S13

Parenting styles were found to have significant effects on a wide range of adolescent behaviors.

. For example, in a one-year longitudinal study of 2,300 fourteen-to eighteen-year-olds from different ethnic and SES backgrounds, Laurence Steinberg and his colleagues discovered that differences in parenting styles were related to differences in psychosocial development, school achievement, internalized distress, and behavior problems

Parents often are surprised at how much care and reflection an eighteen-or nineteen-year-old has given to who he is and how strong his sense of personal direction can be. Just a few short years ago, this same child was irritable and uncertain at home and with his peers.

A clear path forward was uncharted and navigated with frustrating fits and starts. Now, this emerging adult reveals a sense of purpose, welcomes opportunities for demonstrating his maturing skills, and transitions from someone who was only interested in the moment to someone with an eye on attainable goals and aspirations in the near future.

estrogen

A sex hormone, sometimes called the female sex hormone because its high concentration in girls stimulates the growth of the ovaries and vagina during puberty

Few differences between males and females have been found on measures of identity. Both genders are equally represented among the four identity statuses and seem to develop in similar ways.

Although early studies suggested that the identity statuses might have different psychological meanings and consequences for males and females, more recent research indicates that the meanings and implications appear to be quite similar for both genders

During adolescence, a fine line exists between sensitive, respectful parental involvement and intrusive over involvement that fails to adequately appreciate adolescents' need for separateness and independence.

As in early and middle childhood, a parent-adolescent relationship that establishes a secure emotional base is most likely to result in a mutually satisfactory exploration of autonomy and relatedness

These changes, even in healthy families, often lead to conflicts between the teen seeking more independence and the parents who want to hold on a little longer to the child they miss and the adolescent they encounter. The changes and conflicts often stimulate unresolved feelings in parents.

As one parent put it, "Sometimes I'm not sure which is more upsetting to me, my teenage daughter's pain and confusion about who she is or similar feelings that are stirred up from my own difficult adolescence." Whether designed to protect their child, or to remain in control, arguments will erupt between parents and adolescents.

As with the morality of justice, young people develop an ethics of care during adolescence, but like ethical justice, it remains somewhat conventional during the teen-age years.

During the school years, children develop significant concern about others' needs and welfare and begin viewing actions as good if the actions take others' needs and welfare into account

However, egocentrism persists in that teen-agers often fail to distinguish between actions that merely please others and actions that are "right" in a deeper, ethical sense.

For example, if parents will be pleased if their adolescent enrolls in complex science and mathematics courses in high school, doing so may seem "right" to the youngster, even if he has little interest or aptitude in those areas.

For example, when Jean Phinney and her colleagues conducted in-depth interviews with Asian American, Hispanic, and white American-born male and female high school students to assess stage of ethnic identity development, they found no significant differences based on either ethnic group or gender in the percentages of youngsters who were in the diffusion/foreclosure stage, moratorium stage, or achievement stage of ethnic identity development

Groups did differ, however, in which issues were of most concern in resolving their identity crises. Nearly one-third of all adolescents in the United States are from non-European American backgrounds, and they, in turn, are from a variety of life circumstances

. As many psychologists and parents alike have discovered, arguments during the teenage years are a "ubiquitous phenomenon" during this developmental stage

Higher levels of parent-adolescent conflict are more likely to occur in families experiencing divorce, economic hardship, or other serious stressors, including mental health disorders. Keep in mind, too, that high overall levels of adolescent-parent conflict are frequently a continuation of a pattern that existed during middle childhood.

They are less likely to seek advice from their parents and more likely to consult with friends about important issues.

In some cases, they may orient toward peers so strongly that they are willing to forgo their parents' rules, their schoolwork, and even their own talents to ensure peer acceptance

Despite the theory's plausibility, a number of developmental psychologists have questioned important aspects of it. Can the form of ethical thinking really be separated from content to the degree Kohlberg proposes?

