Chapter 9: Autonomy

Volunteering

Is volunteering good for adolescents' psychological development? This is a hard question to answer, because individuals who choose to volunteer are different to begin with from their peers who do not (Atkins, Hart, & Donnelly, 2005; Schmidt, Shumow, & Kackar, 2012). Nevertheless, studies of volunteering that follow adolescents over time indicate that engaging in community service leads to short-term gains in social responsibility, increases in the importance individuals place on helping others, and increased commitment to tolerance, equal opportunity, and cultural diversity (N. Eisenberg et al., 2009; Flanagan, Kim, Collura, & Kopish, 2015; Reinders & Youniss, 2006). There also is some evidence that volunteering in adolescence predicts volunteering in adulthood (Chan, Ou, & Reynolds, 2014; Hart, Donnelly, Youniss, & Atkins, 2007). The extent to which these effects persist over time depends, in part, on how long the volunteer activity lasts; the shorter the activity, the more short-lived the effects (Horn, 2012). During the past several decades, many school districts began requiring community service of all students. This suggestion has been met with both praise and criticism. Proponents argue that service activities help develop concern for the community and facilitate adolescents' prosocial development. Opponents counter that forcing adolescents to do something they don't want to do will make them even more negative about community service and less likely to volunteer at later ages. Some worry that turning an activity that adolescents may want to do into a school requirement makes the activity less intrinsically rewarding. Several studies have compared students who have volunteered for community service with those who have had it forced on them. It does not seem that requiring community service makes students develop negative attitudes about volunteering, regardless of whether they had been volunteers previously. But the evidence is mixed with regard to whether the effects of volunteering are different between adolescents who willingly participate and those who do it only because it is a requirement. Some studies find that participating in community service activities has positive effects regardless of whether the participation is voluntary or required (Hart et al., 2007; J. Schmidt, Shumow, & Kackar, 2007), but others do not (Horn, 2012), and still others find that participation has little effect regardless of whether it is mandatory or optional (Henderson, Brown, Pancer, & Ellis-Hale, 2007). One reason for these discrepancies is that students' volunteer experiences vary considerably in quality, ranging from ones that engage adolescents in helping others directly to those that occupy them in tedious clerical work (Ferreira, Azevedo, & Menezes, 2012; Henderson, Pancer, & Brown, 2014). Another is that community service only may be beneficial if adolescents are required to reflect on their experience (van Goethem, van Hoof, de Castro, van Aken, & Hart, 2014). One important difference between students who are forced into community service and those who volunteer is that volunteers are more likely to continue their service work after graduation. In other words, whatever the positive effects of participation, they are not enough to turn adolescents who aren't especially interested in community work into adults who are (Planty, Bozick, & Regnier, 2006). Perhaps the most reasonable conclusion one can draw from these studies is that the potential benefits to the recipients of the adolescents' service (the children they tutor, the elderly they visit, or the neighborhoods whose parks they clean up) may be greater than those to the volunteers. There has been much discussion about whether contemporary generations of adolescents are more or less community-oriented than previous ones were. Generally speaking, there have been few significant changes over time in adolescents' degree of concern for others, with no changes since the mid-1960s in the extent to which American adolescents' believe that it is important to "make a contribution to society," feel empathy for people from other backgrounds, do things to help others, or correct inequalities. If anything, there have been significant increases in the proportion of youth who say that it is important to be well-off financially and have a great deal of money, and decreases in the proportion who say that it

Moral Reasoning and Moral Behavior

It is one thing to reason about hypothetical moral problems in an advanced way; it is quite another to behave consistently with one's reasoning. After all, it is common for people to say one thing (cheating on a test is immoral) but do another (sneak a peek at a classmate's test when running out of time during an exam). Although individuals do not always behave in ways that are absolutely consistent with their moral reasoning, on average, people who reason at higher stages are more ethical in their day-to-day behavior (N. Eisenberg et al., 2009). Adolescents who are capable of reasoning at higher stages are less likely to commit antisocial acts, less likely to cheat, and less likely to bow to the pressures of others, as well as be more tolerant of diversity, more likely to engage in political protests, more likely to volunteer their time, and more likely to assist others in need of help. They are also more likely to be influential over their friends in group decisions about moral problems. Conversely, those who reason at lower stages of moral thought are more aggressive, delinquent, accepting of violence, and accepting of others' misbehavior. Moral behavior and moral reasoning do not always go hand in hand. Most of us have found ourselves in situations in which we behaved less morally than we would have liked to. Accordingly, we should not expect moral behavior to follow exactly from moral reasoning, because other factors complicate moral decision making. For example, you probably realize in the abstract that complying with highway speed limits is important because such limits prevent accidents, and you likely obey these limits most of the time. But you may have found yourself in a situation in which you weighed your need to get somewhere in a hurry against your belief in the importance of obeying speeding laws, and you decided that in this instance you would knowingly behave in a way inconsistent with your belief. Situational factors influence moral choices, and they also influence moral reasoning. When individuals perceive that they will be severely hurt by behaving in a morally advanced way (for example, if standing up for someone might get you injured), they are less likely to reason at a higher moral level (Sobesky, 1983). The correlation between adolescents' moral reasoning and their moral behavior is especially likely to break down when they define issues as personal choices rather than ethical dilemmas (for instance, when using drugs is seen as a personal matter rather than a moral issue). This helps explain why adolescents' moral reasoning and risk taking are unrelated; people can be very advanced in their reasoning but still engage in risky behavior. If people consider various risky behaviors (for example, experimenting with drugs, or having unprotected sex) to be personal decisions rather than ethical ones, their moral reasoning will be relatively unimportant in predicting how they will act. Individuals are more likely to engage in risky behavior (even if it is unethical) when they see the behavior as a matter of personal taste rather than a question of right and wrong. This suggests that interventions designed to stimulate moral reasoning will have little impact on adolescents' risk taking if they fail to convince adolescents that the behavior in question involves a moral and not just a personal choice. This is also why delinquency and aggression are more common among adolescents who score higher on measures of moral disengagement (the tendency to rationalize immoral behavior as legitimate, as when one justifies stealing from someone as a way of retaliating).

Political Thinking During Adolescence

Less is known about the development of political thinking during adolescence than about moral development, but political thinking, like moral reasoning, becomes more principled, more abstract, and more independent during the adolescent years. This pattern is linked both to the general cognitive developments of adolescence and to the growth of specific expertise, as the adolescent is exposed to more political information and ideas (Flanagan, 2004).

Civic Engagement

One of the most obvious ways in which adolescents can demonstrate prosocial behavior is through various types of civic engagement (Flanagan & Wray-Lake, 2011; Sherrod & Lauckhardt, 2009). Civic engagement is a broad term for a category of activities that reflect involvement in political and community affairs, including staying knowledgeable about politics and current affairs, participating in conventional political activities (e.g., contacting a political representative about an issue, campaigning for a candidate, or voting in an election), participating in alternative political activities (e.g., being part of a demonstration or a boycott), and engaging in community service. Because the minimum age for voting in most countries is 18 or older, little research has been conducted on adolescents' involvement in political activities, although a number of surveys have been conducted to measure students' knowledge and attitudes on a range of political issues. Most of these studies have found that only a small proportion of young people are politically engaged, not just in the United States, but around the world. Nor does this change once people become old enough to vote. In the United States, election turnouts continue to be lower among young people than among adults, and, with the exception of a temporary spark in interest following major political and world events (such as the horrific 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida), adolescents' interest in, and knowledge of, political issues is meager (Sherrod & Lauckhardt, 2009). Experts attribute this in part to the widespread absence of civics education in American high schools and to the tendency of adolescents to focus their civic energies on organizations that they are more directly involved with, such as their schools, religious institutions, and extracurricular clubs. Most research on civic engagement in adolescence has focused on community service. Volunteering in community service activities, sometimes referred to as service learning, is more common in the United States than in most other countries. Researchers have been interested in both the antecedents of volunteering (what leads adolescents to become involved in volunteer activities) and its consequences (how adolescents are affected by volunteering). Apart from attending a school in which some sort of community service is required, the best predictors of volunteerism in adolescence are being actively involved in religion (most probably because many volunteer activities are organized through religious institutions) and having parents who are active as volunteers in the community. Volunteers also tend to be female, more socially mature, more extraverted, and more altruistic (N. Eisenberg et al., 2009).

