1MESSAGE 1: UNDERSTAND OUR DEVELOPMENT
I don’t understand how adults don’t understand teenagers when they were once a teenager,” Ayana, a sixteen-year-old living in Connecticut, told me.
That’s always been my main question. I’ve thought about this for so long. How can adults forget what it’s like being a teenager when they were once a teenager and had this same exact thing happen to them?
We’d talk about her experiences with school, friends, and boyfriends. She’d explain how she was different from her parents, then return to her question:
We are different, but I still just don’t understand how they can look at me and say, “I understand what you’re going through,” when they don’t.
Many of us may have had a young person say some version of “you don’t understand me” to us. It’s a recurrent theme that—because of its frequency, urgency, and impact—deserves to be addressed. It was the driving purpose of the Breakthrough Years study and the foundation of this book.
The Breakthrough Years Study
Young people in the Breakthrough Years study were asked a question that helps us understand what they want us to know:
What would you like to tell the adults of America about people your age?
The 1,666 young people who took this quantitative survey are from all over the United States, ranging in age from nine to nineteen. They live in the mountains and on the coasts, in the deserts and on the plains, in soaring cities and in the countryside around cities and towns. They’re high-income, low-income, and in between; they’re of all skin hues. Yet, remarkably, many of the words in this nationally representative group in the response to this open-ended question echo each other.*
When they say we underestimate how “smart” they are, they aren’t talking about IQ or book-smarts. “Smart” is a stand-in for who they are and how they approach the world.
They say it directly:
We are smart and not bad.
—Eleven-year-old boy**
We are smart and try our best, but we still need love.
—Nine-year-old girl
We are strong, smart and ready to learn and grow—we need support, love and to be treated like we matter.
—Sixteen-year-old boy
I would like to tell them that we are actually smart and we are the next generation that will help this planet.
—Fourteen-year-old boy
They say, “Don’t assume…”:
Don’t be so judgmental and assume we are dumb.
—Sixteen-year-old girl
We are smarter than you [adults] think. We don’t get everything right all the time, but nobody does.
—Thirteen-year-old boy
They say: “We are not…”
Give us a chance. Listen to us—we’re not as dumb as a lot of you think.
—Sixteen-year-old boy
We are not all screwups—a lot of us are smart and try to do the right thing all of the time.
—Thirteen-year-old girl
I was struck by how many times the words “smart” or “not dumb” appear. In fact, 12 percent—the highest portion of young people in the Breakthrough Years study in a single coding category for this question—specifically want adults to know they are smart.*
Another 9 percent want us to “be more patient,” as one eighteen-year-old boy says, and understand they’re still learning.
We are difficult, but sometimes all we want is to be understood.
—Fourteen-year-old girl
We are young adults finding our way thru life, we should be treated with respect and hopefully understanding as to what we are going through.
—Thirteen-year-old girl
Breakthrough Years Study Finding: One in every five young people (21 percent) want adults to know that we don’t understand their way of being smart and their development.
What messages are they getting from us that give such frequent rise to the word “smart”? Maybe we say “that’s not smart” when we don’t like something they say or do. Maybe we have low expectations:
I would like to tell the adults of America that people my age are not “children” that should be treated like two-year-olds. We are smart and are more intelligent than some think we are. I think that even though we are smaller and have less power than most adults, we can still make a big difference.
—Ten-year-old girl
Or a mix of low and high expectations:
I’ve seen the same phrase everywhere: “Teenagers are treated like children and expected to act like adults.” There is this awkward, in-between learning phase we’re going through. But let me explain why this hurts. Treating me like a child is upsetting because when I turn eighteen, I feel like I’m supposed to magically turn “adult” and know what I’m going to do with my life.
—Seventeen-year-old girl
It’s clear that this in-between learning phase isn’t well understood by us adults.
How Did We Get Here?
There are many reasons. Adolescents live in a world where they’re frequently judged. There’s high-stakes testing, where a lot of their future depends on the results. There’s social media, where some teenagers curate their images, presenting their lives to seem as perfect as possible, while others feel inadequate and judged.1 But young people have felt this way before all of this. There’s something deeper in society.
For well over a century, most studies on adolescence have focused on the emotional upheavals and vulnerabilities of these years, reflecting long-held societal views of adolescents. The textbook I used as a child studies major2 in college begins its description of adolescence with the 1904 work of G. Stanley Hall (the first psychologist to study adolescence as a distinct developmental stage), characterizing adolescence as a time of “Sturm und Drang”—storm and stress.3 And only a few years ago, at a college reunion, my classmates and I attended a lecture on why adolescents make stupid and negative risky decisions, despite seeming to know better.
Has anything changed? Yes. And no.
THE SCIENCE BOOM
Over the past twenty years, there’s been an explosion in research on adolescent development, including brain development, often aided by innovative brain imaging technologies and collaborations between developmental researchers and neuroscientists.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and his colleagues began finding a pattern of brain development that they believed helps explain negative risk-taking.4 Specifically, Steinberg, Jason Chein,5 and others6 found that the brain’s reward system on average develops more quickly than the cognitive control system.
This was and is an important finding. In its wake, however, an image took hold in the public imagination that researchers and many others have used. Adolescence is like an out-of-control car. The accelerator (the reward system) is well developed and can be pushed to the floor, which is thrilling, but the brakes (the cognitive control system) are faulty because they’re not fully developed. The result: risky behavior.