Perhaps not. Some studies have found that when people reason about familiar situations, they tend to have more mature (that is, higher-stage) ethical responses

The principles boys learn also tend to emphasize independence, autonomy, and the rights of others. This orientation biases boys to ignore or minimize others' possible needs.

Perhaps reasoning that if a friend is at home sick with a cold, it may seem better to leave him alone until he gets better, rather than check on how well he is recovering.

They do so on sites like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. Half of all teens use Facebook, followed closely by the 39 and 38 per-cent who use Snapchat and Instagram, respectively, while a quarter of all adolescents use Twitter to follow and inform their friends about their daily activities

Roughly 75 percent of all teenagers have cell phones and use them primarily for texting and instant messaging, and also for access to social media sites with the more advanced phones.The same Pew Center survey found that 40 percent of teens now have smart phones, a 15 percent jump in just the last year of survey data. Smart phones allow teens to connect at all times to their virtual neighborhood via tweets, posts, and instant updates on important events in their busy lives.

Individuation is the process by which an adolescent develops a unique personal identity or sense of self, one distinct and separate from all others.

Ruthellen Josselson (1980) has proposed that the individuation process consists of four separate but overlapping subphases: differentiation, practice and experimentation, rapprochement, and consolidation of self.

In summary, parents and adolescents get along best when decision making is consistent and collaborative, decisions are perceived as being fair and reasonable rather than arbitrary, and the developmental needs and sensitivities of all family members, both parents and children, are respected.

Self-reliance and self-control and the successful academic and social achievement associated with authoritative parenting during childhood are also fostered by these qualities during adolescence

morality

Sensitivity to and knowledge about what is right and wrong.

How is this possible? What are the contributing factors that lead to the development of a strong sense of personal identity?

Several theorists have explored this process.

secondary sex characteristics

Sex characteristics other than the sex organs, such as extra layers of fat and pubic hair.

On her own initiative, Shannon met with the school counselor and accessed college websites to take virtual tours of the schools she was interested in for starters. She then created her own "self-evaluation plan," in which she listed the academic and social qualities she wanted in a school, along with her personal strengths and weaknesses as a student. Added to her plan were the cost, location, admission criteria, and application deadlines for the top seven schools she thought would be a good fit for her.

Shannon then invited her parents into the decision-making process by viewing the schools online and planning college visits with them. Her parents were amazed by the initiative and industriousness Shannon displayed in the search process. But they were also very proud of her maturity and independence in taking on this important task.

It is during the final consolidation-of-self subphase, which lasts through adolescence and into early adulthood, that an individual develops a sense of personal identity. This milestone development provides the basis for understanding self and others, and for maintaining a sense of autonomy, independence, and individuality.

Shannon, a high school junior who will soon be applying to colleges, is a good example. Viewed by herself and her family as somewhat disorganized and lacking maturity and a clear life direction, Shannon in fact surprised them during the college application process.

Overall, then, the moralities of justice and care begin taking into account a broader array of both interpersonal circumstances and general principles than was true during the school years.

Teenagers more often refer to principles in evaluating actions, although they still do not always act on their principles. Often they also regard pleasing others as ethically good or right, even though they are learning to deal with the impossibility of pleas-ing everyone perfectly. Like many other cognitive developments, these changes result from adolescents' growing capacities to reason abstractly.

For both boys and girls, the onset of puberty brings increases in the levels of all sex hormones in the blood, but the pattern by which it does so differs for each sex.

Testosterone (also called male sex hormone), a particular type of androgen, and estrogen (or female sex hormone) are two of the most important sex hormones. Although both hormones are present in males and females, the high concentration of testosterone in boys stimulates the growth of the penis and related male reproductive organs, and the high concentration of estrogen in girls stimulates the growth of the ovaries and vagina. Androgens are thought to influence the strength of the sex drive in both sexes.

Finally, for European and Asian Americans, living in an ethnically mixed versus an all-white or Asian American neighborhood did not appear to affect the impact of type of decision making on adolescent adjustment

The "A Multicultural View" feature describes adaptive strategies that families of minority youths use to cope with the challenges they often face.

