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Great Transitions: Preparing Adolescents for a New Century

Chapter One: Early Adolescence: A Crucial Turning Point

Adolescence is one of the most fascinating and complex transitions in the life span: a time of accelerated growth and change second only to infancy; a time of expanding horizons, self-discovery, and emerging independence; a time of metamorphosis from childhood to adulthood. Its beginning is associated with profound biological, physical, behavioral, and social transformations that roughly correspond with the move to middle school or junior high school. The events of this crucially formative phase can shape an individual's entire life course and thus the future of our society.

In these often tumultuous years, a young person experiences much growth and joy, as well as doubt and confusion. Relationships with peers and family take on new meaning. Some young people consider their prospects and find little to hope for. Others have no more than a vague image of the future as they embark on a prolonged search for the pathways to promising adulthood.

In societies the world over, the onset of adolescence is closely synchronized with the biological changes of puberty. In most technologically advanced countries today, puberty begins on average two years earlier than it did a century ago, and the transition to adulthood can last a decade or more. Adolescence in the United States now extends over so many years that it can be usefully subdivided into several phases. Early adolescence, encompassing the sexual and psychological awakenings of puberty as well as new social challenges, extends roughly from ages ten through fourteen. Middle adolescence, a time of increased autonomy and experimentation, covers ages fifteen through seventeen. Late adolescence, occurring for those who delay their entry into adult roles because of educational or social factors, can stretch from age eighteen into the twenties.

A TIME OF OPPORTUNITY AND RISK
For the majority of young people, the adolescent transition offers great opportunity and excitement, if sometimes anguish and disappointment. Contrary to conventional wisdom, adolescents as a group are not inherently difficult, contrary, ineducable, and prey to "raging hormones." For many, the experience goes fairly smoothly, especially when family relationships are based on an understanding of adolescents' developmental needs. On the whole, teenagers' relationships with their parents and other adults are far less stormy than has been generally thought. Only a minority engage in covert or open conflict or rebellion as they seek to establish a sense of autonomy and separate identity. Through the critical adolescent years, most parents remain an important influence on their children, helping to mold their sense of self and shape their future life choices. Peers, moreover, often have a beneficial influence on adolescents, contributing to their self-esteem, sense of identity, and achievement. Peer support may be especially important for those whose parents are emotionally distant, harshly critical, or casually neglectful.

Despite these largely reassuring findings, adolescents are facing demands and expectations, as well as risks and threats, that are both more numerous and more serious than they were only a generation ago. Millions are growing up under conditions that do not meet their enduring needs for optimal development. They are not receiving the careful, nurturing guidance they need--and say they want--from parents and other adults. They are yielding to social pressures to use drugs, including alcohol and cigarettes, to have sex, and to engage in antisocial activities at distressingly early ages. Too many are alienated from school and moving toward dropping out. Countless poignant examples exist of self-destructive, even violent, behavior in the ten-to-eighteen-year age group, among both rich and poor.

Many of the problems of adolescence begin to surface in the turning point years of ten through fourteen. Important in its own right as a potentially rewarding time of personal growth and development, early adolescence is the phase when young people begin to adopt behavior patterns in education and health that can have lifelong consequences. At the same time, it is an age when, much like younger children, individuals still need special nurturing and adult guidance. For these reasons, early adolescence offers a unique window of opportunity to shape enduring patterns of healthy behavior.

There are nineteen million adolescents ages ten through fourteen in the United States. Approximately 20 percent of them live below the poverty line, and close to 30 percent are members of minority groups. If they are to compete in the complex global economy of the future, all of these young people must grow up healthy and well-educated. The question for our society is how these goals may be achieved in the face of the profound social and economic transformations of the late twentieth century. The changes of just the past thirty years have provided many young people with remarkable material benefits and opportunities, but they have also introduced severe stresses into the adolescent experience--stresses that, among other effects, are taking an increasing toll in emotional and behavior-related illness.

Young adolescents initially explore risk-taking behaviors tentatively. That is why, before damaging patterns are firmly established, it is important to intervene early to prevent later casualties and promote more successful outcomes. Adolescence, in fact, is the last phase of life in which society has reasonably ready access to virtually the entire population, so the potential for constructive influence is great.