Prosocial Reasoning and Prosocial Behavior

Adolescents who show more advanced prosocial reasoning and who place a high value on prosocial behavior behave in ways that are consistent with this (Hardy, Carlo, & Roesch, 2010). Adolescents who have volunteered considerable amounts of time in service activities score higher on measures of moral reasoning than their peers, are more committed to the betterment of society, and, as children, were made aware of the suffering of those who are less fortunate (Hart & Fegley, 1995; Matsuba & Walker, 2005; Yates & Youniss, 1996). Individuals who score high on measures of prosocial moral reasoning are more sympathetic and empathic, and are less likely to behave violently after having witnessed violence themselves (Brookmeyer, Henrich, & Schwab-Stone, 2005). In general, adolescent girls score higher on measures of prosocial moral reasoning than do boys, as do both males and females who are relatively more feminine, consistent with the notion that helpfulness is a trait associated more with femininity than masculinity (Carlo, Koller, Eisenberg, Da Silva, & Frohlich, 1996; N. Eisenberg et al., 2001; Morris et al., 2011). Among inner-city youth, having an adult to rely on (parent, teacher, coach, mentor) is associated with more prosocial behavior, too (Drinkard, Estevez, & Adams, 2017) Although prosocial reasoning becomes more advanced over the course of adolescence, changes in prosocial behavior during adolescence are not as consistent. Some studies find that individuals become more empathic, sympathetic, and helpful as they move into and through adolescence (Padilla-Walker, Dyer, Yorgason, Fraser, & Coyne, 2013; Padilla-Walker, Carlo, & Memmott-Elison, 2017), but many do not (N. Eisenberg et al., 2009). In fact, some studies even have found that teenagers become less helpful toward others as they get older and, especially during middle school, markedly less likely to say that it is important to them to "help those who are less fortunate," "help my society," "help people in my community," "serve my country," "help other students in school," or "make new students feel welcome" (Wray-Lake, Syvertsen, & Flanagan, 2016) (see Figure 9.5). (This is consistent with other observations that early adolescence appears to be the height of meanness, laziness, and close-mindedness, at least in studies of American teens; Soto & Tackett, 2015). In experiments in which individuals are given money and must choose between keeping it all for themselves or giving half to an anonymous peer, older teenagers are less likely to share things equitably (Meuwese, Crone, de Rooij, & Güroğlu, 2015). However, with age there is an increase in adolescents' willingness to compensate peers who have been victimized by others (Will, Crone, van den Bos, & Güroğlu, 2013). More consistent are research findings indicating that prosocial behavior is fairly stable with age (prosocial children grow up to be prosocial teenagers) and across different contexts (adolescents who are helpful to classmates in school are more likely to be helpful to strangers in the mall). Also, girls are generally more caring and prosocial than boys, perhaps because parents emphasize prosocial development more in raising daughters than sons (N. Eisenberg et al., 2009). Encouraging adolescents to spend time thinking about what's important to them seems to increase their tendency to act prosocially (Thomaes, Bushman, de Castro, & Reijntjes, 2012). And having prosocial friends and higher-quality friendships leads to more prosocial behavior (Barry & Wentzel, 2006; Monahan & Booth-LaForce, 2016; Van Hoorn, Van Dijk, Meuwese, Rieffe, & Crone, 2016).

Stages of Moral Reasoning

According to the cognitive-developmental perspective (Piaget's theory), there are three levels of moral reasoning: preconventional moral reasoning, which is dominant during most of childhood; conventional moral reasoning, which is usually dominant during late childhood and early adolescence; and postconventional moral reasoning (sometimes called principled moral reasoning), which emerges sometime during the adolescent or young adult years. Preconventional thinking is characterized by reference to external and physical events. Preconventional moral decisions are not based on society's standards, rules, or conventions (hence the label pre conventional). Children at this stage approach moral dilemmas in ways that focus on the rewards and punishments associated with different courses of action. Conventional thinking about moral issues focuses not so much on tangible rewards and punishments as on how an individual's behavior will be judged by others. In conventional moral reasoning, special importance is given to the roles people are expected to play and to society's rules, institutions, and conventions. Individuals behave properly because, in so doing, they receive the approval of others and help to maintain the social order. The correctness of society's rules is not questioned, however—individuals do their duty by upholding and respecting the rules that people are supposed to follow. According to most studies of moral reasoning, the majority of adolescents and adults think primarily in conventional terms—they evaluate moral decisions in terms of a set of socially accepted rules that people are supposed to abide by. Postconventional reasoning is relatively rare. At this level of reasoning, society's rules and conventions are seen as relative and subjective rather than as absolute and definitive. Individuals may have a moral duty to abide by society's standards for behavior—but only insofar as those standards support and serve moral ends. Occasions arise in which conventions ought to be questioned and when more important principles—such as justice, fairness, or the sanctity of human life—take precedence over established social norms. Whereas conventional thinking is oriented toward society's rules, postconventional thinking is founded on more broadly based, abstract moral principles. For this reason, the development of postconventional reasoning is especially relevant to the discussion of cognitive autonomy. Moral reasoning becomes more principled over the course of childhood and adolescence. Preconventional reasoning dominates the responses of children; conventional responses begin to appear during preadolescence and continue into middle adolescence; and postconventional reasoning does not appear until late adolescence, if at all. Movement into higher stages of moral reasoning occurs when children are developmentally "ready"—when their reasoning is predominantly at one stage but partially at the next higher one—and when they are exposed to the more advanced type of reasoning by other people, such as parents or peers. The development of moral reasoning tends to follow a pattern in which individuals move from periods of consolidation (in which their reasoning is consistently at a particular stage of development), into periods of transition (in which there is more variability in their stages of reasoning), into new periods of consolidation (in which their reasoning is consistent, but at a higher stage than during the previous period of consolidation) (L. Walker, Gustafson, & Hennig, 2001). These gains in moral reasoning are accompanied by changes in brain systems that permit us to behave less selfishly. Although not all individuals enter a stage of consistent postconventional thinking during adolescence, many begin to place greater emphasis on abstract values and moral principles (Rest et al., 1999) and to look inward (being moral is important because it reflects the sort of person you want to be), rather than outward (being moral is important because of what others will think of you), to define their moral identity. Moreover, if individuals of different ages are presented with other peoples' moral arguments, older individuals are more often persuaded by justifications that are more advanced. Thus, the appeal of postconventional moral reasoning increases over the course of adolescence, whereas the appeals of preconventional and of conventional reasoning both decline. The attractiveness of postconventional thinking appears to increase both with age and with schooling; most adults reach a plateau in moral reasoning after completing their formal education.

De-Idealization

Children place their parents on a pedestal; adolescents knock them off it. Psychologists believe that this "de-idealization" of parents may be one of the first aspects of emotional autonomy to develop, because adolescents shed their childish images of their parents before replacing them with more mature ones. Even during the high school years, adolescents have some difficulty in seeing their parents as individuals beyond their roles as parents. This aspect of emotional autonomy may not develop until much later—perhaps not until young adulthood. Seeing one's parents as people, and not just as parents, typically develops later in adolescents' relations with their fathers than with their mothers, because fathers interact less often with their adolescents in ways that permit them to be seen as individuals.

Individual Differences in Religiosity (statistics)

Although individuals usually become less involved in formal religion during adolescence, adolescents differ in their degree of religiosity. According to U.S. surveys, about 85% of American adolescents report an affiliation with a religious group; of the remaining 15%, about 10% report not being religious, 3% say they are uncertain, and another 3% describe themselves as atheist or agnostic (King et al., 2013). About half of all American adolescents say that formal religious participation is important in their life (P. King & Roeser, 2009). Approximately one-third report weekly attendance at religious services, one-sixth attend once or twice per month, and about 45% rarely or never attend services; regular attendance at religious services drops over the course of high school. Adolescent religious attendance declined gradually during the 1980s and 1990s but has changed very little since then. About half of U.S. adolescents identify themselves as Protestant (and close to half of Protestants identify themselves as conservative Christians), and about one-fifth as Catholic. Adolescent girls are slightly more likely to be religious than adolescent boys (this sex difference is found among adults, too). In general, Black and Latino adolescents are more religious than youth from other ethnic backgrounds, as are adolescents who live in the South or Midwest (P. King & Roeser, 2009; C. Smith & Denton, 2005; Wallace et al., 2003). Rates of adolescents' religious participation are considerably higher in the United States than other parts of the world. In contrast to the 41.9% of American youth who participate in an organization sponsored by a religious group, the figures are 27.6% in Southern Europe, 19.9% in Asia/Pacific regions, 14.4% in Western Europe, 13.1% in Northern Europe, and 10.3% in Eastern Europe (King et al., 2013).