Based on their extensive review of the literature on the impact of divorce and remarriage on children and adolescents, Mavis Hetherington and her colleagues proposed a transactional model similar to the ecological model used by Uri Bronfenbrenner to understand how the many complex factors work together to influence children's adjustment

The main factors to consider include (1) the individual characteristics of the parents, including their personality, education, and psychological problems; (2) the nature of the marital transition (marriage and remarriage)

Puberty

The period of early adolescence characterized by the development of full physical and sexual maturity.

Children in divorced families tend to "grow up" faster due in part to early assignment of responsibilities, more autonomy in making decisions, and less adult supervision

Whether this is a positive or negative developmental consequence depends on whether or not the demands are within the adolescent's capabilities. If adolescents perceive them-selves as being unfairly burdened with responsibilities that interfere with their other activities, resentment, rebellion, and noncompliance may result

The lifespan perspective reminds us that the process of separating from parents to achieve emotional independence during adolescence continues during early adulthood. As we will see in Chapter 13, during early adulthood the safe-base function parents continue to provide for adolescents generally shifts to a significant other, a spouse, or a friend

With the development of intimacy within a relationship, and the decision to start a family, the emerging adult now enters the stage of young adulthood envisioned by Erikson (1963), but starting much later in the lives of those in the millennial generation

These studies found that adolescents in middle-class families were encouraged to be independent and to regulate or control their own behavior rather than rely on the rewards or punishments of others to determine how they would act. The parents' child-rearing styles tended to be democratic or authoritative rather than authoritarian.

Working-class parents were much more authoritarian than middle-class parents in their child-rearing patterns and were less likely to support their children's attempts to be independent and participate in family decision making until their children were ready to leave home.

Morality, as we already pointed out, refers to the weightier matters of justice and right and wrong. By nature, social conventions inevitably generate widespread agreement throughout society, whereas morality does not necessarily do so.

Yet Kohlberg's six-stage theory glosses over these differences by defining some of its stages in terms of social conventions and others in terms of morality.

The first is

avoidance of closeness with others

The third form

diffusion of industry—may involve an inability to concentrate on school-or work-related tasks or an excessive preoccupation with a single activity that interferes with accomplishing other things.

A second form

diffusion of time perspective—involves the belief that one is out of sync with others, fearing that important opportunities may be lost forever. Time diffusion is sometimes followed by feelings of depression and despair over the length of time it takes for a comfortable sense of identity to finally be achieved.

Adolescent peer groups generally are of two types

the clique and the crowd

(3) stressful life experiences and economic changes associated with divorce (and remarriage); (4) the composition of the family following divorce or remarriage; (5) the types and amount of social support available to family members

(6) the amount of parental distress; (7) the family process, including the nature and quality of the relationships among family members; (8) the individual characteristics of the children, including age, gender, temperament, and intelligence, as well as strengths and vulnerabilities; and (9) the adjustment of the child or adolescent. This "transactional model" helps us to understand the risks associated with divorce and remarriage to the adjustment of children, adolescents, and adults.

Maria is a good case in point.

. Having just turned fifteen, she goes to great lengths to accept responsibility around the house, but often becomes highly indignant and argumentative when her parents still insist on a curfew and on knowing where she is going and who she is going with when she leaves the house in the evening.

imaginary audience

A characteristic of young adolescents in which they act as though they are performing for an audience and believe that others are as concerned with their appearance and behavior as they themselves are.

These trends, as alarming as they were to parents, were about the same in the United States as in Western European nations.

A close review of this most recent data from the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) biennial Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance survey (2012) is important in other ways.

identity diffusion

A failure to achieve a relatively coherent, integrated, and stable identity.

Boys, too, undergo a small amount of breast development, and their areolas become larger and darker much as they do in girls.

A few boys experience enough tissue growth to cause them some embarrassment, but these "breasts" usually return to typical male size in a year or two.

negative identity

A form of identity diffusion involving rejection of the roles preferred by one's family or community in favor of socially undesirable roles.

Viewing ethics in context grows out of a general concern for the needs of others more than for one's independence.