The finding that, in general, the brain’s reward system develops more quickly than the cognitive control system has been replicated by the Temple team7 and many others. But new studies have emerged indicating there’s much more to it. In this chapter, I’ll share research on adolescence showing that:
Cognitive control strategies for managing emotions can be taught and learned.The reward system is also a learning system that can be harnessed for growth and learning.Development isn’t set in stone—there are significant individual differences in developmental patterns, and this pattern doesn’t apply to many young people.Most important, our lack of understanding of adolescent development can affect our children in negative ways.NEGATIVE AND INCOMPLETE PERCEPTIONS OF ADOLESCENCE PERSIST
The media, including many books, continue to reinforce incomplete and negative images. Between October 16, 2017, and January 16, 2018, FrameWorks Institute coded and analyzed 249 stories about this age from the top U.S. mainstream media and online news publications. They found that media stories are more than twice as likely to discuss negative influences on adolescents (48 percent) than positive ones (21 percent), “often accompanied by explicit language about the ‘riskiness’ of adolescence.”8 Influences characterized as negative include peers, gangs, technology, social and entertainment media, and sexual predators.
These messages reinforce existing assumptions—like those “just wait till they’re teenagers” warnings I described in the introduction. And so, “over time, these models become ever more deeply etched into culture.”9
But we now know that this isn’t the full story:
Experts see adolescence as a period of vulnerability and [emphasis added] opportunity, when environments and experiences exert an especially strong effect on development and shape long-term outcomes. Media discourse … tells half of this story, focusing only on the threats posed to young people but not opportunities for growth and development.10
I’ll explore why these negative stories are so persistent and resistant to change at the end of this chapter. First, let’s look at the research that sheds an illuminating new light on adolescent development.
Reflections on Message 1
Think back to a time when you had to move out of your comfort zone as an adult. Perhaps it was moving to a new place, starting a new job, or meeting new people. How did you manage this?
When I ask this question of adults in my talks, here are some of the stories I hear:
Some speak about being brave:
I had to summon the courage to take on this project in the first place.
Others search for meaning:
Thinking on my feet comes to mind. Because I wasn’t sure of the customs or conventions at my new organization, I had to look at other people to see how they reacted. I had to listen to the words they used and try to quickly make sense of what was happening so I could respond.
Moving workplaces prompted one person to try to discover the norms in the new culture:
When I was going to a new job, I used self-talk and asked myself questions, like: “Should my boss tell me exactly what to do?” I told myself, “No, that’s not going to happen.” I need to look to the people who’ve been there for years to figure out what’s expected. I gave myself the grace of not knowing, of asking questions, of exploring, and of realizing it will take time.
Becoming able to take risks helped another manage:
My dad held our large family together for years. When he passed, I couldn’t deal with the way the family became, so I decided to move. I had to find new doctors, new stores, and new people to help me. When I was trying to manage all of this, I kept remembering how it felt to be in my old home. That helped me take the risk and try something new.
A man spoke about how much his mindset mattered:
When I have to do something hard, I think about times when a similar experience had gone well in the past. That gives me the confidence to see this as an adventure.
When we move out of our comfort zone, we summon our courage, try to get a quick read on the social situation, think on our feet, explore, and take risks.
For adolescents, this is a phase of life—a yearslong experience of moving out of their comfort zones. This phase is not “complete” once the jolt of the new gradually fades away. It unfolds over a period of years, as they continually form an identity during adolescence (and later in life) and as they adapt to new schools, new people, new situations, and ultimately to adult experiences. The exhilarating, exhausting, exacting process that adults go through when we take a new job, move, or go to an unfamiliar city for a work project is the sustained work of adolescence.
The Adolescent Years Are Breakthrough Years
For as long as she can remember, Jennifer Silvers of UCLA has been interested in emotions. She recalls that when she experienced a particularly difficult time as an adolescent—having a problem in school, trying something new, getting rejected by a new crush—it made her feel “nervous,” “overwhelmed,” and “as if it was the end of the world!” She also recalls that her mother would suggest taking a step back:
My mother told me something to the effect of, “Right now this feels like everything, but someday you’ll look back and it will seem like just one experience of many.” I remember thinking: that must mean that the way I’m looking at the world today will be different when I’m older. It made me wonder what was unique about being an adolescent, particularly since a lot of emotions felt so strong. That was part of what led me to want to study adolescence.11
OVERLY EMOTIONAL + IMPULSIVE + RISKY = ADOLESCENCE?
Imagine that you are slighted at work, someone you care about says something mean, or someone treats you like a child. At any age, we resent having our powerful feelings dismissed. Silvers’s mother understood adolescence, which showed in her responses to her daughter. She wasn’t confrontational (“Get over it!”) or dismissive (“You’re blowing things out of proportion”). She accepted her daughter’s feelings (“right now this feels like everything”) and offered a tool for reframing an overwhelming moment (“your perspective might be different someday”).
Parents and caregivers like this mother know that how children view and manage emotionally charged situations will change as they grow up, but it wasn’t until recently that researchers like Silvers understood more precisely when this happens and how. She has focused specifically on those when and how questions, looking at cognitive reappraisal—reframing one’s interpretation of an emotional event. Her research helps us see adolescence as the breakthrough years of dramatic changes it truly is.
Copyright © 2024 by Ellen Galinsky
