Seltzer's theory of adolescent identity formation

CHAPTER 10 The Social World of Adolescence The search for identity is considered the primary developmental task of the adolescent period. In this chapter, you will find that the outcome of an adolescent’s search is very much affected by the social world. Peers play a critical role, and so do parents, schools, and neighborhoods. All are in turn influenced by the cultural and historical context in which the adolescent’s identity is formed. Counselors, therapists, teachers, and other helping professionals who support adolescents through their explorations and struggles must consider the impact of these multiple, interdependent factors. As we have seen repeatedly, no single factor or influence fully explains any developmental outcome. In this chapter, we present a model of the mechanism for social identity development and explore research on the influence of peers, parents, schools, leisure, work, and culture on that process. We conclude with a discussion of implications for professionals who work with adolescents. Let’s begin with an example: As a balmy October turned into a frigid November, 12-year-old Tamara’s mother repeatedly suggested to her daughter that they go shopping to replace Tamara’s outgrown winter jacket. Tamara refused. She said she wasn’t sure what sort of jacket she wanted, admitting that it depended on what the other girls in her class would be wearing. The popular girls had not yet worn jackets to school, despite the cold. They, too, were waiting and watching! Finally, in mid-December, one popular girl in the seventh-grade class capitulated to her mother’s demands and made a jacket choice. Tamara and her classmates at last knew what to wear. Parents and teachers are often perplexed, even dismayed, by the importance of peers to the adolescent. Why would an otherwise sensible young person become so dependent upon the actions and choices of others, and what role do parents and other concerned adults play in an adolescent’s life when peers become so important? Dependence upon peers is a normal and important developmental process for the young adolescent. As you will see, the search for identity (see Chapter 9) that characterizes the adolescent period takes place largely within the world of peers. The adolescent period roughly begins at puberty, although in today’s world many of the processes discussed in this chapter are beginning to affect the lives of children even before the onset of puberty. FRAMEWORKLESSNESS AND AUTONOMY: A MODEL OF ADOLESCENT SOCIAL IDENTITY Theorists have long argued that one’s identity develops within the context of interpersonal interactions (Cooley, 1902; Mead, 1934; see also Chapter 7). Erikson (1968) suggested that peers are particularly important in the construction of identity at adolescence, and Seltzer (1982) expanded upon Erikson’s ideas, specifying how and why the peer group plays such a central role. To understand fully the function of peers, let’s look again at what happens when a child enters adolescence. The body changes in appearance, adult sexual needs emerge, hormonal shifts may heighten irritability, the capacity to reflect on the future and on the self expands bringing its own brand of egocentrism, and demands for autonomy increase. All of these changes are supported by dramatic alterations in the adolescent brain. These profound shifts can produce a state of instability and anxiety unique to adolescence, which Seltzer calls frameworklessness. Think about your own experiences as a young adolescent. Can you relate to the sense of frameworklessness? The adolescent is at sea. Previous boundaries and guideposts are no longer functional. In earlier developmental periods, expansion and growth exist within a context of familiar motion and exercise. The adolescent condition is different, however. The adolescent is possessed of new physical and intellectual capabilities that are both mystical and mystifying. . . . The allure of the adult world calls, and is strong, even as the safety of childhood is close and still beckons. Yet neither fits; the one is outgrown, the other not yet encompassable. (Seltzer, 1982, p. 59) The adolescent’s passage to adulthood is in some ways parallel to the infant’s passage to childhood status. To exercise their developing skills and to explore the beckoning world, infants must give up the security of the caregiver’s continual presence and care. Most attachment theorists believe that toddlers manage the stress of this separation by referring to their working model of the other, a kind of mental representation of the caregiver, which provides feelings of security and makes independent exploration possible. For adolescents, the task of establishing adult independence requires separating from caregivers on a new plane, a process traditionally called the “second” individuation (Blos, 1975). Adolescents rework their views of their parents, deidealize them, and loosen, somewhat, their emotional dependency (Steinberg & Belsky, 1991; Steinberg & Monahan, 2007). Figure 10.1 illustrates the typical decline between the ages of 11 and 17 years in adolescents’ willingness to endorse the legitimacy of their parents’ claims to authority or to endorse the notion that they (the children) are obligated to follow parental dictates. These data are from a large sample of Chilean youth, but young people in many countries, including the United States, show similar patterns of decline, with the steepest drop coming in early adolescence (Darling, Cumsille, & Martinez, 2008). Thus, it appears that in early adolescence the mental representation or concept of the parent becomes more peripheral to the child’s self-system. However, a teenager’s increasing individuation and sense of autonomy does not come without a price. As adolescents experience a loss in feelings of security, their sense of frameworklessness can increase. But psychological separation from parents does not mean cutting ties in some dramatic fashion, even though stereotypes about adolescence might imply this. We know that emotional attachments persist in some form across the lifespan, and there is more than one pathway through the adolescent period. Cultural assumptions of interdependence and virtues such as filial piety can help shape alternative narratives of adolescence with respect to parent–child relationships. While the movement toward separation and independence becomes stronger over the course of early adolescence in many countries, the same is not completely true for adolescents in China. For example, U.S. adolescents report more conflicts, less emotional closeness and a reduced sense of obligation to parents compared to their Chinese counterparts (Pomerantz, Qin, Wang, & Chen, 2009). Filial piety (see Chapter 5), which involves the sense of repaying and honoring parents for their role in raising them, appears to influence the developmental course of Chinese early adolescents substantially. Pomerantz and her colleagues (2011) found that Chinese adolescents’ sense of obligation to parents increased over 7th and 8th grades compared to a declining pattern among U.S. youth (see Figure 10.2). The trend toward increasing levels of obligation to parents was associated with better grades, greater mastery of learning, and improved self-regulation. Adolescents in China and the United States who perceived greater obligation to please parents demonstrated higher achievement overall compared to those without a comparable sense of obligation. Figure 10.1 Adolescents’ likelihood of endorsing parental legitimacy and their own obligation to obey, by age. SOURCE: Darling, N., Cumsille, P., & Martinez, M. L. (2008). Individual differences in adolescents’ beliefs about the legitimacy of parent authority and their own obligation to obey: A longitudinal investigation. Child Development, 79, 1103–1118. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Figure 10.2 Obligation to parents across two cultures. U.S. and Chinese adolescents show differences in their academic motivation as a function of their intention to please parents. SOURCE: Pomerantz, E. M., Qin, L., Wang, Q., & Chen, H. (2011). Changes in early adolescents’ sense of responsibility to their parents in the United States and China: Implications for academic functioning. Child Development, 82, 1136–1151. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd. In other words, even though decreasing connectedness to parents among early adolescents is culturally accepted in the United States, its normativeness does not prevent it from contributing to declines in academic performance. The authors of this study offer a possible explanation—“most likely because American children are in need of the motivation in the academic context that their sense of responsibility to their parents provides during the early adolescent years” (p. 1147). The Peer Arena Paradoxically, as children seek autonomy from their parents in early adolescence, they seem to become more dependent on their peers. In a classic study, Steinberg and Silverberg (1986) asked 10- to 16-year-olds in the United States questions about their relationships with parents and agemates. As most studies have found, children between fifth and eighth grades showed a marked increase in agreement on items assessing emotional autonomy from parents, such as “There are some things about me that my parents don’t know” and “There are things that I would do differently from my mother and father when I become a parent.” Yet, when the students in this study were asked “What would you really do?” if a friend suggested either some antisocial act such as cheating or some neutral act such as joining a club, they showed a marked decrease between the fifth and eighth grades in their ability to resist peer influence, as you can see in Figure 10.3. Newer studies indicate that increasing susceptibility to peer influence is greatest for anti-social or risky behaviors, and more likely for boys than for girls (e.g., Sim & Koh, 2003). Resistance to peer influence begins to rise in middle adolescence, increasing most between 14 and 18 years, with continuing, shallower gains in young adulthood (e.g., Steinberg & Monahan, 2007). Again, peer influence on risky behavior tends be greater and lasts longer, declining only after mid-adolescence (see Erickson, Crosnoe, & Dornbusch, 2000, and the discussion of risky behavior later in this chapter). Overall, it appears that between the ages of 11 and 14 children transfer at least some of their emotional dependency from their parents to their peers. Why do peers become so important? Seltzer (1982) proposes that it is because adolescents share in common the unique state of frameworklessness. She describes nine basic characteristics that define this age group in contemporary society. Among them are similar chronological age and educational status and shared coping with feelings of aloneness and the loss of past certainties. Social psychologists established long ago that people under stress tend to affiliate with others perceived as having similar experiences (Schacter, 1959), so that adolescents’ shared sense of instability makes the peer group a likely target of affiliation. The sometimes difficult movement toward identity can, at least in part, be shared. Figure 10.3 Parents, peers, and adolescent feelings of autonomy. SOURCE: Based on Steinberg, L., & Silverberg, S. B. (1986). The vicissitudes of autonomy in early adolescence. Child Development, 57, 847. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Peers are thus a source of support. But Seltzer (1982) argues also that the peer group becomes both the site and the raw material for constructing an identity. There are twin processes at work: The first is social comparison. As we saw in Chapter 7, younger school-aged children evaluate themselves in comparison to others. In later chapters we will find that adults continue to use social comparison as a means of self-assessment and self-refinement. But for adolescents, the lack of identity may make this process intense and more consuming. Second is a process of attribute substitution, which involves both imitation and identification. Adolescents need to borrow and “try on” various behaviors and attributes that they observe in others because the state of frameworklessness leaves them without clearly defined ways of behaving and thinking. Peers become an important resource for such borrowing. A formerly quiet boy might imitate the wisecracking style of a friend, a girl may explore the mysteries of Buddhism espoused by a classmate, or a mediocre student might work for hours on a special project, mimicking the approach of a more successful peer. The borrowing goes beyond imitation to partial identification with friends, so that if a boy’s friend has a special talent for hockey, the boy might appropriate a sense of accomplishment as a hockey player from his association with the friend. This appropriation of “stand-in elements” provides relief for the adolescent from the anxiety of being without a stable sense of self. The twin processes of social comparison and imitation appear to constitute a type of experimentation that is necessary for mature identity construction. At first, the trying-on process is rapid, intense, and undifferentiated, but toward later adolescence, some features actually become more stable elements that will form the foundation of the young adult’s identity. Ideally, the goal of all this effort is the development or construction of a fundamental sense of what fits for the particular adolescent. In summary, Seltzer (1982) argues that peers in large part provide the arena for identity formation. She also describes the Eriksonian ideal of unrestricted sampling of various “identities” as a normative process, but in reality what adolescents are able to do may be more circumscribed. As we will see in the next section, the structure of the peer culture may constrain the opportunity to try on some characteristics and behaviors. THE STRUCTURE OF THE PEER NETWORK As you saw in Chapter 8 by early adolescence a typical youngster is part of a nested set of peer relationships that seem to form concentric circles. He spends most of his time with one or two close friends, the innermost circle. A larger clique of about 6 to 10 members forms a less intimate second circle, composed of friends who eat lunch or go to class together. The clique’s boundaries are somewhat permeable, and the membership may fluctuate. Finally, the much larger third circle is the adolescent’s crowd. What crowd members share is not necessarily friendship, but similar interests, attitudes, behaviors, and appearance. Brown (1990) defined adolescent crowds as large “reputation-based collectives of similarly stereotyped individuals who may or may not spend much time together” (p. 177). Crowds reflect the individual’s social status. And, they “. . . demarcate different values and lifestyles that can form the core of an individual’s identity” (Brown, Herman, Hamm, & Heck, 2008, p. 530). Many studies confirm that association with a crowd can be linked to youngsters’ drug and alcohol use, sexual