Prosocial Reasoning, Prosocial Behavior, and Volunteerism

Although most research on the development of morality has focused on what adolescents do under circumstances in which a law might be broken or a rule violated, researchers have increasingly turned their attention to the study of reasoning and behavior in prosocial situations. In general, the ways in which individuals think about prosocial phenomena, such as honesty or kindness, become more sophisticated during late adolescence, just like their moral reasoning (Morris et al., 2011). Over the course of adolescence, individuals come to devalue prosocial acts that are done for self-serving reasons (to receive a reward, return a favor, or improve their image) and value those that are done out of genuine empathy, a pattern that has been observed across a variety of cultures (N. Eisenberg et al., 2009). During late adolescence, prosocial reasoning continues to become more advanced, leveling off sometime in the early 20s (N. Eisenberg, Cumberland, Guthrie, Murphy, & Shepard, 2005). Some research connects these changes in reasoning to developments in regions of the brain that govern our ability to look at things from other people's perspectives (Crone, 2013). During adolescence, individuals become more likely to incorporate insights about their helpful behavior into their views of themselves. Generally, the same type of parenting that facilitates the growth of healthy emotional autonomy also contributes to the development of moral and prosocial reasoning. Adolescents whose parents engage them in discussion, elicit their point of view, and practice authoritative parenting display more advanced moral reasoning and prosocial behavior than their peers. It appears that authoritative parenting makes adolescents more likely to feel sympathy toward others, which in turn prompts prosocial behavior (Eisenberg, VanSchyndel, & Hofer, 2015; Shen, Carlo, & Knight, 2013). Growing up in a home that stresses familism (the importance of fulfilling one's obligations to the family) also leads adolescents to become more prosocial toward others (Knight, Carlo, Basillo, & Jacobson, 2015). In addition, positive parenting helps facilitate the development of empathy and emotion regulation, both of which contribute to prosocial development (Padilla-Walker & Christensen, 2011; Wray-Lake & Flanagan, 2012).

Changes in Susceptibility to Influence

As adolescents come to spend more time outside the family, the opinions and advice of others—not only peers but adults as well—become more important. A variety of situations arise in which adolescents may feel that their parents' advice may be less valid than the opinions of others. Adolescents might seek the advice of friends, rather than their parents, about how to dress. They may turn to a teacher or guidance counselor for advice about what courses to take in school. Or they might talk something over with more than one person. When different "advisors" disagree, adolescents must reconcile the differences of opinion and reach their own independent conclusions. In situations in which parents and peers give conflicting advice, do teenagers tend to follow one group more often than the other? Adolescents are often portrayed as being extremely susceptible to the influence of peer pressure—more so than children or young adults—and as being stubbornly resistant to the influence of their parents. But is peer pressure really more potent during adolescence than at other times?

Individuation

As an alternative to the classic psychoanalytic perspective on adolescent detachment, some theorists have suggested that we view the development of emotional autonomy in terms of the adolescent's developing sense of individuation (Blos, 1979). Individuation, which begins during infancy and continues into late adolescence, involves a gradual, progressive sharpening of one's sense of self as autonomous, competent, and separate from one's parents. Individuation does not involve stress and turmoil. Rather, it entails relinquishing childish dependencies on parents in favor of a more mature, more responsible, and less dependent relationship. Adolescents who establish a healthy sense of autonomy accept responsibility for their choices and actions.

Political Thinking and Political Behavior

As is the case with moral development, there often are gaps between adolescents' political thinking in hypothetical situations and their actual attitudes and behavior. The most important influence on the political behavior of young people tends to be the social context in which they grow up, such as having political discussions with parents and friends, discussing politics in classes, and being exposed to the news (Kirshner & Ginwright, 2012; Quintelier, 2015). This context also includes both the immediate community and the larger social and historical environment. Minority adolescents, especially those living in environments in which there are limited economic opportunities, tend to be more cynical about politics than their White counterparts. Since 1990 there has been a steady increase in the proportion of young people who report engaging in community service (perhaps because there was an increase during this time in the number of schools that required it). The increase was especially notable among college-bound seniors (perhaps because college admission committees began looking at community service as a plus). There was also a drop in participation in "conventional" civic activities (e.g., voting, contacting elected officials) between 1976 and 1990, but little change after that. Participation in alternative political activities (e.g., boycotts, demonstrations) waxed and waned over the last 30-years.

Social Roles and the Development of Autonomy

Changes in social roles and activities during adolescence are bound to raise concerns related to independence, as the adolescent moves into new positions that demand increasing degrees of responsibility and self-reliance. Becoming involved in new roles and taking on new responsibilities, such as having a job or a driver's license, place the adolescent in situations that require and stimulate the development of independent decision making. A teenager might not really think much about the responsibilities associated with taking a job until she actually ends up in one (D. Wood, Larson, & Brown, 2009). Choosing whether to drink does not become an important question until the adolescent begins to approach the legal drinking age. And deciding what his political beliefs are becomes a more pressing concern when the young person realizes that he will soon have the right to vote.

Religious Beliefs During Adolescence

Despite the fact that religion plays an important role in the lives of many adolescents, the development of religious beliefs has been very much neglected by social scientists. Religious beliefs, like moral and political beliefs, become more abstract, more principled, and more independent during adolescence. Beliefs become more oriented toward spiritual and ideological matters and less oriented toward rituals, practices, and the strict observance of religious customs. Although more than 90% of all American adolescents pray and 95% believe in God, a substantial proportion of young people say that organized religion does not play a very important role in their lives. Compared with children, adolescents place more emphasis on the internal aspects of religious commitment (such as what an individual believes) and less on the external manifestations (such as whether an individual goes to church). Adolescence is an important time for "spiritual questioning, doubting, and creating". There are enormous differences around the world in the extent to which adolescents say that God is important in their life. The development of religious beliefs parallels with the development of moral and political reasoning. During late adolescence, individuals enter into a stage in which they begin to form a system of personal religious beliefs, rather than relying solely on the teachings of their parents, which is similar to the transition to principled moral reasoning or the development of a coherent political ideology. Developments in all three domains—moral, political, and religious—reflect the underlying growth of cognitive abilities and the shift from concrete to abstract reasoning that characterizes the adolescent transition. This fundamental shift in cognitive ability affects adolescents' thinking across a wide variety of topics. Religious development has two main components: religiosity (the religious practices one engages in) and spirituality (one's personal quest for answers to questions about God and the meaning of life). Although both can be part of the process of psychosocial development, religiosity may be more important for identity development, since it involves identification with a particular religious group and its practices and beliefs (not unlike identifying oneself with a particular ethnic group), whereas spirituality may be more closely linked to the development of cognitive autonomy, since it involves the development of self-awareness, and of a particular personal meaning system and set of values. For most religious adolescents, religiosity and spirituality are deeply interconnected (D. C. French, Eisenberg, Vaughan, Purwono, & Suryanti, 2008). But there are substantial numbers of adolescents who practice religion without giving much thought to its spiritual aspects (for instance, adolescents who attend religious services each week or celebrate religious holidays either because their parents expect them to or because they enjoy the familiarity and routine of regular observance), as well as many who devote a great deal of time and energy to thinking about spiritual matters but who don't identify with an organized religion or practice customary religious rituals.

Emotional Autonomy: Detachment or Individuation?