A friend who is depressed therefore deserves a visit or a phone call; leaving her alone seems more like neglect than like respect for her autonomy.

Friends strongly influence adolescent development by virtue of their positive and negative characteristics, attitudes, values, and behaviors and through the quality of the friendship.

A friendship based on mutual respect and trust, intimacy, and prosocial behavior is likely to help the adolescent cope with stressful situations in the family and in school. Friend-ships that lack these qualities are likely to be less helpful or even destructive

Girls tend to develop a different sort of morality as they grow up. Instead of seeing moral judgment as a set of abstract principles to apply to specific situations, girls tend to develop an ethics of care, a view that integrates principles with the contexts in which judgments must be made.

A girl therefore may have learned that deception is usually bad, but she may also reason that deception is ethical in certain circumstances, such as when a friend needs reassurance about the quality of a term paper that is actually mediocre but took a lot of time and effort to write.

crowd

A large, loosely knit peer group of between fifteen and thirty members (average of twenty members) that generally consists of from two to four cliques.

Recent research has shown both behavioral adjustment problems as well as a physiologic reaction in children living in a family where the parents are experiencing a high degree of conflict. Life in high-stress families can produce higher levels of cortisol in the brain, increasing anxiety, sleep disturbances, weight management, and greater irritability for both children and adolescents

A majority of divorces involve a failure of parents to successfully resolve their conflicts, a problem that often intensifies during the process of separation and divorce, and may persist even after the marriage has ended, when the need to share parenting responsibilities may continue.

A final and more extreme form of identity diffusion is the choice of a negative identity.

A negative identity involves the rejection of positive roles and valued opportunities made available by one's family or community resources, and the acceptance of socially undesirable roles, leading to delinquent and/or antisocial behaviors

In the practice and experimentation subphase, the fourteen-or fifteen-year-old may believe he knows it all and can do no wrong. He may deny any need for caution or advice and actively challenge his parents at every opportunity.

A sense of youthful invincibility clouds his judgment. He now turns to like-minded friends, who provide the support and approval he previously sought from adults.

testosterone

A sex hormone, sometimes called the male sex hormone because its high concentration in boys stimulates growth of the penis and related male reproductive organs.

clique

A small, close-knit peer group of two or more members (average of six members) who are intimately involved in a number of shared purposes and activities and exclude those who are not.

Because of persisting widespread homophobia, gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents are likely to experience feelings of attraction for members of the same sex for several years before actually coming out, or publicly acknowledging their sexual orientation

A study by Ritch Savin-Williams (1995) found that for gay males initiation of sexual behavior with same-sex partners was closely associated with biological changes of puberty (early maturers initiated same-sex encounters earlier than did late maturers), whereas sexual behavior with opposite-sex partners began according to a youngster's age and level of social and emotional development.

displaced homemaker

A woman who committed herself to the conventional roles of wife and mother, lost these roles due to separation, divorce, or widowhood, and was unprepared for employment and single parenthood.

The search for identity and the achievement of a mature psychological sense of autonomy and relatedness affect all of an adolescent's relationships. Ties with parents must make room for an increasing interest in peers and a new commitment to the life among comparative equals that peers provide.

A young teenager's efforts to become more physically and emotionally independent from his parents and closer to his friends may be stressful, but more often than not, the problems and conflicts of this period are relatively minor.

psychosocial moratorium

According to Erikson, the latency period that precedes puberty and provides a temporary suspension of psychosexual development.

However, not all teenagers seem equally egocentric, and even those who do show this quality only when compared to adults, not to younger children. Investigations of adolescents' belief in an imaginary audience show that teenagers are just as likely to develop greater empathy or interpersonal sensitivity during this developmental period as they are to develop greater self-centeredness

Accurate awareness of others' opinions about oneself apparently develops alongside, and sometimes even instead of, self-conscious preoccupation with others' opinions. The relative balance between these two developments depends, among other things, on the quality of relationships between parents and the adolescent: closer and more supportive relationships lead to greater real-ism and less self-consciousness.