behavior, academic commitment, achievement, and even the types of psychiatric symptoms they display, such as externalizing and internalizing problems. Once a member, a teen’s sampling of elements of behavior will be limited to some degree by the crowd to which the teen belongs. Few would be surprised to find that adolescents are strongly influenced by their closest friends. What is striking about the data on peer affiliation is how powerful crowd membership seems to be. A classic example of the impact of crowds on adolescent behavior is provided by a large scale study by Steinberg and his associates (e.g., Lamborn, Mounts, Steinberg, & Dornbusch, 1991; Mounts & Steinberg, 1995; Steinberg, 1996; Steinberg, Fegley, & Dornbusch, 1993; Steinberg, Lamborn, Darling, Mounts, & Dornbusch, 1994; Steinberg, Lamborn, Dornbusch, & Darling, 1992). More than 20,000 adolescents and their families from nine public high schools in Wisconsin and northern California were studied. Students came from ethnically and socioeconomically diverse communities (more than 40% were ethnic minorities) and from a variety of family structures (intact, divorced, and remarried). Student data were collected over a 3-year period from 9th through 12th grades. Teens answered questions about their emotional adjustment, academic achievement, and behavior, the parenting practices of their families, and their peer associations. Steinberg (e.g., 1996) and his colleagues found a characteristic crowd structure that many other large-scale studies of U.S. teens have confirmed (e.g., Barber, Eccles, & Stone, 2001; Brown et al., 2008). Roughly 20% of students belong to popularity-conscious crowds (“populars” and “jocks”), who are moderately achievement oriented and may engage in some illicit behavior, such as drug use. About 20% belong to “alienated” crowds (“druggies” or “burnouts”), who are even less invested in academic success and who may be involved in heavy drug use and delinquent behavior. “Average” crowds, comprising about 30% of students, are not openly hostile to academics but, like the populars, are only moderately concerned about grades. In majority White high schools, some crowds are defined primarily by ethnicity (roughly 10% to 15% depending on the school), and academic achievement differences exist among these ethnically defined crowds. Less than 5% of high schoolers belong to crowds characterized by high academic achievement. These students are unlikely to use drugs and may form strong ties with teachers. Distinct crowd structures also exist in other cultures. Researchers in Denmark, for example, found four major crowd categories: Alternative, Urban, Conventional, and Achievement-Oriented (Delsing, ter Bogt, Engels & Meeus, 2007). Alternative crowds (“punks,” “metal heads,” “goths”) tended to display more nonconformist, rebellious behavior than more conventional crowds. The Urban crowd was characterized by an orientation to musical and cultural activities typically found in urban areas (“hip-hop,” “rasta”). The Conventional crowd was made up of “normals,” rural, and religious youth. The Achievement-oriented crowd (“posh,” “brains”) was oriented toward academic and financial success. Affiliation with the two nonconventional crowds (Alternative and Urban) was associated with higher rates of delinquency, aggression and depression. In Singapore, where the cultural rules for dress and behavior are stricter and where a relatively strong norm for conformity exists, adolescents also identify with different crowds. Sim and Yeo (2012) identified seven primary crowd orientations from a large number of suggestions obtained from open-ended questions (“Nerd,” “Gangster,” “Athlete,” “Computer Geek,” “Joker,” “Ordinary,” and “Loner”). “Gangsters” were generally rebellious in the ways they dressed, were rude toward others and disinterested in academics. You may suspect some overlap between these and the crowds seen in U.S. schools, notably with jocks, brains, delinquents, and nerds. While groups in both cultures show a similar distinction between conventional and unconventional, there are also notable differences. Because of the cultural value placed on academic achievement and filial piety, “nerds” in Singapore were primarily identified with academic achievement rather than social awkwardness, and thus viewed much more positively. Although socializing and “partying” are common features of the “popular” crowd in the United States, a comparable “popular” group did not emerge in Singapore. The authors suggest that this is due to the relative absence of these types of activities among Singaporean youth. “Nerds” and “gangsters” were the largest and most commonly identifiable crowds. “Athletes” came in a distant third, a much less recognizable group compared to U.S. schools. Although the sample in this study did not represent the whole of Singapore, findings are interesting in light of how cultural values and practices shape adolescent behavior and identify formation. Teens and parents often use the word clique to describe all groups of friends. In these examples, are they talking about cliques, or are they talking about crowds? How teens find a niche among the available crowds is not completely understood (Brown, 1990). Steinberg (1996) suggests three determining factors: children’s personalities and interests as they enter adolescence; the types of crowds available; and the ways that parents attempt to manage their children’s peer relationships. We’ll take a close look at parents’ role in children’s crowd membership later in this chapter. In Chapter 8 you learned that adults frequently attribute the behavior of adolescents to “peer pressure,” what we have called the influence of peers, which implies that the individual teenager might conform to others’ demands despite his or her better judgment. What research findings also show is that adolescents operate according to the principles of group dynamics that govern any social group—namely, they often choose to participate in shared norms, roles, and expectations, a process called peer selection (e.g., Cohen & Prinstein, 2006). They are influenced by peers, and sometimes that peer influence is related to negative control tactics by their peers, such as teasing and threats of rejection. Under the powerful influence of peers, teens may willingly engage in peer-sanctioned behavior. The willingness to be influenced by peers may be related to adolescents’ identity processes. They are motivated to borrow styles, attitudes, behaviors and so forth from others, and they serve as models from whom others borrow. In the case of delinquent behavior, research has consistently shown that deviant peers mutually influence each other (Gifford-Smith, Dodge, Dishion, & McCord, 2005). Social processes are also amplified by the developmental changes in the teenage brain which affect risk taking. Steinberg (1996) provides a specific example of the U.S. crowd’s effects on academic achievement. Recall from the data on teens’ distribution among their high school crowds that a relatively small percentage is committed to academic excellence (i.e., are A students). Membership in the largest, most appealing, and preferred crowds (populars, jocks, and average) prescribes more modest academic achievement. Most students in these crowds, representing about 50% of high schoolers, earn Bs on average. Could it be that these data simply indicate that students who begin with only moderate academic commitments and abilities gravitate toward groups of similar individuals? Several longitudinal studies (e.g., Eccles & Barber, 1999; Steinberg, 1996; Kindermann, 2008) suggest otherwise. For example, after tracking students for 3 years who began with similar academic records and behavior profiles, Steinberg (1996) found that students’ crowd affiliation was highly correlated with their later grades and delinquent activities. So, crowd membership made a unique contribution to these outcomes over and above early developmental characteristics. What role do ethnicity and peer relationships play in academic achievement among U.S. adolescents, given that their peer networks are often based on shared ethnicity, even in heterogeneous school settings (Hamm, 2000)? Let’s look at a study that examined this interplay. This study was based on a large representative sample of U.S. adolescents (Add Health study, see Chapter 9) over three waves from 1994 through 2002 (Goza & Ryabov, 2009). Peer networks, GPA, and odds of high school graduation were examined for approximately 14,000 students. Regardless of their racial/ethnic background, students generally had lower graduation rates in low SES schools compared to schools with higher school-wide SES. All students, especially non-Hispanic White students, had higher graduation rates when there was greater school-wide diversity in the student body. When researchers took a closer look at the peer networks of African American, Latino, non-Hispanic White, and Asian students, certain unique effects on achievement and graduation rates were found. Remember that the amount of diversity in any school may be a substantial or a small percentage of overall school composition. Minority students may then have different experiences with regard to the availability of peer networks that are ethnically and racially similar. For African American students, membership in ethnically diverse peer networks contributed positively to their academic achievement, even though it was not related to their graduation rates. Findings were different for Asian, Latino and non-Hispanic White students. These three groups were more likely to graduate, and Asian and Latino students were more likely to have higher GPAs, when their peer networks were more homogeneous. While research on crowd structure and social processes tell us much about adolescent peer behavior, we should remember that there are underlying brain changes that are also at work here. Areas of the brain involved in social information processing overlap in activation with areas that we refer to as the emotional brain system, which includes sub-cortical structures such as the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, and hippocampus. At puberty, there is both structural and functional change in these overlapping structures. We will provide more information about these brain changes in a later section of this chapter. THE ROLE OF PARENTS Given that peers become so important to young adolescents, what is the role of adults, especially parents, in adolescents’ lives? A brief history of perspectives on adolescent development may be useful here. Early psychoanalytic writers described this period as one of conflict between parents and their teens that is sparked by the reemergence of latent sexual impulses as the child reaches puberty (Freud, 1958). The classic interpretation is that the young adolescent’s emotional attachments become sexualized and need to be redirected to agemates. In this view, the child’s press for autonomy creates conflict with the parents but is seen as normal and necessary. Neopsychoanalytic views have become more moderate over time (e.g., Blos, 1975), but still assume that the child’s cognitive and affective detachment from parents is to be expected in the service of autonomy. Erikson’s (1968) view of adolescence as a “normative crisis” supports this as a time of potential upheaval. The early psychoanalytic tradition framed the typical parent–adolescent relationship as a struggle, with teens trying to pull away from parents to the point of rebellion. Prescriptions for appropriate parental behavior often focused on the child’s legitimate need to break away and the parents’ responsibility to “let go” and allow their adolescents to “be themselves.” Parents were advised to back off because teens must be free to explore with their peers to consolidate their identity. Parents who are invested in their adolescents’ well-being balance acceptance with appropriate limit-setting and monitoring. In the 1970s and beyond, studies of adolescence contradicted earlier constructions based on psychoanalytic thought. They indicated that major transformations do occur in family relations as children pass through adolescence but that becoming more independent and personally responsible is not necessarily accompanied by emotional detachment from parents (Collins & Laursen, 2004). Offer (1969) reported that roughly two thirds of teens experienced adolescence as a tranquil period or at least experienced only minor conflicts with parents. Montemayor (1983) reported that in typical families, teens and their parents argued on average twice a week, hardly a matter of great concern. A more recent meta-analysis indicates that conflicts with parents occur most frequently in early adolescence. By middle adolescence, they begin to decline in frequency but tend to increase in intensity (Laursen, Coy, & Collins, 1998). Across cultures, both adolescents and parents view some aspects of parental control to be quite legitimate. Parents can exercise authority over moral issues (like stealing and justice) or even issues governed by conventional rules (such as table manners), especially when conventional rules have prudential consequences (having to do with an individual’s health or safety; see Darling, Cumsille, & Martinez, 2007; Darling et al., 2008; Smetana, 1997). It’s when parents impose rules on what their teens perceive as personal issues (like what you can say to a friend in an email, how you wear your hair, or what music you listen to) that conflicts are most likely to arise (Smetana & Daddis, 2002). For teens, gaining control over this personal domain is a way of establishing autonomy and therefore is an important identity issue (Smetana, Crean, & Campione-Barr, 2005). Observers began to argue that if disagreements with parents center on relatively mundane issues like music and hairstyles, perhaps the storminess of relations between parents and adolescents has been overstated (Rutter, 1995). Parenting prescriptions began to include the implicit advice, “Don’t worry, things will work out fine.” As you might guess, however, things may not be so simple. Camila, at age 16, states that friends say she and her mother seem like “best friends,” but she then goes on to describe a variety of disagreements that she has with her parents. How does she try to exert her independence, and how do her parents respond? Arnett (2000), for example, raises a word of caution. He suggests that conflicts over relatively minor matters are nonetheless stressful for both parents and children. He further warns that the “mundane” matters that adolescents argue with their parents about may not be as trivial as they seem. Rather, they . . . often concern issues such as when adolescents should begin dating and whom they should date, where they should be allowed to go, and how late they should stay out. All of these issues can serve as proxies for arguments over more serious issues such as substance use, automobile driving safety, and sex. (p. 320) In other words, some of the behaviors that adolescents categorize as “personal,” their parents probably see as “prudential/conventional” because the behaviors have potentially serious consequences for a teen’s future (see Hasebe, Nucci, & Nucci, 2004; Smetana & Daddis, 2002). Peer relationships, in particular, can be a flash point for parents and youth because what one group (adolescents) determines to be a matter of personal choice, the other (parents) may see as putting their child at some risk. What do parents of adolescents really know about their adolescent children’s friendships and how much do teens tell them? Eighty-three percent of European-American high school and college students had lied to their parents in the past week according to a study by Arnett and colleagues (2004), and lies for the high school group most often involved peers and alcohol. Adolescents lied more to parents whom they perceived as controlling, cold, or rejecting (see also Tilton-Weaver et al., 2010). Consistent with their advances in cognition, adolescents make increasingly sophisticated decisions about what to disclose to parents. Information may be mangaged in various ways: full disclosure, partial story telling with details omitted, changing the subject or avoiding conversations, and outright lying (Darling, Cumsille, Caldwell, & Dowdy, 2006). A small cross-cultural study investigated information management in African American and Hmong low-income samples (Bakken & Brown, 2010). Unlike the African American families in this study, the Hmong families were recent immigrants/refugees to the United States who faced language and cultural barriers. The African American parents had a long history in the United States and were more knowledgeable about cultural norms. Hmong adolescents perceived their parents to be more restrictive and less able to help them with some of the challenges they faced. Understandably, Hmong parents wanted to protect and preserve the values of their culture, but frustrations and difficulties of life in a new country affected both parents’ and adolescents’ experience. Hmong adolescents justified withholding information from parents on pragmatic grounds (e.g., because they wouldn’t understand) but also because they wanted to maintain good relationships with their parents. Hmong adolescents didn’t want to worry parents by disclosing some aspects of teenage life in the United States. Younger African American adolescents believed that their parents had the resources to find out whether or not they were telling them the truth. Compared to older African American adolescents, younger adolescents engaged in more full disclosure. African American parents believed that they needed to balance their children’s growing need for autonomy with their parental inclination to protect them from experiences of racial discrimination. Although African American youth could understand parental protectiveness, they were secretive about some things to preserve their own growing autonomy. Both universal aspects of adolescent autonomy-seeking and culturally specific rationales for information management were noted in this study. Even though the authors conclude that lying to parents is typically not a good idea, “more careful work is revealing that adolescents are both thoughtful and strategic in deciding what information about peers to share with parents. Often, they consider not only the quality of the parent-child relationship and the best interests of their parents but also their obligation to maintain confidence of peers” (Brown & Bakken, 2011, p. 155). It appears that the importance of peer relationships and the press for behavioral autonomy need to be appreciated by parents, serving to make their parenting strategies more flexible, though no less involved, at this age. Research on the family as one supportive context for adolescent development has been growing rapidly. Its theoretical framework rests upon Baumrind’s (e.g., 1971, 1978, 1991) studies of parenting styles, in which, you will recall from Chapter 5, she identified two important dimensions of parental behavior, each of which is predictive of a particular constellation of child characteristics. First is parental warmth or responsiveness. Responsive parents seem to encourage their children’s self-acceptance, confidence, and assertiveness by being warm, involved, and accepting of their children’s needs and feelings. They take their children’s feelings and expressed needs seriously and are willing to explain their own actions, particularly when they impose limits on the child. The second dimension is parental control or demandingness. Demanding parents apparently foster self-discipline and achievement by making maturity demands on their children. They make and enforce rules, provide consistent supervision or parental monitoring, and confront their children when their behavior does not measure up. According to a large body of research by Baumrind and others, the most effective parenting style, authoritative parenting, combines high responsiveness and high demandingness. Treating responsiveness and demandingness as two distinct dimensions, three other categories of parenting style can be derived. Besides authoritative, there are authoritarian, permissive (also called indulgent), and neglecting (also called uninvolved or dismissive) styles (Maccoby & Martin, 1983). Authoritarian parents are low on responsiveness but high on demandingness. Permissive parents are high on responsiveness but low on demandingness, and neglecting or dismissive parents are essentially disengaged, scoring low on both dimensions. Before you read Box 10.1 on how authoritative parenting of adolescents “looks in action,” consider the evidence that it can positively influence teen behavior and well-being. Baumrind (e.g., 1991) assessed the behavior of parents and their young adolescents and found that “authoritative parents put out exceptional effort . . . and their adolescents were exceptionally competent (mature, prosocial, high internal locus of control, low internalizing and externalizing problem behavior, low substance use)” (Baumrind, 1993, p. 1308). In the large-scale study of 14- to 18-year-olds by Steinberg and his colleagues, parenting style was linked to four aspects of teens’ adjustment: psychosocial development, school achievement, internalized distress, and problem behavior. The children of authoritative parents scored best on the majority of these indicators, and those of neglectful parents scored worst (Lamborn et al., 1991). After 1 year, the adolescents’ adjustment status was reassessed. Parenting style was predictive of patterns of change over the year. For example, adolescents from authoritative homes showed increases in self-reliance, whereas other adolescents showed little change or, if they had neglectful parents, actually declined somewhat (Steinberg et al., 1994). In general, research on parenting styles from as early as the 1940s (e.g., Baldwin, 1948) has produced results that are consistent with the large-scale studies of today, supporting the notion that both responsiveness and demandingness are beneficial. Overall, responsiveness seems more closely tied to adolescents’ self-confidence and social competence, and demandingness is more closely associated with “good” behavior and self-control. Some work indicates that it can be useful to consider responsiveness as comprising separable factors: acceptance is being affectionate, praising the child, being involved in the child’s life, and accepting the child’s strengths and limitations, showing concern for the child’s needs, and it is correlated with children’s self-esteem and social adjustment. Democracy is the degree to which parents encourage children’s psychological autonomy by soliciting their opinions or encouraging self-expression, and it is most closely linked to children’s self-reliance, self-confidence, willingness to work hard, and general competence (Steinberg, 1996). Democracy is the opposite of “psychological control,” which we described in Chapter 5: a parent’s tendency to subvert an adolescent’s autonomy by invalidating his feelings, constraining his verbal expressions, using love withdrawal, and so on. Psychological control predicts internalizing problems in adolescents, and to a lesser degree, externalizing problems (e.g., Barber et al., 2005). Regardless of how we label the fundamental dimensions of parenting style, there is very strong empirical support for what constitutes “good parenting” for adolescents, and this support is surprisingly consistent across many cultures (Barber et al., 2005; Darling et al., 2008), from collectivist societies with more hierarchical family structures (such as China) to more individualistic cultures with more democratic family structures (such as the United States). It is also consistent across demographic and ethnic subgroups in the United States (e.g., Chung & Steinberg, 2006; Wang, Pomerantz, & Chen, 2008). One of the newer findings is that authoritative parenting’s beneficial effects are partly determined by adolescents’ willingness to accept their parents’ authority on a variety of issues. When parents have established a warm family climate and are perceived by their children to monitor them closely, adolescents are more likely to endorse parental legitimacy and their own obligation to obey, even though they are more likely to argue with their parents (Darling et al., 2008). Ironically, effective parental monitoring depends partly on adolescents’ willingness to disclose information about their behavior to their parents, which in turn depends on adolescents seeing their parents as warm and understanding (e.g., Smetana, 2008; Soenens, Vanseteenkiste, Luyckx, & Goossens, 2006). Further, parents who are both high on acceptance/democracy and high on demandingness/monitoring are likely to make clearer distinctions between personal issues and other domains (moral and prudentially conventional) in their governance (Smetana, 1995, 2008), which may in turn help their children to feel more comfortable disclosing information. But, relatively speaking, how powerful a role can such parental behaviors actually play in adolescence, when the influence of peers has been found to be so great? An important key to answering this question is to recall, again, that multiple determinants interact to affect outcomes at every developmental stage. Let’s reconsider, for example, school achievement in the teen years. When authoritative parents involve themselves in their adolescents’ schooling by attending school programs, helping with course selection, and monitoring student progress, their children are more likely to achieve (Gutman, Sameroff, & Eccles, 2002; Mounts & Steinberg, 1995; Steinberg, Lamborn, Dornbusch, et al., 1992). However, as we have seen, an adolescent’s crowd affiliation also impacts school achievement. Steinberg (1996) found that teens who began with similar academic records showed change over time in school performance consistent with their crowd membership, indicating the importance of peer influence despite parental efforts. Can parents affect crowd membership? Characteristic behaviors of the child are probably important in determining crowd membership, and a child’s behaviors are associated with parenting style. Steinberg (1996) describes parenting as “launching” children on a trajectory through adolescence. But parental effects may be indirect. Research has shown for a long time that teenagers whose friends engage in delinquent behaviors are more likely to do so as well (see Brown & Bakken, 2011). However, membership in delinquent crowds may be less the result of peer pressure and more the effect of intentional peer selection (Farrington, Loeber, Yin, & Anderson, 2002). Some parental behaviors, however, may have a moderating effect on peer selection processes. Monitoring and encouraging achievement, are correlated with children’s choice of more academically oriented peers (e.g.,Mounts & Steinberg, 1995). When urban parents in poor neighborhoods show high levels of monitoring and involvement their kids are more likely to steer clear of joining delinquent groups or gangs and less likely to become juvenile offenders (Chung & Steinberg, 2006; Walker-Barnes & Mason, 2001). But the availability of crowds is also important. If, for example, all crowds value high academic achievement, or if none do, the child’s trajectory with regard to school performance will be much less affected by authoritative parents who value academic excellence than if there is a diversity of crowds. Here is a clue to other ways in which parenting style may influence behavior. Steinberg proposes that authoritative parents, who are involved in their children’s lives, may do things to help structure the child’s peer group options and thus indirectly affect achievement by affecting the accessibility of peers. Does the local high school have few, if any, academically oriented students? Parents may arrange for their children to go elsewhere; they might move, or put their children in private schools, or choose to home school. It is not uncommon for parents who live in dangerous environments to send their children to live for brief periods with relatives. Such behavior, of course, depends on income and on the availability of such options, but it also depends on parental involvement. Authoritative parents are invested parents, often making personal sacrifices to maintain their commitment to their view of good parenting (Greenberger & Goldberg, 1989). Box 10.1: Authoritative Parenting with Adolescents Is authoritative parenting for real or some magician’s trick? How can a parent, especially the parent of a savvy teenager, be warm, responsive, respectful, and democratic on one hand but firm, controlling, and watchful on the other? Imagine that 14-year-old Risa bursts into the house on a Friday after school, literally jumping for joy at a party invitation she has just received. It’s from Katy, one of the most popular girls in school, and being at the party will automatically define Risa as one of the popular elite. Risa prattles on about who will be there, and what to wear, and “Oh my god! I’ve got to start getting ready now!” Dad is working at home this afternoon, so he’s the P.I.C.