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Sarah Rosen, 16

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THE REQUIREMENTS FOR HEALTHY ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT
All adolescents have basic human needs that must be met if they are to grow up into decent, caring, informed citizens. They must find ways to earn respect, establish a sense of belonging in a valued group, and build a sense of personal worth based on mastery of useful skills, including social skills. They must learn the peaceful management of conflict, the elements of ethical behavior, and how to use the social support systems available to them. Hopefully, during adolescence, they will acquire a positive vision of the future and of constructive opportunities in the adult world.

But in our contemporary society--one that places an increasingly high premium on competence in many domains, even more is asked of adolescents. They must cultivate inquiring and problem-solving habits of mind, acquire the technical and analytic capabilities to participate in a worldwide economy, and have the capability for lifelong learning and adaptation to changing circumstances. Further, they must learn, in our pluralistic society, to live peacefully and respectfully with a wide array of ethnic, religious, and cultural groups.

COMPREHENSIVE, GENERIC APPROACH
Current interventions on behalf of young adolescents are typically targeted to one problem behavior, such as drug abuse, delinquency, or teenage pregnancy. While targeted, or categorical, interventions of this kind can be useful, they often do not take into adequate account two findings from research: that more than one problem behavior is likely to occur in the same individual; and that these problems are likely to have common roots in childhood and educational experience.

The Carnegie Council's approach is to deal more directly with the underlying factors that predispose adolescents to engage in high-risk or problem behaviors in the first place. Such an approach is generic, comprehensive, and preventive in nature. At its heart is the restoration and strengthening of social supports that were once available to young adolescents within their families and communities but that can no longer be taken for granted. Such a generic approach focuses not just on problem behaviors after they occur, but on their common antecedents. It emphasizes the positive possibilities inherent in the adolescent transition--possibilities for educating and motivating young adolescents to pursue healthy lifestyles; for fostering interpersonal and decision-making skills to help adolescents choose alternatives to very risky behavior; and for providing them with reasons and tools to build constructive lives.

RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE CARNEGIE COUNCIL
Ensuring the healthy growth and development of adolescents requires the combined commitment of all the institutions that have a profound impact on youth. No single entity can be responsible for a young person's successful transition from adolescence into adulthood--not today and certainly not in the next century. Families, the schools, health care organizations, community organizations, and the media must work singly and in concert to launch all young people onto a successful life course.

To families, the Carnegie Council asks that they take the time to reengage with their adolescent children within the home, in their school lives, and beyond. To schools, the Council asks that they understand and meet the unique developmental needs of young adolescents. To health care institutions, the Council asks that they do a better job of recognizing opportunities to promote good lifelong health practices during the adolescent period. To community organizations, the Council asks that they form partnerships with other organizations to provide safe places and high-quality programs for all adolescents during the out-of-school hours. To the media, the Council asks that they redirect their pervasive power toward becoming a more positive force in the lives of the young.

Altogether, those responsible for nurturing adolescents must seek opportunities to build a supportive and caring infrastructure for young people at the threshold of adulthood--an infrastructure that can potentially sustain them through the difficult transitional years into productive, fulfilling adulthood, even under conditions of deep adversity.

THE SEARCH FOR COMMON GROUND
The United States is a large, heterogeneous, multiethnic nation with a strong tradition of individualism. These qualities are significant assets, but they also make it difficult for Americans to arrive at a shared understanding of complicated social problems and turn that understanding into solutions that can win broad acceptance. Can we envision how the basic institutions of society--families, schools, churches, youth organizations, health care agencies, and the media--buttressed by powerful sectors like higher education, the scientific community, and government, might cooperate in meeting the developmental needs of youth? Achieving a consensus on the values and behaviors appropriate for adolescents, and on the steps that can be taken to help them, will not be easy. But we must try, for it is not only the lives of young people that are at stake. It is our common future.

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Young Adolescents Face Serious Risks

HEALTH RISKS

• Injuries are the leading cause of death for young adolescents. The largest single cause of death among these adolescents is injuries from motor vehicle crashes.[1]

