The Challenge of Early Adolescence

Thomas Kean, president of Drew University and former Republican governor of New Jersey, did not mince words. "Ours may be the first society in history to neglect children during early adolescence, the years 10 through 14," he said. "Western European societies offered apprenticeship programs; tribal societies had initiation rites to help young people cross into adulthood.What do we offer them?" Wine coolers packaged like soft drinks.

Kean was speaking at a meeting of the Carnegie Council, which, on October 13, 1995 brought together 200 people from around the nation to discuss the conditions faced by adolescents, "the most neglected Americans," according to Carnegie's new report, "Great Transitions." Much of the report's findings were disturbingly familiar. Among them:

• One-third of eighth-graders (typically 13-year-olds) report the use of illicit drugs, including inhalants. Among eighth-graders, the rate of smoking rose by 30 percent between 1992 and 1994.
• Among sexually experienced girls 13 years old and younger, over 60 percent have had involuntary intercourse. The greatest rate of increased births during adolescence is occurring for girls younger than 15.
• Among 10- through 14-year-olds, the firearm homicide rate more than doubled for victims in this age group between 1985 and 1992.
• Self-destructive violence, particularly the rate of suicide among 10- to 14-year-olds, increased 120 percent between 1980 and 1992. Suicide increased most dramatically among young black males and young white females.
• Twenty-seven percent of eighth-graders spend two or more hours at home alone after school, placing them at significantly higher risk of self-destructive and violent behavior.

Despite the depressing news, we should not forget that many teens successfully leap the chasm between childhood and adulthood.

"Alarm is not enough," said David Hamburg, president of the Carnegie Corp., which oversees the Council's work. Based on what is now known from recent research of healthy adolescents and families, he said, there is much that can be done. "What does it take for an adolescent to successfully leap the chasm?" he asked. "Here's a crack at the answers."

A successful adolescent, he said, finds a valued place in a constructive group; learns how to have constructive relationships; learns how to make informed choices; expresses constructive curiosity; finds ways to be useful to other people; learns lifelong learning habits; values democracy; and finds ways to believe in the future.

Helping a teenager achieve all of this isn't easy; but parents often have more power than they think they do.

For many years, parents have thought that the parent-teen conflict was natural," said Eleanor Maccoby, professor of psychology at Stanford University, and a member of the Council. "The conventional wisdom was that the kids should fight to be free from their parents, and their parents should give up control as gracefully as possible, and that if the right values had not been installed in the child by this age, it was too late."

However, current research is more hopeful, she said. Adolescents should, in fact, be allowed to act more independently, but parents and teens should not disengage. "Rather, they should move toward the kind of relationship that adults, who are close, have with one another."

Maccoby's description of this relationship was fascinating. Adults who are close are never totally autonomous. They maintain their relationship within a binding network; agree to coordinate activities, negotiate the division of labor; and try to show up on time for meetings with each other. This, she said, is the relationship that parents and adolescents need to move toward, rather than total independence from each other.

"One of the indicators that a parent and an adolescent are truly close," she added, "is that the parent has a tremendous amount of knowledge about the child's life, even if the parent is divorced and living in a separate household."

To encourage this kind of family relationship, parents and children need much more help from institutions, said Hamburg. "In the elementary schools, we found a surprising amount of parental involvement. But after that, it goes over a cliff. We need to educate parents that when they stay involved in the schools, their adolescents do much better."

He recommended that middle schools and junior highs be more aggressive in reaching out to parents. They could, for example, sponsor support groups for parents of adolescents.

To help kids stay connected to adults and supportive peers, large junior high schools should be broken up into smaller "schools within the school," said Hamburg. The Council also recommended that life sciences curriculums in middle and junior high schools be strengthened and that school health facilities be expanded and kept open after school hours.

One point reverberated throughout the Council's research: Adolescents need a sense of community, not only among their peers but among adults of all ages.

Hamburg called for intensified efforts by the organizations that already serve youth -- the YMCAs and YWCAs -- but also added effort by religious organizations, museums, Kiwanians, Rotarians and other traditional service groups. Many of these organizations, he said, are already doing good things for teens, "but the scale is too small."

Joseph Califano, a former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, argued for more business involvement, if only out of business self-interest. "We now know that virtually all substance abusers get hooked before 21," he said. "Because of substance abuse, American business lost $60 billion last year in lost productivity alone."

Califano, now chairman of Columbia University's Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, challenged businesses to provide family-friendly work policies; extend health insurance to dependent adolescents (one in seven has no health coverage); provide substance abuse programs to employees with adolescent drug or alcohol problems; provide seed money for after-school programs for teens, and think about how corporate advertising and marketing plays on adolescent fears and vulnerability.

Carnegie's recommendations "are not Utopian," said Hamburg. "Working model programs can be observed across the country; some have been scrutinized by good evaluative research. But where a few are found, we need thousands."

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Richard Louv is Senior Editor of Connect for Kids and columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune. He is also author of "101 Things You Can Do for Our Children's Future" (Anchor) and "The Web of Life" (Conari).

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