—parent in charge. First, he listens with interest and expresses understanding. It is not that difficult in this case. Risa is given to emotional extremes, but when the extreme is ecstasy, Dad has little trouble smiling, nodding, and reflecting (“This party is really something special!”) compassionately. But before Risa bolts for the shower, Dad begins to ask questions about who, where, when, and under what circumstances. Risa’s joyful prattle turns to impatient disdain: “It doesn’t matter, and I don’t have time to answer all these questions.” Dad continues to try to reflect without being deflected. “I know you’re busy, but the answers are very important to me. So let’s just take a minute.” Risa really does not know the answers, so Dad points out that he can find out more when he calls Katy’s parents. “No! You can’t! These kids don’t even want to know I have parents. If you call I’ll be completely humiliated!” Here is the challenge to the authoritative parent: balancing the child’s feelings and concerns with the critical monitoring responsibility. Risa’s dad stands firm: She is not permitted to attend parties where responsible adults are not present, and the only way to be sure is to speak directly to Katy’s parents. Without belittling Risa’s concerns, Dad insists on the phone call. He explains, as he has before, why unsupervised parties are not acceptable, and then invites Risa to help problem solve. “I know this is awkward, Risa. Let’s try to think of ways to make this go smoothly for everyone. For example, I could call and thank Katy’s parents for having the party at their house, and offer to bring over a case of soda.” But Risa’s idea of reasonable is not consistent with her father’s. She has an inkling that the party is not going to be supervised, and in any case she does not want to risk the popular crowd seeing her as a “baby.” She attacks her father as “old-fashioned,” “overprotective,” and “stupid,” alternately raging and whining. At this point, it is difficult for parents to repeat explanations calmly and to hold firm. Sometimes they give up, or lose all patience. Personal assaults from the teenager complicate the parents’ role: These attacks are hurtful and demeaning, and they too need to be addressed. In this case, Dad manages to respond, “I know you’re upset, but your attacking me hurts my feelings, and it’s not going to change my mind. Let’s stick to the subject of the party.” At another point, he takes a timeout for 5 minutes to cool down. Rarely do conflicts like these feel happily resolved in the immediate situation. In this case, Risa finally tells her father not to bother to call because she will not go to the party—she will call and make an excuse. She then sulks in her room all night. Both her mother and her father talk to her about it again, giving her an opportunity to vent, to discuss again the pros and cons of the rule about unsupervised parties, and to consider ways of promoting her relationships with her friends, such as having a party herself. Their restrictions on her social life never stop grating on Risa, but her parents hold firm. These confrontations can be frightening for even the most confident parents. On a different occasion, Risa might just walk out rather than sulk in her room. Parents are dependent not only on the quality of the mutual caring that has been established with a child up to the teen years but also on the support that is available in the child’s circle of friends. If her friends’ parents routinely allow unsupervised parties, Risa’s parents are soon going to feel besieged and may have limited success in helping Risa navigate her adolescence safely. On the other hand, if her friends’ parents have similar values and are also authoritative, then the impact of her parents’ authoritative style will be enhanced: Her psychosocial competence, including her self-esteem and self-reliance, will be benefited, and her chances of delinquency, drug abuse, and psychological distress will be reduced (Collins & Steinberg, 2006). Parenting Styles, Peers, and Ethnicity The complex interplay of parenting style with peer influences stands out in bold relief when we look at teens in different ethnic groups in the United States. Several researchers have found that while the elements of effective parenting are generally applicable across subcultures (e.g., Chung & Steinberg, 2006), for minority youngsters authoritative parenting is not as strongly associated with positive outcomes as it is for White teens (e.g., Baumrind, 1972; Chao, 2001; Dornbusch, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts, & Fraleigh, 1987; Walker-Barnes & Mason, 2001). Steinberg, Dornbusch, and Brown (1992) found ethnic differences in their large survey of adolescents, particularly in the likelihood of academic success: Authoritative parenting was not as good a predictor of academic success for teens from Asian American, African American, and Hispanic families as it was for White teens. However, Steinberg, Dornbusch, et al. (1992) found some fundamental similarities across all ethnic groups. First, not surprisingly, hard work is linked to academic success regardless of ethnicity; students who put in the most time on homework, for example, are the best school performers. Second, teens across all ethnic groups were equally likely to believe that getting a good education pays off. But the researchers also found some surprising differences in beliefs about the negative consequences of not getting a good education. Asian American students were most likely to believe that poor academic preparation could limit their job options later, whereas African American and Hispanic youngsters were the most optimistic, that is, the least likely to believe that poor academic preparation would hurt their job prospects. These differences in belief systems were reflected in the degree to which various ethnic peer groups supported academic achievement: Asian crowds were usually highly supportive, whereas African American and Hispanic crowds were not. Unlike White students, minority students sometimes have little choice of which crowd to join, especially when they go to a school where White students are in the majority. They may see themselves as having access to one or a few crowds defined primarily by ethnicity. Steinberg, Dornbusch, et al. (1992) found that for all ethnic groups, the most successful students were those whose parents and peers supported academics. When peers were at odds with parents, the crowd’s support, or lack of it, for homework and hard work was the better predictor of a student’s day-to-day school behaviors. As Steinberg (1996) noted, even Asian students of disengaged parents are often “saved from academic failure” by their friends’ support of academics (p. 157). Yet African American youngsters with authoritative parents often face giving up or hiding their academic aspirations to keep their friends because the crowds they join not only fail to support school effort but may even criticize it as an attempt to “act White” (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986). Indeed, at a very vulnerable age some Black adolescents may feel compelled to choose either to give up high academic standards, greatly limiting their future opportunities, or to be cut off from peer groups that help define their ethnic/racial identity (Ogbu, 2003). The complex interactions between parenting and peer influences can also be seen in the arena of high-risk and deviant behavior. Again, an authoritative approach is the best protection a parent can provide. Lamborn, Dornbusch, and Steinberg (1996) found, for example, that children from permissive or disengaged families were most likely to experiment with alcohol and marijuana, and children from authoritative homes were least likely to do so. But they also found that the peer group had more influence than the parents on whether experimentation would lead to regular use. For example, even the most vulnerable youngsters, those who had experimented with drugs and whose parents were disengaged, were unlikely to become regular users if their peers were not. As with school achievement, ethnicity and social class are among the predictors of drug use and deviant behavior in America, so that authoritative parenting is less effective for some teens than for others. But interestingly, several recent studies suggest that even among minority teens from poor neighborhoods, one component of authoritative parenting can be a strong force against deviant behavior and drug use: high levels of parental demandingness (behavioral control). Parents who closely monitor their children have teens who engage less often in delinquent behavior. These are parents who manage to keep track of their children and to place limits on where they spend their time after school and at night. These parents know with whom their children spend their time and what they spend their time doing. In one large, longitudinal study of rural preadolescent and adolescent children, one quarter of the sample was American Indian. About 4 years after the study began, a casino opened on the Indian reservation. Income supplements were paid to every Indian family thereafter, moving 14% of the Indian families out of poverty. Researchers found that for the children in these families (the “ex-poor”), there was a significant decline in conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorders over 4 years. Statistical evaluation of a number of variables suggested that a key mediator of the children’s behavioral change in the ex-poor families was that parents’ time to supervise and monitor their children increased after the change in income (Costello, Compton, Keeler, & Angold, 2003). Even when parents are not particularly warm or democratic, that is, when they are more authoritarian than authoritative, high levels of monitoring, especially for minority teens, can help protect youngsters from high-risk behavior (e.g., Fletcher, Steinberg, & Williams-Wheeler, 2004; Gorman-Smith, Tolan, Zelli, & Huesmann, 1996; Hoeve, Semon Dubas, Eichelsheim, van der Laan, Smeenk, & Gerris, 2009; Lamborn et al., 1996; Lansford, Deater-Deckard, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 2004; Walker-Barnes & Mason, 2001). Why are levels of parental monitoring and control so strongly associated with reduced levels of delinquent behavior among Black and other minority teens, even when parents appear to be authoritarian rather than authoritative in their style? As we indicated in Chapter 5, how children construe, or interpret, parenting behaviors may have an influence on how they respond to them. In some ethnic groups, under some environmental circumstances, parents who require absolute obedience to authority without question may be seen by children as operating out of love and affection. First, we have seen that in some cultures and ethnic minority groups, where control is perceived as normative, parents who use control tactics are nonetheless high on warmth (Collins & Steinberg, 2006). Second, if a family lives in a low-income neighborhood where the real dangers of risky behavior may be all too obvious to youngsters, an authoritarian style might be read by a child as an expression of concern. Interestingly, research on Black and White neighborhoods in the United States indicates that Black communities may be more dangerous places for children than White communities even when they are middle class. When Sampson, Morenoff, and Earls (1999) compared middle-class Black versus White communities, they found them to be quite similar internally. But the neighborhoods bordering Black and White communities could be quite different. For White middle-class families the surrounding neighborhoods were often affluent and reasonably safe; but Black middle-class enclaves were more likely to be surrounded by low-income and dangerous neighborhoods. Thus, Black parents, regardless of social class, may more often than White parents perceive a need to monitor and control their children closely to keep them safe. Their children, in turn, may perceive control as an indicator of affection. It should be noted, however, that regardless of ethnicity, when parents are low on warmth and high on harsh control, adolescents are less likely to be willing to reveal information to them, making the actual monitoring of adolescents’ behavior more difficult (Smetana, 2008). THE ROLE OF SCHOOL As we have seen, the adolescent experience is strongly influenced by parents and peers. In addition, school plays a major part in the psychosocial, intellectual, and vocational development of adolescents. Teachers, curricula, school activities, and school culture all provide raw material contributing to the adolescent’s growing sense of self and shaping experience-dependent learning. Much has been written about the problems with American schools (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2002), and it is beyond the scope and purpose of this chapter to articulate all the aspects of the debate about American educational reform. It is important to note, however, that educational institutions have been increasingly challenged to make changes that support the developmental needs of adolescents (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1996). This movement derives both from the recognition that many contemporary adolescents face a host of social and academic problems that threaten their well-being (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2002) and from the increasing body of evidence that demonstrates a stage-environment mismatch between adolescents and their schools (Eccles et al., 1993; Eccles & Roeser, 2009). Many researchers and theorists have noted a decline in academic orientation and motivation starting in the early adolescent years that for some individuals continues throughout high school or culminates in “dropping out” (e.g., Eccles & Roeser, 2011; Gutman, Sameroff, & Cole, 2003). Instructional practices such as whole-group lectures (Feldlaufer, Midgley, & Eccles, 1988), ability grouping (Oakes, Quartz, Gong, Guiton, & Lipton, 1993), and competitive rather than cooperative activities and assessment (Ward et al., 1982) all occur more frequently in middle and junior high schools than in the elementary grades. These practices have been linked to low levels of student motivation and heightened social comparison. For example, just as adolescents become exquisitely sensitive to their place in the peer scene, school-based evaluative policies such as “tracked” academic classes may make differences in ability more noticeable to the adolescent’s peers and teachers, leading to decreased status for some (Eccles, Midgley, & Adler, 1984; Oakes 2005). Compared with elementary schools, middle or junior high schools place a heavier emphasis on discipline and teacher control and provide relatively fewer opportunities for student decision making (Brophy & Evertson, 1976; Midgley, Feldlaufer, & Eccles, 1988). In contrast to this traditional model, longitudinal research by Wentzel (1997) documents the benefits associated with a more personal system of middle and secondary schooling. She found that students who perceived their teachers as caring and supportive were more likely than were students of less nurturant teachers to show greater academic effort and to express more prosocial goals. Interestingly, when students described teachers “who cared,” they named characteristics that were quite similar to those of authoritative parents. Large schools tend to be more impersonal and reduce adolescents’ opportunities to be mentored by nurturing adults. The large size of most middle and secondary schools is another factor that detracts from personal, mentoring relationships between students and available adults. Ravitch (1983) writes that the trade-off for bigger, more “efficient” schools means “impersonality, bureaucratization, diminished contact between faculty and students, formalization of relationships among colleagues, a weakening of the bonds of community” (p. 327). Large school size is correlated with lower scores on standardized test scores and higher drop out rates (see