Early writings about emotional autonomy were influenced by psychoanalytic thinkers such as Anna Freud (1958), who argued that the physical changes of puberty cause disruption and conflict inside the family. Freud believed that intrapsychic conflicts that had been repressed since early childhood are reawakened at early adolescence by resurgent sexual impulses. (These conflicts revolve around the young child's unconscious attraction toward the parent of the other sex and ambivalent feelings toward the parent of the same sex.) The reawakened conflicts are expressed as increased tension, arguments, and discomfort in the family. As a consequence, early adolescents are driven to separate themselves from their parents emotionally, and they turn their emotional energies to relationships with peers—in particular, peers of the opposite sex. Psychoanalytic theorists call this process of separation detachment, because to them it appears as though the adolescent is attempting to sever the attachments that were formed during infancy and strengthened throughout childhood.

Detachment

Freud and her followers viewed detachment and the accompanying storm and stress inside the family as normal, healthy, and inevitable aspects of emotional development during adolescence. In fact, Freud believed that the absence of conflict between an adolescent and his or her parents signified that the young person was having problems growing up. Studies of adolescents' family relationships have not supported Freud's view, however. In contrast to predictions that high levels of adolescent-parent tension are the norm, that adolescents detach themselves from relationships with their parents, and that adolescents are driven out of the household by unbearable levels of family conflict, every major study done to date of teenagers' relations with their parents has shown that most families get along well during the adolescent years. Although parents and adolescents may bicker more often than they did during earlier periods of development, there is no evidence that this bickering diminishes closeness between them in any lasting way In fact, most individuals report becoming closer to their parents in late adolescence, especially after they have made the transition into college. In other words, although teenagers and their parents modify their relationships during adolescence, their emotional bonds aren't severed. Emotional autonomy during adolescence involves a transformation, not a breaking off, of family relationships. Adolescents can become emotionally autonomous from their parents without becoming detached from them, although achieving this balance can be tricky in cultures in which individualism is not as strongly valued as it is in many Western societies.

Emotional Autonomy and Parenting Style

Independence, responsibility, and self-esteem are all fostered by parents who are authoritative (friendly, fair, and firm) rather than authoritarian (excessively harsh), indulgent (excessively lenient), or indifferent (aloof to the point of being neglectful). As a result, the development of emotional autonomy follows different patterns in different types of households. In authoritative families, guidelines are established for the adolescent's behavior, and standards are upheld, but they are flexible and open to discussion. Although parents may have the final say when it comes to their child's behavior, the decision that is reached usually comes after consultation and discussion—with the child included. In discussing an adolescent's curfew, for example, authoritative parents will sit down with their child and explain how they arrived at their decision and why they picked the hour they did. They will also ask the adolescent for his or her suggestions and consider them carefully in making a final decision. It is not difficult to see why the sort of give-and-take found in authoritative families is well suited to the healthy development of emotional autonomy. Because standards and guidelines are flexible and adequately explained, it is not hard for the family to adjust and modify them as the child matures. Gradual changes in family relations that permit the young person more independence and encourage more responsibility, but that do not threaten the emotional bond between parent and child—in other words, changes that promote increasing emotional autonomy—are relatively easy to make in a family that has been flexible all along. Plus, having a close relationship with one parent protects against the adverse effects of the other parent's psychological control. In authoritarian households, where rules are rigidly enforced but seldom explained, adjusting to adolescence is more difficult. Authoritarian parents see the child's emotional independence as rebellious or disrespectful, and they resist their adolescent's growing need for independence, rather than accepting it. Authoritarian parents may inadvertently maintain the dependencies of childhood by failing to give their children sufficient practice in making decisions and being responsible for their actions. In essence, authoritarian parenting may interfere with adolescent individuation. When closeness, as well as support for autonomy, is absent, the problems are compounded. In families in which excessive parental control is accompanied by extreme coldness and punitiveness, adolescents may rebel against their parents' standards explicitly, in an attempt to assert their independence in a visible and demonstrable fashion. Adolescents were more likely to "act out"—to misbehave—when their parents are overreactive or intrusive; one study found that the more frequently parents called their adolescent's cell phone, the more dishonest the adolescent was (Weisskirch, 2009). Such rebellion is not indicative of genuine emotional autonomy—it's a demonstration of the adolescent's frustration with his or her parents' rigidity and lack of understanding. In both indulgent and indifferent families, a different sort of problem arises. These parents do not provide sufficient guidance for their children, and as a result, the youngsters do not acquire adequate standards for behavior. In the absence of parental guidance and rules, permissively reared teenagers often turn to their peers for advice and emotional support—a practice that can be problematic when the peers are themselves still young and inexperienced. Adolescents whose parents have failed to provide sufficient guidance are likely to become psychologically dependent on their friends—emotionally detached from their parents, perhaps, but not genuinely autonomous. The problems of parental permissiveness are exacerbated by a lack of closeness, as is the case in indifferent families. Some parents who have raised their children permissively until adolescence are caught off guard by the consequences of not having been stricter earlier on. The greater orientation toward the peer group of permissively raised adolescents may involve the young person in behavior that his or her parents disapprove of. As a consequence, some parents who have been permissive throughout a youngster's childhood shift gears when he or she enters adolescence, becoming autocratic in an attempt to control a youngster over whom they feel they have lost their authority. Parents who have never placed any restrictions on their child's out-of-school activities during elementary school may suddenly begin monitoring her social life once she enters junior high school. Shifts like these can be extremely hard on adolescents—just at the time when they are seeking greater autonomy, their parents become more restrictive. Having become accustomed to relative leniency, adolescents whose parents change the rules in the middle of the game may find it difficult to accept standards that are being strictly enforced for the first time.

Parenting and Behavioral Autonomy

Like emotional autonomy, behavioral autonomy appears to be associated with authoritative rather than permissive, authoritarian, or neglectful parenting. The impact of having authoritative parents on adolescents' susceptibility to peer pressure depends on the nature of the peer pressure, however. Adolescents from authoritative homes are less susceptible to antisocial peer pressure, but they may be more susceptible to the influence of positive peers. Adolescents from authoritative homes are less likely to be influenced by having drug-using friends, but they are more likely to be influenced by having friends who perform well in school (Mounts & Steinberg, 1995). It is also important to distinguish between adolescents who are excessively dependent on their peers and those who turn to peers for counsel but do not ignore their parents' guidance (Fuligni, Eccles, Barber, & Clements, 2001). Substituting peers for parents leads to problem behavior; adding peers to the list of persons one turns to for advice, so long as that list also includes parents, does not. In other words, the problem is being distant from one's parents, rather than being close to one's peers, something that parents who worry about the power of the peer group would do well to remember. The ways in which parents and adolescents negotiate changes in behavioral autonomy have implications for adolescents' adjustment (Chen-Gaddini, 2012; Roche et al., 2014). Adolescents who have less positive relationships with their parents are more likely to be especially peer oriented, to affiliate with antisocial peers, and to spend time with friends in unsupervised settings, all of which heighten the risk for problem behavior. Parents need to maintain a healthy balance between asserting control and granting autonomy. Granting too much autonomy before adolescents are ready for it or granting too little autonomy once adolescents are mature enough to handle it creates adolescents who are the most strongly peer oriented. Adolescents whose parents become more authoritarian over time (stricter and less likely to permit the adolescent to make decisions) are the most peer oriented of all. Although many parents clamp down on their teenagers' independence out of fear that not doing so will allow the youngsters to fall under the "evil" influence of the peer group, this strategy often backfires. Having parents limit their autonomy at just the time when more independence is desired and expected makes adolescents turn away from the family and toward their friends.

Autonomy as an Adolescent Issue

Like identity, autonomy is a psychosocial concern that surfaces and resurfaces during the entire life cycle. The development of independent behavior begins long before puberty. Toddlers try to establish an initial sense of autonomy when they begin to explore their surroundings on their own and assert their desire to do as they please—a stage of development so frustrating to parents that it is often called "the terrible twos." The toddler who insists on saying "No!" and the young adolescent who insists on keeping her whereabouts secret are both demonstrating their growing sense of independence and autonomy. And just as psychologists see toddlers' oppositional behavior as normal, they also see adolescents' interest in privacy as normal, too—however frustrating that might be to parents (McElhaney et al., 2009). Although early childhood and adolescence are important periods for the development of autonomy, issues of autonomy are not resolved once and for all upon reaching young adulthood. Questions about being able to function independently arise whenever individuals find themselves in positions that demand a new degree of self-reliance. Following a divorce, someone who has depended on a spouse for economic support, guidance, or nurturance must find a way to function more independently. During late adulthood, autonomy may become a significant concern of someone who, after losing a spouse, suddenly finds it necessary to depend on others for assistance. If establishing and maintaining a healthy sense of autonomy is a lifelong concern, why has it attracted so much attention among scholars interested in adolescence? When we look at the development of autonomy in relation to the biological, cognitive, and social changes of adolescence, it's easy to see why.

