What Happened to Adolescence?

By Thomas Franklin, M.D.

I recently attended a dinner party of well-heeled middle-aged couples. Over dinner, one engaged, well-regarded Mom, a PTA president, suggested she didn’t want her 13-year-old son to answer the door because it was dangerous. Suddenly, the table got quiet, and a quick look around showed nodding heads and sympathetic looks. When I suggested that the risk to our teens of not being able to competently answer the door was greater than the minuscule risk of opening it to a dangerous stranger it fell on surprisingly deaf ears.

However, there are greater risks to adolescents than strangers at the door. Over the past generation, the adolescent mental health crisis has worsened in the United States, becoming even more acute during the COVID pandemic. Teen suicide rates are on the rise; colleges and universities are having to develop full-scale mental health centers on their campuses. Specialty programs for the emerging-adult population have sprung up around the country and the term “failure to launch” has entered the popular lexicon to refer to a young adult who has stalled developmentally and is unable to manage living on their own.

How did we get here?

In Western culture, adolescence has been considered a critical developmental period, at the core of which children were expected to figure things out on their own, with less adult input and supervision. They use this time to develop skills and capacities for independence, responsibility, and meaningful relationships. For several generations, teenagers started on this path with ample time to gather and form friendships. It was a time to seek out part-time after-school and summer jobs outside the home.

Most notably, it included unsupervised, unstructured time to get into and out of minor challenges on their own (and, hopefully, learning when and how to ask for help). The outcome of teenage years spent this way was young adults who went confidently into the world with a notion of how to solve problems and engage in the social reciprocity inherent in relationships.

However, during the past 30 years, the number of teens engaged in paid work has plummeted. Rather than learning about the work world at summer jobs and sorting out the social and psychological issues around working with a diverse group of people, teens spend summertime in various highly structured “enrichment” activities, often with others just like them, where someone else fully manages their time and involvement.

In addition, the past decade has seen the amount of time teens actually talk and interact with one another go down as well. The time they spend together is often more like parallel play, similar to what occurs in early childhood, rather than the creative interaction with one another that invites real intimacy. That is, they are playing next to each other, not with each other. Frequently adolescents may be found sitting around while looking on their phones together, which is not the same as relating to one another in a meaningful way.

What societal influences have contributed to parental participation in these changes?

Policy making and decisions to federally guarantee all student loans and decouple college costs from basic economics have caused college costs to skyrocket in the past generation. The stakes for working families of getting into college have become almost unbearable. The general stress of getting into colleges and universities now also includes the institutional expectation that applicants demonstrate mastery or depth of commitment to a sport, instrument, artistic pursuit, or organization.

In the desperate effort to succeed, both parents and teens now pursue what used to be a task of one’s 20s, skipping entirely over the important developmental milestones of the teenage years. The result is a 20-year-old who plays the cello beautifully but cannot make a doctor’s appointment, fill out a job application, or scramble eggs—a young person frightened of life and its uncertainties and who needs assistance to manage basic life tasks. Many are also often overcome with fear and shame that they are not more capable, especially given the talents and gifts they’ve been praised for their entire life.

What can be done?

For starters, teens need time away from their phones and more time with each other. Teen parties and get-togethers where phones are collected at the door could be the norm.

Second, colleges need to de-emphasize developmentally inappropriate specialization for teenagers and reward those who work at jobs outside the home, have a more diverse array of interests, and are not afraid to explore the world even if they are not experts at it.

Third, we need to dial down the college mania that has been drummed up by the colleges. Getting into college should not be more meaningful than leaving college with the potential to be an adult who is capable of being happy, healthy, and self-supporting.

Finally, we must allow children of all ages more developmentally appropriate, unsupervised, unstructured time. The risks to our kids of not being able to take care of themselves are much, much greater than the risks of walking to the corner store by themselves or playing with other kids in the neighborhood with minimal or no supervision.

Hopefully, by making these changes, we can raise children into young adults who are capable of independent growth and development, relationships, work, and civic engagement.