by classifying people of different ages as being differentially advanced, moving from the savagery of children to the barbarism of adolescents and finally the civilized behavior of adults

Adolescence

five decades ago there were no clearly identified cliques among teens; today, from the kinds of clothes worn to music listened to, teenagers are defined by their groups

the hysteria generated by adult fear of youth affects disadvantaged teens much more than they do middle-class adolescents

Thus, youth were isolated from adults and they had a lot of spending money – the two elements that gave birth to the modern youth culture

The minimum age that youth could have sex was raised to 18, with a special eye towards curtailing girls’ sexual activity

Initially, girls were sent to school at greater frequency than boys because it was looked at as a route to a teaching career

In the 19th century, well-to-do families began supporting high schools to isolate their teens from children of immigrants, street kids, vagrants and deviants (Katz, 1976

A 10-year-old and a 17-year-old were both perceived very similarly in terms of their maturity during the early colonial period in the USA; they often studied together, played together and performed household duties side by side

Psychology:

Teaching is therefore always flexible and contingent on the learner and the context.

a good teacher is one who stays within the zone and leads the child to increasing proficiency in a task

women now were considered inferior

humans have always worked to bring nature under control to suit their needs and all social formations, past and present, were designed to aid this process.

there is no such thing as individual emancipation or individual knowledge that is unmoored from society-group.

A teacher has to stay within the zone where the child can do a level of work on their own and the level where they require the help of an advanced leader/teacher/collective to complete the task.

They are able to articulate all the ways in which their lives are unstable, but they are not able to put it all together in a way that promotes social change;

all references to Marxism were left out because the authors decided this would make his work less palatable to western readers.

Theories

Bronfenbrenner’s theory helped shift the focus from the child as an isolated individual to a view of development as deeply embedded in and shaped by a web of social, cultural, and environmental contexts

gender roles

Examples include a parent’s workplace, local government decisions, or community health services.

the relationship between a child’s parents and teachers

and physical features.

A new generation of researchers began to challenge the idea that child development is the same across all contexts.

View of Youth

They argue that factors such as culture, gender, and ethnicity play a significant role in how cognitive abilities develop

Some studies have shown that children can complete Piagetian tasks at much younger ages than he proposed, especially when the tasks are made more familiar or relevant to their everyday experiences

They lack object permanence

Piaget believed that children are born with an instinct to organize their experiences into mental frameworks

Piaget viewed the abstract thinking that emerges in adolescence as the highest form of human reasoning.

dolescents often score higher on moral reasoning than adults

Historically, young people have often led social justice movements, especially when older generations have accepted inequality as long as it doesn’t affect them directly.

Perspectives of Adolescence

He argued that the emotional ups and downs of the teen years are natural and even necessary to shape a stable adult personality

The decisions individuals make during these years can affect the rest of their lives

built on the idea of life stages by outlining a developmental path from birth to adolescence. Freud proposed five stages of childhood, each focused on sexual or pseudo-sexual feelings tied to different areas of the body, ultimately leading to heterosexual attraction in adolescence

Less healthy responses include identity foreclosure, where teens adopt identities based on their family’s expectations rather than their own choices, and identity diffusion, where they feel confused or overwhelmed and stop trying to define themselves.

it is normal for teens to temporarily regress to earlier stages of development, letting their desires dominate their behavior

arguing that teens often behave in contradictory and unpredictable ways due to emerging sexual needs.

the search for identity dominates youth attention.

Brain Analysis

Also, the emotional situation matters a lot. Teens are more likely to act impulsively in emotionally intense situations. So, it’s hard to say that a person’s behavior is caused just by how their brain is wired.

One study, for instance, found that people with insomnia often misinterpret emotions because they don’t scan both the eyes and mouth at the same time, something non-insomniacs usually do.

For teens, their conclusions about adults’ emotions are based on their experiences with significant adults around them.

Some lawmakers believed that violent teens had something wrong in their brains and wouldn’t change, so they pushed for harsh punishment

They suggest that this risk-taking is a sign that teens are less developed or less capable than adults

or between males and females by pointing to the brain. This has often involved reinforcing stereotypes.

Some researchers argue that the teenage brain is shaped by the life experiences and environments of teens, so just seeing a link between brain activity and behavior doesn’t prove one causes the other

A Biological View

The researcher explained this by saying teens were using the older, emotional parts of the brain, while adults were using the front part of the brain that helps with thinking and judgment.

This means teens have a harder time managing their emotions, while also wanting more excitement and rewards, which can lead them to take more risks

Because of this, youth might act in ways adults don’t always understand

adults exhibit a similar propensity as adolescents.

There has been some criticism leveled at this model in studies that show that teens tend to engage in risky behavior more often when their peers are around.

The discovery of these biological changes has led many experts to describe adolescence as a time when impulses often take over teen behavior.

The concept of “adolescence” itself is relatively new

Adolescence is the transitional space between childhood and adulthood

Whether a researcher sees adolescence as a social construct or a biological fact has a big impact on the kind of research they do

Instead, they believe it is a social construct, something shaped by culture, history, and society rather than biology alone.

In this view, adolescence became an important turning point, a stage where young people were expected to make decisions that would shape the kind of adults they would become

This idea supported the belief that societies, and even individuals, could be ranked by how “evolved” or “advanced” they were, which had lasting effects on how adolescence and other life stages were understood.

A key sign of puberty in AMAB individuals is the first ejaculation

Neither Child nor Adult

the average girl reaches puberty around age 12.5. Just a couple of hundred years ago, it was closer to 16 (Chumlea et al., 2003; Evelith, 2017). While the age of sexual maturity has been falling, the average age at which women have their first child has been rising; it’s now just over 26 in many developed countries.