Improvements in Self-Regulation

Many studies have documented important improvements in decision-making abilities during middle and late adolescence that are linked to gains in self-regulation. Across many different cultural contexts, strong self-regulation is one of the most robust predictors of success in life, whereas weak self-regulation is linked to all sorts of emotional and behavioral problems (Crandall, Magnusson, Novilla, Novilla, & Dyer, 2017; Evans & Fuller-Rowell, 2013; Galla & Duckworth, 2015; Moffitt et al., 2011; Roper, Vecera, & Vaidya, 2014). Improvements in self-regulation appear to be due to two separate, but related developments. First, there is a decline over the course of adolescence in the extent to which decisions are influenced by their potential immediate rewards. Most situations in which we have to decide among alternative choices (Should I stay home and study or go out with my friends? Should we sneak into the movie theater or stand in line and pay for tickets? Should I sleep with my girlfriend right now or wait until tomorrow night, when I'll make sure to have a condom?) present a combination of potential rewards and potential costs. What we decide to do is often the result of how strong those rewards and costs are. Someone who is just thinking about having fun with his friends, saving money by seeing the movie for free, or how good unprotected sex is going to feel will act differently than someone who is thinking about the grade he might get on a test he didn't study for, what would happen if he got caught sneaking into the theater, or the possibility of getting his girlfriend pregnant. During early adolescence, individuals are much more drawn to the potential benefits of a decision than the potential costs. As they mature, the relative balance of reward and cost changes, so that by late adolescence, these factors are weighed about evenly (Cauffman et al., 2010). Psychologists have now mapped this development onto changes in patterns of brain activation, showing that the regions of the brain that are especially sensitive to reward are more intensely activated during early and middle adolescence than childhood or adulthood, especially when rewards are being anticipated, as they might be when adolescents are thinking about how much fun they are going to have before they head out for an evening. Some of the heightened "reward sensitivity" seen among adolescents is not even conscious. In fact, adolescents are just as consciously aware as adults of the potential rewards and costs of a decision—they are just influenced more by the anticipated rewards. Not only are younger adolescents more drawn to rewards than are adults, but they also seem especially drawn to immediate rewards (Steinberg, Graham, et al., 2009). A second influence on changes in decision making concerns individuals' ability to control their impulses, Regions of the brain that govern self-regulation are still developing during adolescence and early adulthood, as are connections between brain regions that control impulses and those that respond to rewards. This improvement in self-control has important implications for decision making. With age, individuals are better at thinking ahead, imagining and analyzing the consequences of their decisions, seeking and evaluating the advice of others, and making decisions that aren't hasty or excessively influenced by their emotions. The combination of heightened reward sensitivity and immature impulse control may lead adolescents to make a lot of risky—even dangerous—decisions. Some writers have suggested that one way to diminish adolescent risk taking is to encourage them to do things like mindfulness meditation, which has been shown to increase self regulation.

Moral Development During Adolescence

Moral development has been the most widely studied aspect of cognitive autonomy during adolescence. The study of moral development involves both reasoning (how individuals think about moral dilemmas) and behavior (how they behave in situations that call for moral judgments). Related to this is the study of prosocial behavior, acts people engage in to help others.

Changes in Political Thinking

Political thinking changes during adolescence in several important ways (Flanagan, 2004). First, political thinking becomes more abstract. In response to political questions, 12- and 13-year-olds are likely to reply with concrete answers. Older adolescents are likely to respond with more abstract and more general statements. Individuals' understanding of various rights—for example, their beliefs about whether children and adolescents have the right to have some control over their lives—also becomes more abstract with age (Ruck, Abramovitch, & Keating, 1998). With age, individuals are more likely to judge the appropriateness of having certain rights (e.g., freedom of speech) in light of characteristics of the individual (e.g., whether the individual is mature enough to act responsibly) and the context within which the right is expressed (e.g., whether the authority who is regulating speech is a parent or a government official) (Helwig, 1997; Tenenbaum & Ruck, 2012). There is strong support among adolescents for fundamental democratic principles such as representation and majority rule, even in countries whose governments do not operate on these principles. Second, political thinking during adolescence becomes less authoritarian and less rigid (Flanagan & Galay, 1995). Young adolescents are inclined toward obedience, authority, and an uncritical, trusting, and acquiescent stance toward government. For example, when asked what might be done in response to a law that is not working out as planned, an older teenager may suggest that the law needs to be reexamined and perhaps amended. A young adolescent will "propose that it be enforced more rigorously." In contrast to older adolescents, younger adolescents are "more likely to favor one-man rule as [opposed to] representative democracy"; show "little sensitivity to individual or minority rights"; and are "indifferent to the claims of personal freedom" (Adelson, 1972, p. 108). Finally, during late adolescence people often develop a roughly coherent and consistent set of attitudes—a sort of ideology—that does not appear before this age and that is based on a set of overarching principles. These principles may concern a wide range of issues, including civil liberties, freedom of speech, and social equality. As is the case among adults, adolescents' views about political matters—the causes of unemployment, poverty, or homelessness, for example—are strongly linked to their social upbringing. Adolescents from higher social classes tend to attribute unemployment, poverty, and homelessness to societal factors ("People are poor because not everyone receives the same skills or training and encouragement when they are young"), whereas adolescents from lower-class backgrounds are more likely to attribute these problems to individual factors ("People are poor because they are lazy and don't want to work hard"). Socioeconomic differences in explanations of why some people are wealthy are not as striking, but they follow a similar pattern, with adolescents from lower-class backgrounds more likely to favor individual explanations ("People are rich because they stayed in school") than societal ones ("Some people are rich because they inherited money or a big business"). Adolescents' explanations of wealth tend to be more multifaceted than their explanations of poverty. Shifts in all three of these directions—increasing abstraction, decreasing authoritarianism, and increasing use of principles—are similar to the shifts observed in studies of moral development, and consistent with the idea that cognitive autonomy emerges during late adolescence. The movement away from authoritarianism, obedience, and unquestioning acceptance of the rulings of authority indicates that an important psychological concern for older adolescents involves questioning the values and beliefs emanating from parents and other authority figures, as they begin to establish their own priorities.

Three Types of Autonomy

Psychologists have described autonomy in three ways The first is emotional autonomy—that aspect of independence related to changes in the individual's close relationships, especially with parents. The second is behavioral autonomy—the capacity to make independent decisions and follow through on them. And the third is cognitive autonomy (sometimes called "value autonomy"), which involves having independent values, opinions, and beliefs.

The Impact of Religious Involvement on Development

Religious adolescents are better adjusted and less depressed than other adolescents, less likely to have premarital sex, less likely to use drugs, and less likely to engage in delinquency. Some of the apparent beneficial effects of religious involvement are because adolescents who are involved in religion often have other positive influences in their life that promote positive development and prevent problem behavior, like supportive parents, prosocial peers, or adults outside the immediate family who care about them. Being religious in and of itself appears to deter problem behavior and delay the onset of sexual activity. Religious involvement may play an especially important role in buffering inner-city Black adolescents against the harmful effects of neighborhood disorganization and exposure to violence, and there also is evidence that religious involvement may help protect against the adverse effects of family conflict and other sources of stress. There is more consistent evidence for the role that religion plays in preventing problem behavior than for its role in promoting positive development. Although studies show that religious adolescents are more involved in the community, more altruistic, and more prosocial, other research finds that rates of identity foreclosure are higher among religious adolescents Some clues to the reasons that religious involvement may protect against involvement in problem behavior come from the finding that religiosity, rather than spirituality, is the stronger predictor of staying out of trouble. Moreover, it does not appear to be attending religious services that matters—it is being a part of a community of individuals who share similar values and engage in similar activities. In one study of churchgoing rural youth, adolescents frequently mentioned participating in youth groups and the relationships they formed with youth group leaders as important influences on their behavior and development. Seen in this light, the connection between religious participation and lower problem behavior is not surprising, since some of the strongest predictors of adolescents' involvement in sex, drugs, and delinquency are the behavior and attitudes of their peers.

