By Po Bronson, Newsweek
November 05, 2009
Here’s a Twilight Zone-type premise for you. What if surgeons never
got to work on humans, they were instead just endlessly in training,
cutting up cadavers? What if the same went for all adults – we only got
to practice at simulated versions of our jobs? Lawyers only got to
argue mock cases, for years and years. Plumbers only got to fix fake
leaks in classrooms. Teachers only got to teach to videocameras,
endlessly rehearsing for some far off future. Book writers like me
never saw our work put out to the public – our novels sat in drawers.
Scientists never got to do original experiments; they only got to
recreate scientific experiments of yesteryear. And so on.
Rather
quickly, all meaning would vanish from our work. Even if we enjoyed the
activity of our job, intrinsically, it would rapidly lose depth and
relevance. It’d lose purpose. We’d become bored, lethargic, and
disengaged.
In other words, we’d turn into teenagers.
This is the metaphorical vision of adolescent life Dr. Joe Allen paints in his insightful new book, Escaping the Endless Adolescence, coauthored with his wife, Dr. Claudia Worrell Allen.
Allen
has concluded that our urge to protect teenagers from real life –
because we don’t think they’re ready yet – has tragically backfired. By
insulating them from adult-like work, adult social relationships, and
adult consequences, we have only delayed their development. We have
made it harder for them to grow up. Maybe even made it impossible to
grow up on time.
Basically, we long ago decided that teens
ought to be in school, not in the labor force. Education was their
future. But the structure of schools is endlessly repetitive. “From a
Martian’s perspective, high schools look virtually the same as sixth
grade,” said Allen. “There’s no recognition, in the structure of
school, that these are very different people with different
capabilities.” Strapped to desks for 13+ years, school becomes both
incredibly montonous, artificial, and cookie-cutter.
As
Allen writes, “We place kids in schools together with hundreds,
sometimes thousands, of other kids typically from similar economic and
cultural backgrounds. We group them all within a year or so of one
another in age. We equip them with similar gadgets, expose them to the
same TV shows, lessons, and sports. We ask them all to take almost the
exact same courses and do the exact same work and be graded relative to
one another. We give them only a handful of ways in which they can
meaningfully demonstrate their competencies. And then we’re surprised
they have some difficulty establishing a sense of their own
individuality.”
And we wonder why it’s taking so long for
them to mature. The old explanation used to be they needed time for the
wave of raging hormones to dissipate (more on this tomorrow). The newer
explanation is that their brains simply aren’t developed yet: their
prefrontal cortex hasn’t converted from gray matter to white matter,
their amygdalas have a surfeit of oxytocin receptors, and their reward
centers have a paucity of dopamine receptors. Few can say for sure yet
how these anatomical features actually interact and create modern
teenagers, but the gist of it is quite simple – until their brains are
finished, they’re not ready for real life.
“Most parents
will tell you that this idea of the immature teen brain is one of the
few notions that truly provides them comfort,” says Allen. “They feel
like it gets them off the hook – that it’s biological, not a fault of
parenting.” But Allen speculates that our parenting style may indeed be
causing their brains to be this way. Brains of teens a hundred years
ago might have been far more mature. Without painful real-life
experiences, modern teens’ brains never learn to tell the difference
between what they should fear and what they shouldn’t. Without real
consequences and real rewards, teens never learn to distinguish between
good risks they should take and bad risks they shouldn’t. “We park kids
on the sidelines, thinking their brains will develop if we just wait,
let time pass, as if all they need is more prep courses, lessons, and
enrichment courses. They need real stress and challenges.”
As
for the risk behavior we associate with adolescence, Allen cautions
that “We don’t give teens enough ways to take risks that are
productive.” So they turn to drinking, drug use, delinquency, and the
like – because those are the only things thrilling. “According to
Allen, teens aren't naturally passive – their environment makes them
passive. We’re writing them off at exactly the time we need to bring
out their potential.
Allen came to this perspective partly from his scholarly research on teens, which we’ve written about before,
and partly from his clinical practice with individual teens. His book
tells the stories of a dozen patients who came to him in trouble. At
first, these teens all manifested their problems differently, and
seemed to have different symptoms. Sam was uncommunicative, unwilling
to ever talk (she was forced to see Allen by the rules of her group
home). Perry was a high-achieving boy who became an anorexic. Tim was
pushing himself to success, when suddenly he dropped out to draw comic
books. Tonya was a small, shy student on path to get pregnant and drop
out, like her sister.
But what helped all these kids – Sam,
Perry, Tim and Tonya – was a taste of real life. They found a way to do
something meaningful in real life, interacting with adults, outside the
realm of the high school artificial bubble, and outside the hovering
control of their parents. For some, it was volunteering at
organizations that really needed their help – where they felt they were
making a real contribution. For others it was tutoring younger kids.
For others, exploring a passion without regard to its value to their
college application. Or it could be a job (not a McJob) where they
interacted with adults. A little went a long way.
I hear
often from parents whose teenagers are disengaged or withdrawn. They
have a hard time caring what other kids think, or what society expects
of them. They’re having a hard time playing the game of resume-building
for a far-off future. Now I have the perfect book to recommend: Escaping the Endless Adolescence.
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