Creating new family structures from intact, single-parent, blended family, and stepfamily configurations, each with their own set of challenges, tests adolescents who are in the process of establishing their own separate identity

Adjusting to a parent's divorce is truly a transactional process, especially for adolescents. A number of factors influence whether the outcomes associated with parental divorce are positive, negative, or a combination of the two.

These developmental differences continued or increased over time. Generally, teenagers raised in authoritative homes maintained or improved in all areas.

Adolescents from authoritarian homes maintained good adjustments in all areas except internalized distress, which increased during the year studied.

Longitudinal patterns of development differed for early (before the median age), middle (after the median age), and late (still virgins) initiators of intercourse. Adolescents who had first sexual intercourse early demonstrated the poorest psychosocial adjustment in ninth grade, and the same negative pattern persisted through twelfth grade.

Adolescents who postponed first sexual intercourse the longest (were still virgins) had the most positive ninth-grade adjustment and the most positive developmental trajectory through twelfth grade.

personal fable

Adolescents' belief that their own lives embody a special story that is heroic and completely unique.

A few young adults develop postconventional moral judgment, meaning that for the first time ethical reasoning goes beyond the judgments society conventionally makes about right and wrong

Adolescents' growing ability to use abstract formal thought stimulates this development, though it does not guarantee it. Unlike schoolchildren, they can evaluate ethical ideas that might be right or wrong given certain circumstances that can only be imagined.

The quality of friendships during early adolescence appears to have long-term effects on development. Catherine Bagwell, Andrew Newcomb, and William Bukowski (1998) conducted a twelve-year longitudinal study of thirty young adults who had a stable, recip-rocal best friend or "chum" in fifth grade and thirty young adults who had been without a chum.

Adults who had close friends as early adolescents experienced better adjustment in school and family relationships and had less difficulty with authority figures than those who did not.

We all have experienced embarrassing moments. It is just that, during adolescence, they seem so much worse due to the natural changes inherent with the age, but also due to the existence of the imaginary audience.

Alberts, Elkind, and Ginsburg (2007) acknowledge that the imaginary audience does not disappear after adolescence—adults are also egocentric. It is just that during the teenage years, it is harder to differentiate between our own perspective and the view that others have of us and of their own world.

In a unique longitudinal study, Susan Golombok and Fiona Tasker (1996) compared the sexual orientations of twenty-five adults who had been raised as children by lesbian mothers with a group of twenty-one adults who had been raised by heterosexual single mothers.

Although children from lesbian families were more likely to explore same-sex relationships, all but two children raised by lesbian mothers (and all children raised by heterosexual mothers) identified themselves as heterosexual in adulthood, a difference that was not statistically significant.

Community context interacted with ethnic background in three distinct patterns of influence. For Hispanic Americans living in ethnically mixed neighborhoods, the impact of joint decision making on adjustment was more positive and the impact of unilateral teen decision making more negative.

Among African American youth, however, the negative impact of unilateral teen decision making was greater for those living in predominantly white communities, compared to those in ethnically mixed communities.

Whether dating in a group, or in a special dyad, there has been a growing awareness that dating situations may lead to sexual activity that is coerced. In a nationally representative survey, 42 percent of rape victims were first raped before age eighteen, and 30 percent of female rape victims were first raped between the ages of eleven and seventeen

Among those who had first experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking from an intimate partner, over 22 percent of females and 15 percent of males also report this occur-ring in adolescence, between the ages of eleven and seventeen. Teen dating violence also mirrors incidents of stalking, coercion, and intimidation that occur in emerging adult and adult relationships, often leading to serious, and at times tragic, outcomes for the developing adolescent

In adolescence, however, she mulls over the significance of all of these impressions taken together and integrates them into a single identity encompassing all of her strengths and weaknesses and an aware-ness of what this all means.

An adolescent's increasing capacity for abstract thought and self-understanding (see Chapter 10) plays a central role in this process.