The Influence of Parents and Peers

Some researchers have studied conformity and peer pressure during adolescence by putting adolescents in situations in which they must choose between the wishes of their parents and those of their peers. Adolescents turn for advice to different people in different situations (Finken & Jacobs, 1996; Halpern-Felsher, 2011). In some situations, peers' opinions are more influential, but in others, parents' views are more powerful. Adolescents are more likely to conform to peers' opinions when it comes to short-term, day-to-day, and social matters—styles of dress, tastes in music, choices among leisure activities, and so on. This is particularly true during the junior high school and early high school years. When it comes to long-term questions concerning educational or occupational plans, however, or to issues concerning values, religious beliefs, or ethics, teenagers are primarily influenced by their parents. When adolescents' problems center on a relationship with a friend, they usually turn to a peer, a preference that becomes stronger with age. But adolescents' willingness to turn to an adult, like a teacher or mentor, for advice with problems—especially those that involve getting along with their parents—remains very strong and increases as individuals move toward late adolescence. In one study in which the researchers compared the effect of advice given by a peer or an adult during a challenging gambling task, both teenagers and adults were more likely to follow the adult's recommendations.

Puberty and the Development of Autonomy

Some theorists have suggested that puberty triggers changes in the young person's emotional relationships at home (Laursen & Collins, 2009; Zimmer-Gembeck, Ducat, & Collins, 2011). Adolescents' interest in turning away from parents and toward peers for emotional support—part of establishing adult independence—may be stimulated by their emerging interest in sexual relationships and concerns over dating and intimate friendships. From an evolutionary perspective, adolescent independence-seeking is a natural consequence of sexual and physical maturation, and "leaving the home" after puberty is something that is observed not just in humans, but in other primates as well (Casey et al., 2010; Steinberg, 2014). Puberty drives the adolescent away from exclusive emotional dependence on the family. In addition, changes in stature and physical appearance at puberty may provoke changes in how much autonomy the young person is granted by parents and teachers. Children may be given more responsibility simply because they look older.

Responding to peer pressure

Studies that contrast the influence of peers and adults do not really reveal all there is to know about peer pressure. Most peer pressure operates when adults are absent—when adolescents are at a party, driving home from school, or hanging out with their friends. To get closer to this issue, researchers have studied how adolescents respond when they must choose between pressure from their friends and their own opinions of what to do. For example, an adolescent might be asked whether he would go along with his friends' plans to vandalize some property even though he did not want to do so. Most studies using this approach show that conformity to peers is higher during the first half of adolescence than late. Especially heightened susceptibility to peer pressure around age 14 is most often seen when the behavior in question is antisocial—such as cheating, stealing, or trespassing—especially in studies of boys. These findings are in line with studies of delinquent behavior, which is often committed by boys in groups, often during middle adolescence (Farrington, 2009). The consequences of being especially susceptible to one's peers also depend on who those peers are. For instance, whereas high susceptibility to peer influence predicts adolescents' antisocial behavior if their friends are antisocial, the same level of susceptibility is not predictive of problem behavior if their friends are not. And, of course, many adolescents have friends who pressure them not to get involved in questionable, illegal, or risky activities. Although we know that conformity to peer pressure is high during early and middle adolescence, it isn't clear why. One possibility is that individuals' susceptibility to peer pressure doesn't change, but that peer pressure may be especially strong around the time individuals are 14. In other words, adolescent peer groups may exert more pressure on their members to conform than do groups of younger or older individuals, and the pressure may be strong enough to make even the most autonomous teenagers comply. Another possibility is that young adolescents are more susceptible to peer influence because of their heightened orientation toward other people in general and toward peers in particular. In one experiment, people of different ages were asked to rate how risky various activities were, were then told how either a teenager or an adult had rated the same activities, and then were asked to re-rate them. All groups except the young adolescents were likely to change their ratings to be more consistent with what they were told the adult had said; the young adolescents were more likely to change their ratings to match what they thought other teenagers had said Not all peer influence is bad, however: When adolescents are actively discouraged from taking risks by their peers, they are likely to listen to them, and in the presence of peers, adolescents engage in more prosocial behavior. Yet a third account is that being around other teenagers changes the way the adolescent brain functions. During adolescence, the mere presence of friends activates brain regions associated with the experience of reward, but no such effect is found when adolescents are with their parents, when adolescents are with a mix of peers and adults, or when adults are with their friends. When adolescents are with their friends, they may be especially likely to pay attention to the potential rewards of a risky choice, and less likely to notice the potential costs. Because adolescents usually experience pleasure when they are with their peers, they are more likely to go along with the crowd to avoid being rejected. In experiments, adolescents who are led to believe they are interacting in a chat room with either high-status or low-status peers (which is manipulated by the researchers in the way the peers are described) about the acceptability of various illegal or risky behaviors are more influenced by the opinions of high-status peers, an effect that is especially strong among adolescents who are particularly susceptible to peer influence. This creates a dilemma: Teenagers must strike a balance between asserting their independence and fitting in. One of the difficult challenges of adolescence is that being popular with peers often requires a willingness to engage in behaviors that adults disapprove of, like drinking. When adolescents view Instagram photos of other teenagers engaging in risky behavior, looking at photos with a large number of "likes" activates their brain's reward regions.

Cognitive Change and the Development of Autonomy

The cognitive changes of adolescence also play an important role in the development of autonomy (Albert & Steinberg, 2011; Zimmer-Gembeck, Ducat, & Collins, 2011b). Part of being autonomous involves being able to make independent decisions. When individuals turn to others for advice, they often receive conflicting opinions. The ability to see this, however, calls for a level of intellectual abstraction that is not available until adolescence. Being able to take other people's perspectives into account, to reason in more sophisticated ways, and to foresee the future consequences of alternative courses of action all help the adolescent weigh the opinions and suggestions of others more effectively and reach independent decisions. The cognitive changes of adolescence also provide the logical foundation for changes in thinking about social, moral, and ethical problems. These changes in thinking are important prerequisites to the development of a system of values based on one's own sense of right and wrong, and not merely on rules and regulations handed down by parents or other authority figures.

Ethnic and Cultural Differences in Expectations for Autonomy

The development of behavioral autonomy varies across cultures because of differences in the age expectations that adolescents and parents have for independent behavior. Adolescents' mental health is best when their desire for autonomy matches their expectations for what their parents are willing to grant (Pérez, Cumsille, & Martínez, 2016). For example, within the same countries, White adolescents and their parents have earlier expectations for adolescent autonomy than do Asian adolescents and their parents (Rosenthal & Feldman, 1990). Because of this, Asian adolescents may be less likely to seek autonomy from their parents than White adolescents, White adolescents are less likely than Asian adolescents to define themselves in terms of their relationship with their parents (Pomerantz, Qin, Wang, & Chen, 2009), and discrepancies between adolescents' and parents' expectations for autonomy don't cause the same degree of conflict in Asian homes as they do in Western ones Increased autonomy is strongly associated with better emotional functioning among American youth (where being an independent person is highly valued), but less so among Asian adolescents. Sex and birth order differences in behavioral autonomy tend to be very small and are often inconsistent—contrary to the popular beliefs that boys are granted more autonomy than girls or that later-born adolescents are granted earlier freedom because their older siblings have paved the way. Some studies find sex and birth order differences in the extent to which parents grant autonomy, but the pattern varies depending on the particular constellation of sons and daughters in the household and on the parents' attitudes toward sex roles (more traditionally minded parents grant more autonomy to sons than daughters, but more educated parents grant more autonomy to daughters than sons. Sex differences in the extent to which adolescents are granted independence appear to be especially pronounced within Black households, where boys are given substantially more freedom then girls. In families that have immigrated to a new culture, parents and adolescents often have different expectations about granting autonomy. As a rule, because adolescents generally acculturate more quickly to a new culture than do parents, a family that has moved from a culture in which it is normal to grant autonomy relatively later in adolescence (as in most Asian countries) to one in which it is normal to grant autonomy relatively earlier (as in the United States) may experience conflict as a result of differences in the expectations of adolescents and parents. This is because adolescents' expectations for autonomy are shaped to a great extent by their perceptions of how much independence their friends have.