Benner, Graham, & Mistry, 2008), and smaller schools have been shown to promote prosocial behavior among teenagers (Barker & Gump, 1964) and more community activism among their adult graduates (Lindsay, 1984). Leithwood and Jantzi (2009) summarized the data on school size, concluding that elementary schools of 300 to 500 students or less and secondary schools of 600 to 1,000 had the highest levels of achievement. Calls for smaller counselor-to-student ratios in secondary schools reflect the fact that critical goals such as curriculum choice and career planning are dependent upon personal knowledge of the student and a trusting relationship (Herr, 1989). Elkind (1984) asserts that the adolescent’s identity formation is enhanced by being surrounded by a relatively small group of adults who know the student well and who, over time, are able to support the movement toward responsible autonomy. Indeed, adolescents who have more positive perceptions of relationships with teachers do better in school and perform better on achievement tests (e.g., Gregory & Weinstein, 2004; Woolley & Grogan-Kaylor, 2006). Leo, at age 16, has struggled with attention deficit disorder. Her comments show how important both adult support and peer collaboration are for a student’s success in school. The timing and types of transitions involved in the passage from primary to middle to secondary school are also important. These transitions represent turning points that involve a redefinition of social status (e.g., from middle school “top dog” to senior high “bottom dog,” Entwisle, 1990) and the experience of several simultaneous stressors. Simmons and Blyth (1987) present evidence for “cumulative stress” theory in a study of the effects of different transition patterns on academic achievement and self-esteem. Investigating the school-related outcomes of students who followed a K–8, 9–12 transition model and those who followed a K–6, 7–9, 10–12 model, the researchers found more negative outcomes related to the latter plan. They interpreted these findings as resulting from an interaction between the stresses of puberty and the cumulative stresses inherent in multiple school changes. Of course, changing schools per se may not be the problem; it may be that moving from the more supportive elementary environment to the less supportive middle or junior high environment is the key stressor (e.g., Juvonen, 2007; Midgley, Feldlaufer, & Eccles, 1989). For students who might be already at risk, the cost of these educational practices could be extremely high. Feldlaufer et al. (1988) found that low levels of perceived teacher support were particularly harmful for low-achieving students who enter a less supportive classroom after a school transition. But providing an emotionally supportive academic climate for young adolescents is not all that is needed to ensure their educational progress. Evidence from a study of 23 middle schools demonstrated that the combination of demanding teachers and rigorous curricula was strongly related to increased student achievement in mathematics, whereas warm teacher–student relations and communal classroom organization were not (Phillips, 1997). Perhaps we need to remember that both elements, responsiveness and demandingness, make important contributions to success in schools as well as in homes. In another study of middle school students, Wentzel (2002) found that teachers’ high expectations for their students was most predictive of students’ achievement and motivation to learn. But in addition, negative feedback or criticism from teachers, even in combination with high expectations, was found to be most clearly associated with diminished motivation and poor achievement. This finding applied to all students in her sample, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity. She points out that “by creating a context free of harsh criticism and [italics added] one in which students are expected to do their best, teachers might be better able to convey information clearly and efficiently, encourage student engagement, and focus students’ attention on academic tasks” (p. 298). Finally, the level of involvement by parents in the schooling of adolescents also influences achievement outcomes. Despite scientific and government support of parental involvement as a critical ingredient in school success (e.g., U.S. Department of Education, 1990) particularly for poor and minority children (Comer, 1988), the idea of parents becoming involved in the academic life of the adolescent has been met with serious resistance. Consistent with the “hands-off” philosophy described earlier, many adults tend to leave the business of education to teachers or to the adolescents themselves. Involvement declines sharply at the middle and high school levels (Steinberg, 1996; Stevenson & Stigler, 1992). Steinberg has indicated that approximately one third of the students in his study said their parents were uninformed about their school performance, and another one sixth said that their parents did not care. More than 40% of participants said their parents did not attend any school function or activity. This parental unresponsiveness seems closely tied to the child’s age and possibly to parental beliefs about an adolescent’s right to autonomy. Parents and teachers tend to view various dimensions of involvement (e.g., monitoring homework and use of time, helping at school, attending meetings and conferences, plus serving as a partner with the school in decision making) as appropriately decreasing once the child has made the transition out of the elementary grades (see Stewart, 2008). LEISURE AND WORK Outside school, leisure activities occupy much of an adolescent’s time. Leisure activities can promote skill mastery, such as sports participation, hobbies, and artistic pursuits, or they may be more purely recreational, such as playing video games, watching TV, daydreaming, or hanging out with friends (Fine, Mortimer, & Roberts, 1990). Young people who are involved in extracurricular activities sponsored by their schools and other community organizations—athletics, social service organizations, school newspaper staff, student government, band, and so on—are more likely to be academic achievers and to have other desirable qualities than students who are not involved in sponsored activities (see Mahoney, Larson, & Eccles, 2005; Mahoney, Harris, & Eccles, 2006) even though the gains are relatively modest. Longer and more intensive involvement is associated with better long-term effects, including greater educational, civic, and occupational success even in adulthood (e.g., Gardner, Roth, & Brooks-Gunn, 2008). Although there are general benefits to extracurricular participation, the kind of benefit varies somewhat by activity and not all the outcomes are positive. One longitudinal study followed over 1,000 Michigan young people for 14 years, beginning when they were in the 6th grade and keeping track of, among other things, their extracurricular involvements (Mahoney et al., 2005). High school participation in either prosocial activities or sports was associated with long-term educational achievements (e.g., going to college). But although kids who participated in prosocial activities were unlikely to use alcohol or other drugs in high school, those who participated in sports were more likely than most other teens to use alcohol in high school, perhaps because sports participation is also related to high stress (e.g., Larson, Hansen, & Moneta, 2006). Both personal qualities and peer influences appear to play a role in shaping these outcomes. For example, developing positive friendships through extracurricular activities seems to be one important pathway by which activity involvement influences later outcomes (e.g., Simpkins, Eccles, & Becnel, 2008). Leo’s experiences with drama club and her job at Teen Empowerment both allow her to try out different roles and feel part of the larger community. Today’s adolescents spend a lot of time doing work for pay. Mortimer (2005) reports that between 80% and 90% of teens are employed sometime during their high school years. Are there benefits to these early jobs for teens? It seems reasonable to propose some developmental advantages. Having adult responsibilities might help adolescents feel independent and grown up, enhancing self-esteem. Searching for work and being employed might provide training that is hard to come by in any other way, such as learning how to find a job, learning one’s own job preferences, and clarifying one’s work values. Parents often assume that working will help adolescents to learn to manage their money and their time. Mortimer et al. (1999) report that teens who work generally endorse many of these presumed benefits, seeing their jobs as helping them to be more responsible, to manage their time and their money, to establish a work ethic, and to learn social skills. Adolescents also list some negative outcomes, primarily feeling fatigued and having less time for homework and leisure activities, but on balance they see their work in a positive light. Do adolescents who work need to work—to save for college or even to help ease financial burdens at home? During the Great Depression, economic hardship did send adolescents into the workplace, and working was apparently linked to more responsible use of money and a more “adult” orientation (Elder, 1974). But the culture has changed dramatically since then. Whereas in 1940 only about 3% of 16-year-olds still in school were employed, by 1980 the government estimated that more than 40% were working. Of course, relatively more youngsters complete high school today than in 1940, so that today’s students may be more representative of the general population, but there is evidence of a substantial shift in students’ priorities as well. Middle-class teens are more likely to be employed than those from lower socioeconomic groups, and their money is unlikely to be saved or contributed to family expenses. Rather, working teens more frequently spend their money on materialistic pursuits: wardrobes, entertainment, drugs, and alcohol (e.g. Steinberg et al., 1993). Cultural change has also affected the kinds of jobs adolescents acquire. In 1940, many teens worked on farms or in manufacturing, in jobs where they were supervised by adults (frequently adults who were family members or were known to their families), and they often received some training that was directly relevant to the jobs they would have after high school. Today, teens are much more likely to work in retail establishments, including restaurants, and to be under the direct supervision of other young people rather than adults. It appears that the work teens do today is often less educational than in 1940 and may have less long-term career value (Aronson, Mortimer, Zierman, & Hacker, 1996). Although adolescents themselves seem enthusiastic about the value of their part-time work, researchers report that there can be some serious side effects. Note that negative consequences are substantially related to hours of employment—the more hours, the more problematic the effects in most cases. The most troublesome finding is that long hours of employment (especially 20 or more hours per week) are associated with increases in problem behaviors like theft (e.g., giving away store products to friends), school misconduct, alcohol and drug use, including cigarette smoking (e.g., Mihalic & Elliot, 1997; Mortimer et al., 1999). The effects of work on schooling and school involvement are mixed. Several large-scale studies have found no effects on students’ grades but negative effects on total educational attainment. Years of schooling tend to be reduced for students who invest long hours in their jobs. Other studies have found negative correlations between working and grades even for relatively few hours of work (Largie, Field, Hernandez-Reif, Sanders, & Diego, 2001). Bachman, Safron, Sy, & Schulenberg, 2003 found that negative associations between schooling and work appear to be bidirectional—for example, teens with less school involvement are more likely to seek jobs, and once they are working substantial hours, teens become even less involved in school. A recent re-examination of data on part-time work (Monaghan, Lee, & Steinberg, 2011) helps strengthen earlier conclusions. Part-time work of moderate intensity (20 hours or less per week) was not associated with either positive or negative outcomes for adolescents. Contrary to the argument that adolescents acquired some psychological benefits from part-time work (Mortimer et al., 1999), this analysis showed negligible outcomes on academics, self-reliance, and self-esteem. Negative effects on academics and behavior were strongly related to high intensity work (more than 20 hours per week), especially when such work is begun during the course of the school year. MEDIA AND THE CONSUMER CULTURE No doubt about it, media plays a major role in the life of contemporary adolescents, and its use is increasing rapidly for both children and youth. A peek into ways young people consume electronic media shows some startling findings. The word “consume,” often used in regard to media, is an interesting and apt choice because researchers have long been concerned about the effects of a steady diet of technology on the brains and behaviors of young people. A large-scale, nationally representative study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (2010) and its reanalysis by race (Northwestern University, 2011) shows that U.S. 3rd to 12th graders increased their total daily media consumption from 6 hours and 21 minutes in 2004 to 7 hours and 38 minutes by 2009, approximating the hours of a typical adult work day. Media usage takes up even more time than work, however, because it continues during the weekend. Rates of all media consumption (music, computers, video games, TV, and movies) except for print media increased over the three waves of the study (1999, 2004, 2009). What percentage of 3rd to 12th graders have a TV in their bedrooms? If you guessed slightly more that 7 out of 10 (71%,), you’re correct. Cable TV and video game consoles are present in 50% of bedrooms. Computers, fast becoming a staple of the educational system, are also very common. 