• The firearm homicide rate for ten- to fourteen-year-olds more than doubled between 1985 and 1992 (from 0.8 to 1.9 per 100,000). For black males, the rate increased from 3.0 to 8.4 per 100,000 during the same period.[2]
• In 1992, twelve- to fifteen-year-olds had a high overall victimization rate. They were victims of assault more than any other age group.[3]
• In a national representative sample of adolescents ten to sixteen years old, one-fourth of respondents reported having experienced an assault or abuse in the previous year.[4] Approximately 20 percent of the documented child abuse and neglect cases in 1992 involved young adolescents between the ages of ten and thirteen years.[5]
• Use of alcohol and cigarettes remains more widespread than use of illegal drugs.
• Although it is illegal to sell alcohol to individuals under twenty-one years of age, two-thirds of eighth graders report that they have already tried alcohol and a quarter say that they are current drinkers. Twenty-eight percent of eighth graders say that they have been drunk at least once.[6]
• Among eighth graders, who are thirteen to fourteen years old, the rate of current smoking (smoking any cigarette in the past thirty days) rose by 30 percent between 1991 and 1994, from 14.3 to 18.6 percent.[7]
• Marijuana use among eighth graders more than doubled between 1991 and 1994 from 6.2 to 13.0 percent.[8]
• Over the last three decades, the age of first intercourse has declined. Higher proportions of adolescent girls and boys reported being sexually experienced at each age between the ages of fifteen and twenty in 1988 than in the early 1970s. In 1988, 27 percent of girls and 33 percent of boys had intercourse by their fifteenth birthday.[9]
• While the number of births to those ages fifteen and younger is not large, this group is experiencing the greatest rate of increased births. Pregnancy rates for all girls younger than fifteen years old rose 4.1 percent in the United States during the period between 1980 and 1988--higher than any other teenage group.[10]
• Current evidence indicates that increases in depressive disorders and mood swings are greater for girls than for boys during adolescence. By age fourteen to fifteen, girls are twice as likely as boys to suffer from depression, a gender difference that persists into adulthood.
• From 1980 to 1992, the rate of suicide among young adolescents increased 120 percent and increased most dramatically among young black males (300 percent) and young white females (233 percent). Suicide rates for ten- to fourteen-year-old American Indians are four times higher than those for ten- to fourteen-year-olds of all races.[11]

EDUCATIONAL RISKS

• The average proficiency in science, mathematics, and writing among thirteen-year-olds was slightly higher in 1992 than it was in the 1970s. However, these achievements have not improved enough to keep pace with the higher level of skills required in a global economy.[12]

• Only 28 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficiency level in reading in 1994. Two percent read at or above an advanced level.[13]
• In 1990, 7 percent of the eighth-grade class of 1988 (most of whom were then fifteen and sixteen years old) were dropouts.[14] By their senior year (1992), 12 percent of this class were dropouts.[15 ]Dropout rates vary by students' race/ethnicity: white (9.4); black (14.5); Hispanic (18.3); Asian/Pacific Islanders (7.0); and American Indian (25.4).[16]

SOURCES

1. National Center for Health Statistics, Unpublished data, 1994.

2. Ibid.

3. Bureau of Justice Statistics. (1994). Criminal victimization in the United States, 1992. NCJ-145125. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

4. Finkelhor, D., & Dziuba-Leatherman, J. (1994). Children as victims of violence: A national survey. Pediatrics 94:413-420.

5. U.S. Bureau of the Census. (1994). Statistical abstract of the United States, 1994. (114th edition). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

6. Johnston, L. D., O'Malley, P. M., & Bachman, J. G. (1994). National survey results on drug use from the Monitoring the Future study, 1975-1993, volume I, secondary school students. Rockville, MD: National Institute on Drug Abuse.

7. Johnston, L. D., O'Malley, P. M., & Bachman, J. G. (1995). National survey results on drug use from the Monitoring the Future study, 1975-1994. Rockville, MD: National Institute on Drug Abuse.

8. Johnston, L. D., O'Malley, P. M., & Bachman, J. G., 1994.

9. The Alan Guttmacher Institute. (1994). Sex and America's teenagers. New York: Author.

10. U.S. General Accounting Office. (1995). Welfare dependency: Coordinated community efforts can better serve young at-risk teen girls. GAO/HEHS/RCED-95-108. Washington, DC: Author.

11. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Suicide among children, adolescents, and young adults--United States, 1980-1992. Vol. 44, No. 15, April 21, 1995; and U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment. (1990). Indian adolescent mental health (OTA-H-446). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

12. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 1994 NAEP reading: A first look. April 1995.

13. Ibid.

14. They were not enrolled in school and had not finished high school.

15. U.S Department of Education, 1995.

16. National Center for Education Statistics. (1994). The condition of education, 1994. NCES94-149. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

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