The Development of Cognitive Autonomy

The development of cognitive autonomy entails changes in the adolescent's beliefs, opinions, and values. It has been studied mainly by looking at how adolescents think about moral, political, and religious issues. Three trends in the development of cognitive autonomy are especially noteworthy. First, adolescents become increasingly abstract in the way they think about moral, political, and religious issues. This leads to more complicated decisions about how to act when one's beliefs about one issue conflict with one's beliefs about another issue. Consider an 18-year-old who is deciding whether to participate in a deliberately disruptive demonstration against policies he believes support the interests of environmental polluters. Instead of looking at the situation only in terms of the environmental issues, he might also think about the implications of knowingly violating the law by being disruptive. Second, during adolescence, beliefs become increasingly rooted in general principles. An 18-year-old might say that demonstrating against pollution is acceptable because protecting the environment is more important than living in accord with the law, and so breaking a law is legitimate when the status quo leads to environmental degradation. Finally, beliefs become increasingly founded in the young person's own values, not merely in a system of values passed on by parents or other authority figures. Thus, an 18-year-old may look at the issue of environmental protection in terms of what he himself believes, rather than in terms of what his parents think. Much of the growth in cognitive autonomy can be traced to the cognitive changes characteristic of the period. With adolescents' enhanced reasoning capabilities and the further development of hypothetical thinking come a heightened interest in ideological and philosophical matters and a more sophisticated way of looking at them. The ability to consider alternate possibilities and to engage in thinking about thinking allows for the exploration of differing value systems, political ideologies, personal ethics, and religious beliefs. It also may permit the development of curiosity and open-mindedness. The growth of cognitive autonomy is a relatively late development; it follows and is encouraged by the development of emotional and behavioral autonomy, which typically mature earlier in adolescence.

Research on Emotional Autonomy

The development of emotional autonomy is a long process, beginning early in adolescence and continuing into young adulthood (McElhaney et al., 2009). There are many indicators of this. Adolescents start to see their parents' flaws. They depend less on them to fix things that have gone wrong. As they individuate, teenagers realize that there are things about themselves that their parents aren't aware of (Steinberg & Silverberg, 1986). There often is a drop in the number of their friends whom their parents know, reflecting an increase in the size of teenagers' social networks and in their need for privacy (Feiring & Lewis, 1993). Adolescents' willingness to express negative emotions in front of their parents, such as anger or sadness, is lower during early adolescence than before or after, because keeping some emotional distance from one's parents is a part of the individuation process. Adolescents also become less likely to say that they have the same opinions as their parents, or that they always agree with them. This, in turn, is associated with changes in adolescents' beliefs about their parents' authority over them. Adolescents become increasingly likely to draw distinctions between aspects of their life that their parents have the right to regulate and those that they think are not really their parents' business.

The Importance of Maintaining the Connection (bet. parents and children)

The development of emotional autonomy, and individuation in particular, may have different psychological effects on adolescents depending on whether the parent-child relationship is a close one. Adolescents who become emotionally autonomous, but who also feel distant or detached from their parents, score poorly on measures of psychological adjustment, whereas adolescents who demonstrate the same degree of emotional autonomy, but who still feel close and attached to their parents, are psychologically healthier than their peers. Adolescents who are better able to balance autonomy and connectedness in their relationships with their parents are also better able to balance autonomy and intimacy in their friendships and romantic relationships. These studies remind us that it is important to distinguish between separating from one's parents in a way that nevertheless maintains emotional closeness in the relationship (which is healthy) and breaking away from one's parents in a fashion that involves alienation, conflict, and hostility (which is not). For example, lying to one's parents and concealing undesirable things from them, which may be more an indicator of detachment than healthy individuation, is associated with psychological problems. As individuals make the transition from adolescence into adulthood and work through much of the individuation process, they increasingly see lying to their parents as unacceptable.

Assessing Moral Reasoning

The dominant theoretical viewpoint in the study of moral reasoning is grounded in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Cognitive-developmental theories of morality that stem from this viewpoint emphasize shifts in the type of reasoning that individuals use in making moral decisions, rather than changes in the content of the decisions they reach or the actions they take as a result.

Why is cognitive autonomy stimulated by the development of emotional and behavioral autonomy?

The establishment of emotional autonomy provides adolescents with the ability to look at their parents more objectively. When adolescents no longer see their parents as omnipotent and infallible, they may reevaluate the ideas and values that they accepted without question as children. And, as adolescents begin to test the waters of independence behaviorally, they may experience a variety of cognitive conflicts caused by having to deal with competing pressures to behave in different ways. These conflicts may prompt young people to consider in more serious and thoughtful terms what they really believe. For example, during adolescence, individuals become increasingly likely to say that it is permissible to lie to one's parents about disobeying them when they think their parents' advice is immoral (for instance, if the parents had forbidden their teenager to date someone from another race). This struggle to clarify values, provoked in part by the exercise of behavioral autonomy, is a key component of the process of developing a sense of cognitive autonomy.

Changes in Decision-Making Abilities

The more sophisticated reasoning processes used by adolescents permit them to hold multiple viewpoints in mind simultaneously, allowing them to compare people's different perspectives, which is crucial for weighing the opinions and advice of others. Because adolescents are better able than children to think in hypothetical terms, they also are more likely to contemplate the long-term consequences of their choices. With age, adolescents become more likely to consider both the risks and benefits associated with the decisions they make and more likely to weigh the long-term consequences of their choices, not just the immediate ones (Crone & van der Molen, 2007; Steinberg, Graham, et al., 2009). Moreover, the enhanced role-taking capabilities of adolescence permit teenagers to consider another person's opinion while taking into account that person's point of view. This is important in determining whether someone who has given advice has special areas of expertise, particular biases, or vested interests that the teenager should keep in mind. Taken together, these cognitive changes result in improved decision-making skills and, consequently, in the individual's enhanced ability to behave independently.

When Do Adolescents Make Decisions as Well as Adults?

The recognition that individuals' decision-making skills improve over the course of adolescence has prompted numerous debates about young people's abilities to make decisions in the real world—for example, with regard to having access to medical care without their parents' approval or functioning as competent defendants in court. Many such debates revolve around where we should draw the legal boundary between adolescence and adulthood for things like driving, purchasing alcohol or cigarettes, or being tried in adult court (Steinberg, 2012). One relevant line of research has examined adolescents' legal decision making. In the typical study, adolescents and adults are presented with vignettes involving an individual who had gotten into trouble with the law and asked how the individual should handle different situations—being interrogated by the police, consulting with an attorney, deciding whether to plead guilty in return for a lesser sentence versus going to trial, or taking her or his chances on the outcome. In these studies, adolescents are less likely than adults to think about the long-term implications of their decisions, more likely to focus on the immediate consequences, and less able to understand the ways in which other people's positions might bias their interests. Younger adolescents are more inclined to think about the immediate consequences of their actions ("If I tell the police the truth, they'll let me go home"), not the longer-term implications ("If I confess, this information can be used against me in court"). One difficulty in making decisions about where to draw legal lines between adolescents and adults is that mature decision making is the product of both cognitive abilities (such as being able to reason logically) and emotional factors (such as being able to control one's impulses), aspects of development that proceed along somewhat different timetables. The maturation of basic cognitive abilities is complete at around age 16. Many writers have argued that adolescents who have reached this age reason well enough to have the right to vote or to seek health care services (including abortions and contraception) without parental knowledge or consent. But because there are improvements in things like impulse control, planning ahead, and risk assessment well into early adulthood, there is a period during which adolescents may think like adults but behave in a much more immature way. One recent study found that young adults were just as able as people in their mid-20s to exercise self-control under calm conditions, but not when they were emotionally aroused (Cohen et al., 2016). Individuals who are opposed to trying juvenile offenders as adults use this evidence to argue in favor of treating juveniles who have committed crimes less harshly than adults because of their emotional immaturity judgment. One way of resolving this problem is to make sure our treatment of adolescents is consistent with what we know about psychological development in ways that are specific to the legal matters in question. In other words, if the skills necessary for making one type of decision mature earlier than those necessary for another, it would make sense to have a different age boundary for each.