18-year-old Tim lives in a media-rich world, with both positive and negative influences. How does technology change adolescents’ relationships with their friends and families? Figure 10.4 How much media do children and adolescents consume? Types and Extent of Media Use Among U.S. 3rd to 12th Graders. SOURCE: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (2010, January 1). Generation M2: Media in the lives of 8- to 18-year-olds. From [no longer online] http://www.kff.org/other/poll-finding/report-generation-m2-media-in-the-lives/. Used by permission. Consumption patterns differed between younger (8 to 10 years olds) and older groups as well as between racial/ethnic groups (see Figure 10.4). Media exposure was higher in Black, Hispanic, and Asian groups (by approximately 4 hours per day) compared to Whites and among boys (by approximately one hour per day) compared to girls (Center on Media and Human Development, 2011). Researchers concluded that a more realistic picture of media use should take into account exposure to multiple forms of media, because youth are often engaged in more than one form at the same time. When such multitasking is considered, the amount of time jumps to an average high of 10 hours and 45 minutes of media exposure per day. This study did not include time using cell or smart phones (talking, texting, tweeting, Internet, or movie viewing), which would have, most likely, increased the average amount of time spent on media use. It is important for helping professionals to concern themselves with the effects of cultural forces on adolescent development if they are to take a position that promotes healthy growth and functioning. Jessor (1993) noted that the distal effects of the larger cultural context are rarely taken into consideration when studying development, although “understanding contextual change is as important as understanding individual change” (p. 120). Perhaps the major question to be addressed is: How adolescent-friendly is the society we live in? If family, peers, and teachers are fellow players in the unfolding drama of adolescent identity formation, the culture with its values and broader institutions provides the stage upon which that drama is acted out. Many writers from diverse fields of study have noted a general loss of community and a focus on individualism and material success evident in American culture at this point in its history (Barber, 1992; Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; Hewlett & West, 1998; Lasch, 1991). In their discussion of a culture they call “poisonous,” Hewlett and West describe punitive economic forces that undermine family stability and negative media forces that shape attitudes and beliefs. Few adults would deny that the exposure to the realities of the adult world that teens have today has been ratcheted up several levels compared to even recent generations. For example, media exposure to violent, sexualized, and commercial messages occurs at a more intense level and starts at earlier ages. But how does this kind of media exposure affect children and adolescents and how much of a threat is it? The link between viewing televised violence and behaving aggressively for certain individuals has been well researched and is generally accepted (see Comstock & Scharrer, 1999). Modeling processes (see Chapter 1) are presumed to account for much of this relationship. Recent interest in the role of media as a socializer of values expands upon social learning principles to include constructivist conceptions of how individuals make sense of their environments. In other words, people use what they perceive as raw material from which to construct ideas, beliefs, and guiding principles. A recent longitudinal study offers strong support for this model with respect to violent video games (Willoughby, Adachi, & Good, 2012). Canadian adolescents were studied over the course of their high school years to investigate relationships between playing violent video games and later aggressive behavior. Even after controlling for other media use, quality of parenting, academic and school variables, sports involvement, depression, and deviant behaviors, the relationship between a steady diet of violent video game play and aggressive behavior was significant. Furthermore, the authors did not find support for the idea that more aggressive youth elected to play more violent video games (a selection effect). On the contrary, playing the violent games themselves was associated with increased levels of aggressive behavior for both boys and girls. There appears to be something unique about the violent video game effects insofar as the same increase in aggression was not seen in those youth who played nonviolent video games. Violent video games are now played by adolescents around the world. Does violent video game play have the same causal relationship to aggressive behavior and cognitions across cultures? The answer appears to be yes. Results from a large meta-analysis of studies from Western countries and Japan showed that increased violent video game play was a causal factor in increasing aggressive behavior and cognitions and in reducing prosocial behavior and empathy (Anderson, Shibuya, Swing, Bushman, Sakamoto, et al., 2010) Neither gender nor age significantly moderated this relationship. This finding is important because it updates other analyses and strengthens the view that repeated practice shapes brain and behavior via processes of experience-dependent learning. This is a timely and practically important issue for parents, helpers, and public policy makers. The authors conclude that playing video games doesn’t just involve moving a joystick. Players “are indeed interacting with the game psychologically and emotionally. It is not surprising that when the game involves rehearsing aggressive and violent thoughts and actions, such deep game involvement results in antisocial effects on the player. Of course, the same basic social–cognitive processes should also yield prosocial effects when game content is primarily prosocial . . . Video games are neither inherently good nor inherently bad. But people learn. And content matters” (Anderson et al., 2010, p. 171). Another area of particular concern for adolescents is the learning of sexual messages and attitudes. Studies using correlational methods have found relationships between frequent viewing of televised portrayals of sexuality with more distorted cognitions, more liberal attitudes about sex, and more tolerance for sexual harassment (Strouse, Goodwin, & Roscoe, 1994). Frequent consumption of sexualized media has also been linked to increased sexual behavior—that is, more sexual partners and earlier sexual initiation than for individuals without such media exposure (Brown et al., 2002). This may have something to do with the perception that “everybody’s doing it.” Researchers have found that people’s expectations or constructions about what is normative influence what they choose to do. Adolescents who believe that teens in general have frequent sexual experiences engage in riskier and more frequent sexual activity themselves (Whitaker & Miller, 2000). A study by Ward (2002) employed both correlational and experimental methods to study whether television’s messages influenced attitudes about sexuality in a multiethnic sample of older adolescents. This study confirmed that the three beliefs investigated in this study—that men are driven by sex, that women are sex objects, and that dating is a recreational sport—were very strongly related to heavy TV viewing and to personal involvement with TV. High personal involvement was measured by individuals’ goals for TV (entertainment and a way to learn about the world), discussions about TV shows with others, and identification with TV characters, among other things. Outcomes of the experimental part of the study revealed that females more strongly endorsed the stereotypical beliefs after viewing sexual TV clips than did women who saw nonsexual episodes. Interestingly, this pattern was not the same for males. Males’ agreement with the three stereotypes was already much higher than women’s, so it may not have been realistic to expect this experimental manipulation to generate higher rates of agreement. Another possibility is that males’ attitudes might be differentially influenced by exposure to other types of media, such as music videos. Certainly not all media use is associated with negative outcomes. Yet it is important to consider the impact of repeated exposure to the violent, sexual, and materialistic images in much of the media adolescents consume. Media messages can provide elements for the construction of identity via the processes we have described in this chapter. Moreover, media images serve as standards for social comparison, molding expectations for normative behavior and amplifying values that may be at odds with those of families and communities (Comstock & Scharrer, 2006). As the report from the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development (1996) points out, adolescents are careening down the information superhighway, and electronic conduits (TV, videos, cable, computers, movies, and popular music) “have become strong competitors to the traditional societal institutions in shaping young people’s attitudes and values” (p. 41). Also, newer interactive media applications (text messaging, e-mail, chat rooms, and so on) provide means for communicating with a broader segment of society, often anonymously. These venues offer youngsters new opportunities for risk taking and aggressive behavior. For example, “cyberbullying,” using electronic forms of contact to carry out intentional, relational aggressive acts, is on the rise among adolescents (Raskauyskas & Stoltz, 2007; Smith et al., 2008). Unlike traditional bullying it tends to happen outside of school and can have a broad reach. Smith et al., for example, describe “. . . ‘happy slapping,’ where a victim is slapped or made to appear silly by one person, filmed by another, and the resulting pictures circulated on mobile phones . . .” (p. 376). Sexting, or the sending of sexually suggestive photos or messages, appears to be on the rise. A recent study showed that youth (aged 14–24) who were sexually active were more likely to engage in sexting. These adolescents and young adults were also more likely to share the suggestive pictures with friends (MTV, 2010). More research is needed to explore the effects of this trend most importantly on shaping attitudes and behaviors about sexuality. How do contemporary cultural conditions interact with the adolescent’s struggle for autonomy and self-definition? In the next section, we will explore some answers to this question. Like it or not, teens assimilate views of acceptable behavior from many sources, including TV, movies, popular music, and the Internet. RISKY BEHAVIOR AND SOCIAL DEVIANCE Andy and Ben are talking about drinking and driving. They describe a typical “party”—one that involves lots of alcohol and not much parental supervision. They frequently drive home from these unsupervised events, believing that they are “responsible drivers” because they’re so good at drinking and driving and have never had any accidents. It’s not that Andy’s and Ben’s parents are intentionally neglectful. The teens just don’t share this information with their parents. Andy and Ben simply believe they are very good at doing what they want to do without getting into trouble. They tend to think that other teenagers, those who aren’t as smart or clever, might get into trouble, but not them. Are the behaviors Ben and Andy describe normal or deviant? Are they part of a passing phase or predictive of future problems? Should we crack down on these behaviors or look the other way? These questions pose real problems, not only for parents and helpers but also for social policy makers in fields such as education and criminal justice. These behaviors epitomize a paradox at this stage of development, for contravention of adult norms by experimentation with deviant behaviors has always been part of the adolescent experience and is, in fact, statistically normative (Barnes, Welte, & Dintcheff, 1992; Jessor et al., 1991; Reyna & Farley, 2006). Risky behaviors are behaviors that constitute a departure from socially accepted norms or behaviors that pose a threat to the well-being of individuals or groups. Various writers have used different terms to refer to these behaviors, including reckless, problem, deviant, antisocial, and delinquent. Here we use the adjectives somewhat interchangeably, although risky and reckless connote slightly more benign behaviors than do deviant, antisocial, or delinquent. Even so, separating these activities into bad and not-so-bad is tricky because, as we shall see, they all pose potential dangers. They vary on a continuum of severity and, when severe, tend to appear in clusters in the lives of teenagers at risk. Some examples of these problem behaviors include drinking and other drug use, smoking, truancy, sexual behavior, high-speed driving, drunk driving, vandalism, and other kinds of delinquency. Society considers some of these behaviors to be not only reckless but illegal as well. Consequently, statistics show that fully four fifths of adolescent males have experienced some police contact for minor infractions during their teenage years (Farrington, 1989). Although most crime statistics indicate that males are disproportionately involved in these offenses, evidence points to increasing delinquency among girls, especially those who mature early (Henggeler, Schoenwald, Borduin, Rowland, & Cunningham, 1998; Odgers, Moffitt, Broadbent, Dickson, Hancox, Harrington, et al., 2008). Risky behaviors escalate sharply during adolescence, peaking around age 17 and then dropping off in early adulthood for most individuals (Steinberg, 2008). Figure 10.5, for example, shows the drop in speeding while driving after the teen years. Not all adolescents experiment with reckless behavior, but a high percentage do. Thus, the proportion of adolescents who engage in some variety of reckless or deviant behavior is higher than for groups at any other stage of the life span. Figure 10.5 Percentage of drivers who were speeding in fatal crashes in 1996, by age and sex. SOURCE: From U.S. Department of Transportation (1996, Fig. 4) as cited in Nell, V. (2002). Why young men drive dangerously: Implications for injury prevention. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 75–79. It is hard to get a handle on the actual amount of risky behavior enacted by adolescents. Juvenile crime rates have dropped overall since 1980. In 2010 the incidence was 55% lower that it was at its peak in 1994 (Puzzanchera & Adams, 2012; U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000). Even though incidence rates of violent crime have fallen, the problems associated with risky behavior among teenagers have not disappeared. Consider that in the United States, approximately 3 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases are diagnosed in adolescents each year, and two new young people are infected with HIV every hour (Centers for Disease Control, 2006). A decline in teenage pregnancy has continued since the 1990s into 2011. Reductions in sexual activity and increases in condom use may be the reason for this decline (Ventura & Hamilton, 2011). However, the number of babies born to teen mothers in the United States is still the highest of all developed countries. Great Britain, whose teenage birth rate is next highest, has only about half the teenage birth rate of the United States (e.g., United Nations Statistical Division, 2007). In 1997, approximately 30% of children in 4th through 6th grades reported being offered drugs, representing an increase of 47% from 1993 to 1997 (Partnership for a Drug-Free America, 1998). When a national sample of adolescents was surveyed in the early 1990s about binge drinking (drinking at least five drinks in a row), 28% of high school seniors and 40% of 20- to 21-year-olds admitted they had binged on alcohol at least once during the previous 2-week period (Johnston, O’Malley, & Bachman, 1994). Results of the same survey in 2000 revealed that 30% of 12th graders, 26.2% of 10th graders, and 14.1% of 8th graders reported binge drinking in the 2 weeks prior to the survey. In addition, 12th graders’ perceptions of the risks of drinking one or two alcoholic drinks decreased from 1990 to 2000 (Johnston, O’Malley, & Bachman, 2003). Data reported by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (2006) indicate that alcohol use by teens has steadily declined since 1998. Still, in 2005, 28% of 7th to 12th graders reported binge drinking in the past 2 weeks. Furthermore, a significant increase in the use of painkillers (Vicodin and Oxycontin) was reported among 8th to 12th graders between 2002 and 2004 (Johnston, O’Malley, & Bachman, 2004). More recent statistics from 2009–2011 show some encouraging signs. Decreasing trends were reported for alcohol and tobacco use among teens. Marijuana use, however, increased over this period (see Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2011). Sometimes, helpers choose to treat the reckless or deviant behaviors of adolescents as separable conditions. When this approach is used, interventions get targeted to specific problems, such as drug use or unsafe sexual practices or drunk driving. However, most problem behaviors come in packages. They frequently coexist on a spectrum of less harmful to dysfunctional. Consider Brianna, a high school sophomore who drinks alcohol at parties, but never to excess, and smokes cigarettes with her friends. She has tried pot now and again, but she thinks she does not want to try anything stronger until she gets older. She is an average student, has a sociable personality, and has stabilizing family and peer supports. Despite this, Brianna and her best friend recently were arrested for shoplifting in the local mall. The girls explained that they did this “on a dare.” Shauna is a 9th grader who has had academic and behavioral problems since elementary school. Her headstrong, impulsive, and aggressive characteristics have always put her at odds with people in authority. Her boyfriend is part of a gang that steals beer and cigarettes, later selling them to buy harder drugs. The lure of her boyfriend and his lifestyle is stronger than her single mother can overcome. Shauna is now pregnant and will soon drop out of high school. Although there are some similar features in both girls’ risky behavior, namely, the easy availability of alcohol and drugs, freedom to spend time with peers who may influence risk taking, and the ubiquitous adolescent urge to experiment, there are also some important differences. Consequently, the level of intervention used to address Brianna’s problem behaviors would probably be less effective with Shauna (see Box 1.2 in Chapter 1 on prevention issues). Moffitt (1993a) makes a valuable contribution to understanding these differences by distinguishing between two major developmental trajectories of adolescent antisocial behavior: life-course-persistent antisocial pattern and adolescence-limited antisocial patterns. These developmental patterns are also called early-starter and adolescent-onset trajectories. (See Chapter 7 for descriptions.) The life-course-persistent pattern begins in early childhood and continues throughout life. In general, this pattern is associated with early conduct problems, aggressiveness, and academic difficulties, as typified by Shauna. For this particular package of problems, early intervention for children and families is most effective. In contrast, adolescence-limited antisocial behavior, such as Brianna’s, develops in adolescence and usually ends shortly thereafter. The prognosis for the latter kind of pathway is generally more favorable. Is adolescence-limited antisocial behavior the same as reckless behavior in adolescence? The answer may be a matter of degree. Certainly, some teenagers go to more extreme lengths, have more accumulated risk factors and fewer protective ones in their lives, and thus suffer more from the consequences of their behavior than others. But the paradox we introduced earlier seems to apply here. Behaviors traditionally considered deviant are increasingly becoming part of the experimental repertoire of teens who are considered well adjusted. Hersch (1998) closely followed the activities of adolescents in a suburban high school for several years. She got to know the students well, becoming an “insider” in the world of adolescents, and was able to document the escalation of dangerous pursuits as a normal part of contemporary adolescent life. “Behaviors once at the fringe of adolescent rebelliousness have not only permeated the mainstream culture of high school but are seeping into the fabric of middle school” (p. 156). As Jessica, an eighth-grade student interviewed by Hersch said, “This [smoking, using drugs, having sex] is what you are supposed to do [italics added]. . . . It’s our teenage phase. You are only a kid once” (p. 156). Helpers who work on the front lines, in middle and high schools or in practices that include adolescents, deal with these problems and attitudes every day. Let us try to examine why reckless behavior is such a part of the adolescent phase in the first place, and then we will consider its benefits and costs to young people. Setting the Stage for Risk Taking Adolescent risk taking appears to be a result of complex interacting processes, from the brain changes that underlie emotional and cognitive developments from puberty onward to identity processes to parenting and community supports. Let’s consider some of the important factors. First, adolescents tend to score higher than other age groups on a dimension called sensation seeking, which is defined as “the need for varied, novel, and complex sensation and experiences and the willingness to take physical and social risk for the sake of these experiences” (Zuckerman, 1979, p. 10). Sensation seeking is related to the maturing of emotional brain systems and the relative imbalance that exists between appetitive functions (approach behaviors) and control (executive functions). At puberty, proliferation and then pruning of dopamine receptors creates a new pattern of receptor distribution throughout the brain (Steinberg, 2008). Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter in the processing of emotion, and puberty triggers “. . . a rapid and dramatic increase in dopaminergic activity . . . which is presumed to lead to increases in reward seeking” (Steinberg et al., 2008, p. 1764). The link between the reward system and the social processing system seems to play a role in adolescents’ heightened interest in peers. Literally, peer acceptance appears to be more rewarding post-puberty than in childhood (Casey et al., 2008; Steinberg, 2008). Human imaging studies show greater activation of parts of the emotional system relative to children or adults when adolescents are making risky choices (Casey et al., 2008). But why would having a mature emotional brain system make adolescents bigger risk takers than adults? As we have discussed in Chapter 9, the cognitive control system develops more slowly than the emotional system, and perhaps more importantly, connections between the cognitive control system and the emotional system develop slowly, continuing to grow through the mid-20s. Therefore, for adolescents “in emotionally salient situations, the limbic system will win over control systems given its maturity relative to the prefrontal control system” (Casey et al., 2008, p. 64). Figure 10.6 illustrates the relative rates of functional development for the emotional and cognitive control systems. Figure 10.6 A model of timing of functional maturation of the emotional and cognitive control systems of the brains. SOURCE: Based on Casey, B. J., Getz, S., & Galvan, A. (2008). The adolescent brain. Developmental Review, 28(1), 62–77. Used with permission from Elsevier. Ernst and her colleagues have expanded our understanding of adolescent risky behavior and cognitive control to include the increased sensitivity to stress present in adolescence. As we have described, cognitive control is primarily a function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Reward seeking is related to appetitive (approach) systems in the brain, and sensitivity to stress marked by emotional lability is related to the brain’s threat-detection (avoidance) systems. The triarchic model (Ernst, Pine, & Hardin, 2006; Richards, Plate, & Ernst, 2012; see Figure 10.7) is a useful way of conceptualizing the mix of risky behavior, emotional dysregulation and reduced executive functioning characteristic of this period. The hyperactivity of both reward (mediated by the striatum) and avoidance (mediated by the amygdala) systems, in the context of an underdeveloped cognitive control system (mediated by the PFC), can help explain the sometimes inexplicable highs and lows of teenage behavior. Figure 10.7 Uneven brain development in adolescence. Triadic Neural Systems Model (Ernst, Pine & Hardin, 2006). The reward and threat systems are more active during adolescence, tipping the balance needed for mature self-regulation, decision-making, and behavior. SOURCE: Based on Richards, J. M., Plate, R. C., & Ernst. M. (2012). Neural systems underlying motivated behavior in adolescence: Implications for preventive medicine. Preventive Medicine, 55, S7–S16. Used with permission from Elsevier. A second important factor may be that adolescent egocentrism supports the fiction that risky behavior is exciting but not potentially catastrophic. Arnett (1992) implicates adolescents’ weaknesses in reasoning about probability, a kind of formal operational thinking, as particularly important here (See Chapter 9). Drawing upon Piaget’s ideas, Arnett argues that . . . in every judgement of probability, there is a reference, implicit or explicit, to a system of distributions or frequencies. Adolescents’ perceptions of these systems are skewed by their desire for sensation and by the personal fable that convinces them of their immunity from disaster. . . . But even if an adolescent were exceptionally proficient at estimating probabilities, on a given occasion, the likelihood of disaster resulting from drunk driving, or sex without contraception, or illegal drug use, or delinquency/crime is, in fact, statistically small—even when applied to others, and seen through the lens of sensation seeking and egocentrism, the perceived probability fades even further. (p. 350) Recent empirical research supports some aspects of Arnett’s analysis but not others. Adolescents who perceive the risks of certain behaviors seem to be somewhat less likely than others to ever engage in those risky behaviors; but adolescents who do engage in risky behavior actually seem to be well aware that they have put themselves at risk! There seem to be complicated processes at work here (see Reyna & Farley, 2006). It appears that some teens put themselves at risk because they are responding to triggers that cue big, short-term rewards; they do not do a cost/benefit analysis. This is what you would expect if the emotional system is activated without benefit of control from the cognitive system. However, even when adolescents feel vulnerable and do engage the cognitive control system, their approach to evaluating risk may keep them from being as risk averse as they should be. Reyna and Farley (2006) suggest that when probability analyses are new to adolescents, they are likely to do cost/benefit assessments that favor risk taking, just as Arnett suggests. They often perceive the relative costs, which are usually low probability, as well worth the potential rewards. Adults, on the other hand, think about risk situations differently. They are more likely to assess risky behaviors, like having sex with a casual partner without a condom, as completely unacceptable, because if there were negative consequences, however low the probability, they would be catastrophic. As Reyna and Farley put it, adults eventually develop a more global or categorical approach to risk assessment, a sort of automatic response to the “gist” of the situation, rather than painstakingly weighing the probabilities of positive and negative outcomes. To illustrate, in a study of adolescents’ versus adults’ reaction time to questions such as, “Is it a good idea to set your hair on fire?” or “Is it a good idea to swim with sharks?” Baird and Fugelsang (2004) found that adolescents responded much more slowly than adults, as you would expect if they were actually taking a risk/benefit analysis approach. They did not respond more slowly to other, non-risk related questions. Another important factor affecting adolescent risky behavior is the influence of peers. Arnett (1992) suggested that peers provide not only role models for deviancy but a kind of collective egocentrism. Shauna might reason, for example, that if her boyfriend and his friends aren’t worried about getting caught in some illegal scheme, then neither should she worry. Each adolescent’s judgment that “it probably won’t happen to me” strengthens that of the other members of the peer group. Peers are definitely implicated in increased risk taking during adolescence, but there may be other reasons for their influence. We noted earlier that the presence of peers helps to activate reward-seeking behavior, because social information processing and reward are served by some of the same early maturing emotional brain areas. Steinberg (2008) argues that it is the same slowly developing connections between cognitive control systems (involving several cortical areas) and the subcortical emotional system that accounts for both the decline of risk taking and of peer influence in later adolescence and early adulthood. There is evidence to support these claims. For example, Paus and his colleagues (Paus, Leonard, Lerner, Lerner, Perron, Pike et al., 2011) report studies using imaging techniques to assess the degree of connectivity between regions of the cortex involved in self-control in a sample of 12- to 18-year-olds. Those participants who scored high on measures of resistance to peer influence showed more structural connectivity (controlling for age) than participants who scored low on such measures. Are there any benefits for humans to having an adolescent period that involves increased sensation seeking and risk taking? Chronic, life-course-persistent antisocial behavior exacts an enormous cost from the individual involved, from his family, and from society in general. So it is hard to imagine any redeeming features to this condition. The impact of adolescent-limited antisocial behavior, however, is less clear-cut. In one view, recklessness in adolescents, especially in males, once had a strong fitness value (e.g., Nell, 2002; Steinberg & Belsky, 1996; Steinberg, 2008). Nell, for example, argues that in the evolutionary history of the human species, young males who were willing to risk their own safety