Perché dobbiamo cambiare la narrazione sull'adolescenza
Forget the negative stereotypes, adolescence can be a time of promise and possibility
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My daughter is only 4, but I already feel apprehensive about the Herculean task that is parenting a teenager. She can be stubborn and defiant, as preschoolers often are, and well-meaning relatives and friends warn me of what’s to come: “She’s a tough one — you’ll have your work cut out for you in the teenage years.” “Just wait until she’s 15 and sneaking out of the house!”
Such negative stereotypes of adolescents can create profezie che si auto avverano and damage parent-teen relationships. Instead, we should see stereotypes for what they truly are — over-generalizations that are usually inaccurate — and recognize that adolescence is a period of tremendous potential and growth.
“Negative stereotypes of adolescents can create self-fulfilling prophecies and damage parent-teen relationships.”
“Parents and other adults tend to forget their own adolescent years. Adolescence is not just about getting into trouble or risky behavior — it also can be a time of constructive behavior,” says Yang Qu, Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University in Illinois. “The question is, can we provide a supportive social context that helps children achieve optimal development during adolescence?”
Is adolescence a time of storm and stress?
More than 120 years ago, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall described the teenage years as a period marked by “storm and stress” in his pivotal two-volume work on adolescence. His characterization of adolescents as prone to l'assunzione di rischi, moodiness, and rebellion continues to dominate popular opinion in Western cultures. However, such negative views of teenagers do not always reflect reality.
In un 2023 studio, researchers examined the development of both problematic and positive behaviors as 1,211 children from 11 cultural groups across eight countries moved into and across adolescence. Typical behavior in all groups was more positive than negative. Symptoms of “internalizing” — mood and emotional problems, including depression and anxiety — were highest among 8-year-olds, not adolescents. The overall prevalence of internalizing and “externalizing”, which includes school misconduct, substance use, and aggression, was low. Wellbeing was on the high end of the scale.
“Some adolescents had more extreme scores and reported high levels of internalizing or externalizing, or low levels of wellbeing,” says study author Christy Buchanan, Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. “Nonetheless, if you look at the adolescents in this sample as an overall group, they were doing well.”
Analogamente, in un meta-analisi of laboratory studies, Ivy Defoe and her colleagues found that while adolescents made more risky decisions than adults, children actually took just as many risks in the lab as adolescents. Also, when adolescents could opt out of taking a risk and choose a safe option instead, they chose the safe option more often than children did.
“The results were shocking. We took it as a given that the adolescent period is when the most risk-taking happens,” says Defoe, Assistant Professor of Forensic Child and Youth Care Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. “Maybe adolescents are not the stereotypical risk-takers after all, even though we assume and tell them they are.”
Negative stereotypes become a self-fulfilling prophecy
Buchanan started investigating stereotypes of adolescents as a graduate student in the 1980s, specifically the view that girls have low self-esteem during the teenage years.
“I remember seeing headlines about how girls’ self-esteem plummeted at adolescence, and how as a society, we needed to do something to help girls,” she says. “For a paper I was writing, I had to read the literature at the time and noticed that girls’ self-esteem did seem to go down from childhood — but overall levels of self-esteem were still pretty high for adolescent girls.”
“Young people may internalize and enact stereotypical views.”
Today, she and other researchers continue to dispute the negative expectations of teenagers and analyze their effects. One consequence is that young people may internalize and enact stereotypical views. For example, Buchanan and her colleagues found that mothers’ expectations of their 11- and 12-year-old children, in terms of risk-taking/rebelliousness and feeling alienated from the family, and the children’s own expectations for themselves, predicted parallel behavior and attributes one year later. The study provides initial evidence that parental expectations of “storm and stress” might lead to behavior or perceptions of behavior consistent with the stereotype.
In un 2020 studio, Qu and his colleagues compared stereotypes about 12-year-olds in Hong Kong to those in Chongqing, a relatively less developed city in Mainland China. Youth in Hong Kong held views more in line with the Western “storm and stress” stereotype, while their counterparts in Chongqing saw adolescence as a time of greater family obligation. In addition, viewing the teenage years as a time of being irresponsible in the family or at school predicted more frequent problem behavior, over 6 months. To measure problem behavior, the researchers asked adolescents to report how often they engaged in everyday actions such as lying, cheating, or stealing, which are often highlighted in stereotypical views of adolescence, and then examined how these behaviors changed over a six-month period.
Changing the narrative on adolescence
Experts believe that a more accurate depiction of the teenage years than the “storm and stress” characterization would convey the positive potential and nuance of this pivotal developmental period. For instance, Buchanan proposes characterizing adolescence as a time of promise and possibility, openness and opportunity, or exploration and discovery.
“Words matter, especially words that are coming from adults labeling the youth who look up to them.”
Ivy Defoe
Stereotypes can affect the way parents, caregivers, and teachers treat children, who may then behave in ways that fall in line with expectations. “Words matter, especially words that are coming from adults labeling the youth who look up to them,” says Defoe, who has advocated for centering youth voices in such matters concerning them. “And in this context, this means that scientists should consider both adolescents’ perspectives on and the impacts of negative stereotypes as explained by adolescents themselves. But all things considered, in the end, adults need to focus on the individual child without giving into negative stereotypes.”
I braced myself for the “Terrible 2s” or “threenager” phase with my daughter, when, in reality, children develop at their own rate and possess different temperaments. Instead, I will strive to see her as unique – now, and in the future – instead of allowing labels to shape my perception of her.
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