The Development of Emotional Autonomy

The relationship between children and their parents changes repeatedly over the life cycle. Changes in the expression of affection, the distribution of power, and patterns of interaction, to give a few examples, are likely to occur whenever important transformations take place in the child's or parents' competencies, concerns, and social roles. By the end of adolescence, people are far less emotionally dependent on their parents than they were as children. We can see this in several ways. First, older adolescents do not generally rush to their parents when they are upset, worried, or in need of assistance. Second, they do not see their parents as all-knowing or all-powerful. Third, they often have a great deal of emotional energy wrapped up in relationships outside the family; they may feel more attached to a boyfriend or girlfriend than to their parents. And finally, older adolescents are able to see and interact with their parents as people—not just as their parents. Many parents find that they can confide in their adolescent children, which was not possible when their children were younger, or that their adolescent children can sympathize with them when they have had a hard day at work. These sorts of changes in the adolescent-parent relationship all reflect the development of emotional autonomy.

Patterns of Religious Involvement

The stated importance of religion—and especially religiosity—declines during adolescence, and especially during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Compared with older adolescents, younger ones are more likely to attend church regularly and to state that religion is important to them (Hardie, Pearce, & Denton, 2016). The early years of college are a time when many individuals reexamine and reevaluate the beliefs and values they grew up with. For some, this involves a decline in regular participation in organized religious activities (perhaps because the college environment doesn't encourage this) but an increase in spirituality and religious faith (Lefkowitz, 2005). The religious context of the college environment plays an important role, though; religious commitment often becomes stronger among students who attend a college with a religious orientation (Barry & Nelson, 2005). Although some parents interpret the adolescent decline in religiosity as indicating rebellion against the family's values, the development of religious thinking during late adolescence is better understood as part of the overall development of cognitive autonomy. As adolescents develop a stronger sense of independence, they may leave behind the unquestioning conventionality of their younger years as a first step toward finding a truly personal faith. Adolescents who continue to comply with their parents' religious beliefs without ever questioning them may actually be showing signs of immature conformity or identity foreclosure, not spiritual maturity.

The Process of Individuation

What triggers individuation? Two different models have been suggested. According to some researchers, puberty is the main catalyst (e.g., Holmbeck, 1996; Steinberg, 2000). Changes in the adolescent's physical appearance provoke changes in the way that adolescents are viewed—by themselves and by their parents—which, in turn, provoke changes in the ways in which parents and children interact. Shortly after puberty, most families experience an increase in bickering and squabbling. Adolescents' feelings of connectedness to their parents often decline in early adolescence, when bickering is more frequent, but increase in late adolescence after this temporary period of heightened squabbling is over. Adolescents' movement toward higher levels of individuation is stimulated by their cognitive development. The development of emotional autonomy in adolescence may be provoked by young people's development of more sophisticated understandings of themselves and their parents. Prior to adolescence, individuals accept their parents' views of themselves as accurate, But as individuals develop more differentiated self-conceptions in early and middle adolescence, they come to see that their parents' view is but one of many—and one that may not be entirely correct ("My parents think I am a good girl, but they don't know what I am really like"). By late adolescence, individuals are able to see that these apparent discrepancies between their self-conceptions and their parents' views are perfectly understandable ("There are sides of me that my parents know and sides of me that they don't") (Harter, 2011). Separating from one's parents is not as turbulent as was once believed, but it nevertheless has its difficult moments. Even though the images children have of their parents as all-knowing and all-powerful may be naive, these idealized pictures still provide emotional comfort. Leaving such images behind can be both liberating and frightening, for parents as well as teenagers. The development of emotional autonomy is associated not only with insecurity among adolescents, but also with increased feelings of anxiety and rejection among parents. Difficulties in the process of individuation also arise when adolescents push for independence at an earlier age than parents are willing to grant it. Adolescents usually believe that teenagers should be granted autonomy earlier than parents do.

The Development of Behavioral Autonomy

Whereas the development of emotional autonomy is played out mainly in adolescents' relationships with their parents, the development of behavioral autonomy—the ability to act independently—is seen both inside and outside the family, in relationships with peers as well as parents. Broadly speaking, behavioral autonomy refers to the capacity for independent decision making. Researchers who have studied behavioral autonomy have looked at changes in decision-making abilities and in susceptibility to the influence of others.

Emotional Autonomy and Parenting Practices

Whether provoked by puberty or by the development of more advanced cognitive skills, and whether approached with confidence or trepidation, one fact is certain: Healthy individuation and positive mental health are fostered by close, not distant, family relationships (McElhaney et al., 2009). Tense family relationships during adolescence indicate problems, not positive development. The adolescents who feel the most autonomous—those who are most likely to feel that they have been granted enough freedom by their parents—are not the ones who have severed relationships at home. In fact, just the opposite is true: Autonomous adolescents are close to their parents, enjoy doing things with them, have few conflicts with them, feel free to turn to them for advice, and see them as role models. Rebellion, negativism, and excessive involvement in the peer group are more common among psychologically immature adolescents than among mature ones. Even during college, students who live away from home (which is in its own way a type of autonomy)—as opposed to remaining in their parents' home and commuting to school—report more affection for their parents, better communication, and higher levels of satisfaction with the relationship. In other words, strained family relationships appear to be associated with a lack of autonomy during adolescence, rather than with its presence. In Asian and Western countries alike, adolescents whose parents impede the individuation process are more likely to show signs of psychological distress Adolescents who do not feel good about themselves and who have very intrusive parents are especially vulnerable to depression (Pomerantz, 2001). In contrast, around the world, adolescents whose parents provide support for their growing interest in autonomy report better mental health than those whose parents do not. Adolescents whose parents use a lot of psychological control—meaning parents who are emotionally close to the point of being intrusive or overprotective—may have difficulty individuating from them, which may lead to depression, anxiety, aggression, and feelings of incompetence and dependence. One recent study found that adolescents whose parents use a lot of psychological control show patterns of brain activity that suggest potential problems in self-regulation. In some families, adolescents respond to excessive parental control by actively rebelling or lying, which may lead to problems in the parent-adolescent relationship. Helping parents to become more mindful about the way they parent may help them become less controlling, which may improve the quality of their relationship with their child. Keep in mind, of course, that parents are also influenced by their teenagers: Adolescents who are bullied, and who presumably become more anxious and timid as a result, are more likely to elicit psychological control from their parents. Although parents' failure to support their teenager's developing sense of autonomy can lead to adolescent depression, the reverse is true as well. Similarly, adolescents with psychological problems are more likely to provoke conflict with their parents, which makes some parents more controlling.

Individual Differences in Susceptibility to Peer Influence

Within a group of teenagers who are the same age, some are highly autonomous, others are easily influenced by their peers, others are oriented toward their parents, and still others are swayed by both peers and parents, depending on the situation (Prinstein, Brechwald, & Cohen, 2011). Girls are less susceptible to peer pressure than boys, as are Black adolescents in comparison to adolescents from other ethnic groups. Asian American adolescents, in contrast, seem especially susceptible to peer pressure, perhaps consistent with the greater emphasis placed on the importance of the group over the individual in Asian cultures (Steinberg & Monahan, 2007). Susceptibility to peer pressure is also higher among relatively more acculturated Latino adolescents than their less acculturated peers, and higher among Latino adolescents who were born in the United States than those who were born abroad. Adolescents from single-parent families, as well as those with less supportive or more controlling parents, appear especially susceptible to peer pressure. Studies of adolescent brain development are adding to our growing understanding of differences among adolescents in their susceptibility to peer influence. Individuals who show a pattern of brain activity indicating heightened sensitivity to social evaluation are less able to resist peer influence, as are adolescents who are in the midst of puberty, perhaps because pubertal hormones make adolescents more sensitive to social influence as well as those who are high in sensation seeking (Segalowitz et al., 2012). Being able to resist peer pressure is associated with stronger connections between areas of the brain active during decision making and other brain regions, perhaps because individuals who are more likely to stand up to their friends are better able to better control the impulsive, emotional decision making that often occurs in the peer group. Similarly, adolescents whose neural activity is indicative of better emotion regulation also report more resistance to peer influence (Pfeifer, Masten, Moore, & Oswald, 2011). This brain research is consistent with the idea that a key aspect of psychological maturation in adolescence involves the development of self-regulation.