to fight for territory and for dominance won the most desirable mates. The legacy of this evolutionary history is that, even today, adolescent boys are prepared, even more so than girls, to take risks and to engage in aggressive behavior. Research on the dopaminergic remodeling of the limbic and paralimbic systems that takes place at puberty indicates that “. . . it is more pronounced in males than in females” (Steinberg, 2008, p. 87), providing a neurological basis for greater risk taking in males during adolescence. Another somewhat related view is that adolescent limited antisocial behavior is adaptive because it promotes individuation and self-determination. Goldstein (1990), for example, suggests that risky behavior is instrumental in relieving the maturity gap that afflicts adolescents who are caught in a time warp between physical and social maturity. To possess the symbolic trappings of adult status (sexual intimacy, material possessions, autonomy, and respect from parents), adolescents mimic the behavior of more advanced, and often more antisocial, peers, borrowing those elements that elicit respect from others and that affirm personal independence. Maggs, Almeida, and Galambos (1995) found that increasing levels of engagement in risk-taking behavior across adolescence (disobeying parents, school misconduct, substance abuse, antisocial behavior) were associated with decreased levels of positive self-concept but with increased levels of peer acceptance. Wilson (1996) noted that some socially deviant behaviors of disadvantaged inner-city youth represent situationally adaptive means of coping with urban life. Engaging in risk-taking behavior thus represents a paradox that has both positive (status-provision) and negative (social-deviance) aspects. Arnett (1992) theorizes that reckless behavior is more a fact of life in cultures with broad as opposed to narrow socialization practices. Societies with broad socializing practices permit and encourage high levels of individual freedom of expression, have fewer social constraints, expect less community responsibility, and thus tolerate a wider variety of socially deviant behaviors. Cultures with narrow socialization practices, more characteristic of nonindustrialized cultures, exert more control over the expression of behaviors that violate social standards and expect more conformity from young members of the society. So is reckless behavior among adolescents the price we must pay for living in a society that encourages freedom of expression? What kinds of trade-offs should we be willing to tolerate? Even though adolescent-limited antisocial patterns usually attenuate sometime in early adulthood, when more conventional roles of employee, spouse, or parent are assumed, we should not conclude that this pattern poses no risk at all. To be sure, Moffitt (1993a) notes that risky behavior, while enhancing peer involvement, may also ensnare adolescents in situations that can ultimately prove quite harmful, such as fostering drug dependence or depressing academic achievement. As Reyna and Farley (2006) argue, no matter how normative risk taking may be in adolescence, both its immediate and long term consequences can be so substantial that it is a matter of great social concern. Developing effective, empirically based interventions to eliminate the most consequential of the risks should be a high priority. Steinberg advocates a commonsense solution: making risky options less available to youth until they have greater maturity in making decisions. “Strategies such as raising the price of cigarettes, more vigilantly enforcing laws governing the sale of alcohol, expanding adolescents’ access to mental-health and contraceptive services, and raising the driving age would likely be more effective in limiting adolescent smoking, substance abuse, pregnancy, and automobile fatalities than strategies aimed at making adolescents wiser, less impulsive, or less shortsighted. Some things just take time to develop, and, like it or not, mature judgment is probably one of them” (Steinberg, 2007, p. 58). SOCIETY’S ROLE IN ADOLESCENT PROBLEM BEHAVIOR: THEN AND NOW Let’s reflect again about the continuum of narrow to broad socialization. At which point along the continuum would you place contemporary U.S. culture? Although there are certainly regional and ethnic variations, it is likely that you identify contemporary socializing practices as quite broad. Adolescents, and even younger children, seem to have a lot more freedom now than they have had in the past. However, we can also consider this question from a slightly different perspective, focusing not just on freedom but also on support. How much support does our contemporary culture provide for young people? How is level of support related to engagement in risky behavior? Has our collective level of responsibility changed in any way from that of the past decades, or is this idea just a nostalgic myth? Siegel and Scovill (2000) provide a comprehensive look at the approach U.S. society has taken toward young people from the 1920s onward. In the 1920s, society viewed deviant adolescent behavior—as much a problem then as it is now—as an expression of youthful energies gone awry. In addition, social deviancy was considered an alternative pathway that some teenagers used to meet normal developmental goals, such as autonomy and relatedness, when more socially conventional means were unavailable to them. Consequently, it was generally believed that society as a whole was responsible for providing more productive outlets for adolescent energies. Many institutions and organizations were established to encourage teenagers to participate in socially constructive activities, to provide them with structured adult contact, and to facilitate prosocial interactions among youth themselves. Some examples of these organizations, most initiated before the 1920s, include Boy and Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, Pioneer Youth of America, 4-H Clubs, Junior Achievement, Kiwanis, Order of the Rainbow for Girls, and Optimist International Boys’ Work Council. Institutions dedicated to special interests, such as the National Recreation Association, the Girls’ Service League of America, and the Sportmanship Brotherhood, as well as religiously affiliated groups such as the YMCA, the YWCA, the Knights of King Arthur, and the Ladies of Avalon, were also established. All were united in their purpose of providing guidance and character-building activities for youth. Today, Siegel and Scovill (2000) point out, many of these age-appropriate community support systems have disappeared or have more limited scope. Consequently, the social envelope, which in the past strengthened families and schools and provided a safety net for youth who lacked family support or good educational opportunities, is weak or even absent. Many academic and recreational opportunities, often available free of charge to past generations of children and adolescents as part of their neighborhoods or communities, now come with a price tag. What has happened to cause this shift in attitudes and priorities? Society’s view of the cause of adolescent problem behaviors undoubtedly shapes its attitudes toward responsibility, prevention, and treatment. Contemporary society leans toward perceiving the source of deviancy as something within the individual adolescent rather than within society at large. While problem behavior was largely “socialized” through the 1960’s, it has become “medicalized” in the 1990’s. In an age in which we have been led to believe that there is a “magic scientific bullet” for nearly all physiological and social problems, we have “medicalized” problem behavior. An unspoken corollary of the “intrapsychic” view is that if the locus of the problem is in the adolescent, then parents and society are off the hook. The genetic or biological perspective provides that out: “There’s nothing we could do; our child was born a delinquent.” (Siegel & Scovill, 2000, p. 781) No one should interpret these comments as suggesting that we return to either–or, nature–nurture thinking. As we have seen repeatedly, temperamental influences on behavior are strong, and they contribute significantly to developmental outcomes. What these authors recommend is a serious examination of the personal needs and rationalizations we adults use in interpreting adolescent problem behavior. If, as a society, we emphasize adolescent self-sufficiency and sophistication and deemphasize adolescent needs for adult time, guidance, and connection, then we do them, and us, a great disservice. Indeed, as we have seen, when adults closely monitor adolescents, they are less likely to engage in problem behaviors. The brain research that implicates increased sensation seeking along with immature self-regulatory processes as dual sources of risk taking makes it all the more obvious that adolescents need outside sources of support, structure, and control. Parents, teachers, and other responsible adults who wish to limit adolescents’ exposure to antisocial models or who wish to restrict their teens’ experimentation are in a position of having to do battle with the culture. In many domains, the best judgment of responsible adults is at odds with information coming from the macrosystem. African American parents, for example, who recognize and support the value of academic achievement, report that music and movies that are made to appeal to their youngsters often explicitly disparage their values (Steinberg, 1996). Sometimes this battle can seem overwhelming. Steinberg estimates from his and other survey research that about 25% of American parents across all ethnic groups are disengaging from the struggle. He aptly describes them as follows: They have “checked out” of child-rearing. They have disengaged from responsibilities of parental discipline—they do not know how their child is doing in school, have no idea who their child’s friends are, and are not aware of how their child spends his or her free time—but they have also disengaged from being accepting and supportive as well. They rarely spend time in activities with their child, and seldom just talk with their adolescent about the day’s events. (p. 118) As we have noted, adolescents whose parents are neglectful experience poorer social and academic outcomes than adolescents from authoritative families. As Elkind (1994) has suggested, and as we noted earlier, the conceptualization of adolescents typical of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was that they should be “let go” to experiment and allowed to “be themselves.” However, this idea developed within a culture that provided teenagers with a protective “adult envelope” that usually prevented their doing too much harm to themselves. In contemporary society, adolescence is not perceived as an adult apprenticeship but rather as an early pseudo-adulthood. Elkind believes that actively encouraging adolescent experimentation or, at least, looking the other way does not fit with postmodern realities. With societal attitudes that place the burden of responsibility on the individual adolescent, with more mothers and fathers working longer hours, with larger classrooms and reductions in funding for recreational activities, and with fewer “old heads” around to listen and offer guidance, teens may come to depend more and more on their peers for support and information about life. In the colonized or segregated space Taffel (2001) dubs “Planet Youth,” adolescent mimicry of risky behaviors may increasingly become the norm. APPLICATIONS Adolescence is the life stage characterized by the highest overall level of risk taking. Some risk taking is a healthy expression of autonomy in the service of identity development. Some risky pathways lead in less adaptive directions. Helping professionals who work with adolescents spend a good deal of their time attempting to encourage healthy behaviors and to discourage or reduce harmful ones. Clearly, there is no shortage of work in this area given the cultural possibilities for exploration in potentially dangerous areas like drugs, alcohol, sexuality, violence, and truancy that are open to younger and younger generations. What is the best way to make headway with adolescents given their natural proclivity to take risks? First, we need to recognize that adults can’t prevent all risky behaviors. But assuming the attitude that “they’ll grow out of it” can be ill-advised as well, given the convergence of research on the power of cumulative risk to affect later outcomes (Grant & Dawson, 1997; Robins & Pryzbeck, 1985). With regard to adolescent well-being, we introduce some ideas that draw upon developmental knowledge at the level of individual counseling, family and peer systems, and broad-based prevention. Approaches like these will not eliminate all risky behavior, but they can reduce it or help youth engage in it less impulsively. The Personal Meaning of Risk It would be easy if adolescents bought the argument that risky behaviors should be avoided. Some adolescents are inclined to do so, but many others seem impervious to adult logic. Those in the latter group might be more likely to show up in a counselor’s office. Although we have discussed many of the theories about why adolescents take risks in general, it is important from a helping perspective to consider the personal motivation that drives a young person and, in so doing, to uncover the personal meaning of risky behavior for that individual. Counselors know how important empathy is for the success of therapeutic relationships. It is good to be mindful that, at its core, real empathy incorporates perspective taking. In work with adolescents, adults cannot assume that mature perspective-taking skills are on-line or that adolescent perspectives will necessarily resonate with their own adult points of view. Consequently, until we become aware of our own perspective and differentiate it from that of our adolescent clients, attempts to reason with youth across this “great divide” can be ineffective. In individual counseling, a good place for the therapist to start might be with the questions “How does this young person perceive the risky behavior? What purpose does it serve?” Although not yet fully developed as an intervention strategy, Selman and Adalbjarnardottir (2000) describe a method for understanding adolescents’ reasoning about risky behaviors that is based on social perspective taking. In their study, a developmental lens was applied to themes that emerged from extensive interviews with Icelandic adolescents about their alcohol use. The interview questions used in this study included two semistructured protocols, the Risky Business Interview (Levitt &Selman, 1993) and the Relationship Interview (Schultz, 1993), both comprised of open- and closed-ended prompts. The use of these instruments underscores the central connection between risky behavior and the world of peer relationships in adolescence. In this research study, verbal responses of adolescent participants were coded to produce highly nuanced portraits of social perspective taking,