When discrepancies such as these come into the open, conflicts usually arise ("You always say X, but you really mean Y!"). That is the bad news. The good news is that the conflicts frequently serve as catalysts for further growth in teenagers' social maturity and to reconcile gaps between parents and their nearly grown children

An important task of adolescence is to achieve adequate psychological separation, or independence, from one's parents, complimenting a parental goal of parent-adolescent relationships evolving to a more egalitarian and horizontal dimension by the later teenage years

Individual differences in physical development result in part from differences in life experiences that either promote or interfere with muscular growth.

And some of the differences in experiences are linked to society's gender-role expectations. Teenage boys more often receive encouragement or feel pressure to participate in sports and to take on jobs and responsibilities that involve physical work. The higher level of activity and physical exertion leads to greater bone and muscle mass as boys mature and become adults. In the decades since the passage of Title IX—an act that eliminated sex discrimination in publicly funded educational and co-curricular activities—young girls have also received greater encouragement and support for being physically active and for participating in organized sports, resulting in stronger muscle development than had been seen in prior generations of adolescent girls. The emphasis on muscle development for girls as a whole is less intense than what is felt by their male peers.

Late-maturing girls experienced a complementary trend.

As teenagers, they were rated by parents and teachers as more attractive and as better social leaders. In fact, the girls actually did become school leaders more often than usual. By age thirty, though, they reported feeling less poised than early maturers, and less sure of where their lives were heading.

According to Gilligan and others, boys and girls tend to view moral problems differently

As they grow up, boys learn to think more often in terms of general ethical principles that they can apply to specific moral situations. They might learn that deception is bad in principle and thus evaluate a specific instance of deception of a friend against this generalization.

Friendships between adolescents from different ethnic groups tend to be relatively rare. One national study of students enrolled in more than one thousand public and private high schools in the United States found that fewer than 3.5 percent of the eighteen thousand friendships identified by students involved friendships between African American and white teens

As we saw in Chapter 9's discussion of psychosocial development in middle childhood, however, the social contexts in which potential friendship interactions occur seem to make an important difference. In one study of school and neighborhood friend-ship patterns among African American and white students attending integrated junior high schools, most students reported having a close other-race school friend, but only about one-quarter saw such a friend frequently outside school.

The process of individuation continues throughout the teenage years and into early adulthood.

As we will see shortly, Josselson's ideas about individuation dovetail with Erikson's theory, which holds that the major task of adolescence is to resolve the crisis of identity successfully

Only by Stage 5 (the stage of social contract) and Stage 6 (the stage of universal principles) can he do so fully.

At Stage 5, one understands that laws and authority can be questioned and that changes can be made for increased fairness and justice for the greater good of society.

Laurence Steinberg and his colleagues found similar relationships among parenting styles and SES in a sample often thousand ninth through twelfth-grade students from different ethnic backgrounds and family structures (biological parents or other parenting arrangement).

Authoritative parenting (based on student reports) generally was more common in middle-class than in working-class families, although ethnic differences and differences in family structure were also important. In addition, for all ethnic groups and family types, adolescents from authoritative families had better school grades, were more self-reliant, and exhibited less delinquent behavior than those from nonauthoritative families

Moral Development:

Beliefs about Justice and Care

Parents of adolescents frequently are concerned that their children will be excessively influenced by peer pressure and that peer influence will replace their own guidance. Laurence Steinberg and Anne Levine (1990) suggest that parents can help their adolescents with their friendships and relationships with peers in a number of ways.

Build self-esteem by helping your adolescent discover her or his strengths and special talents. • Encourage independence and decision making within the family. • Talk about situations in which people have to choose among competing pressures and demands. • Encourage your adolescent to anticipate difficult situations and plan ahead. • Encourage your adolescent to form alliances with peers who share his or her values and your family's values. • Know your adolescent's friends. • Don't jump to hasty conclusions based on peers' appearance, dress, language, or interests. • Allow time for peer activities. • Remain close to your adolescent.

In fact, much of adolescence consists of developing these social skills. So does most of adulthood, for that matter; we never really finish learning how to understand others or comparing our own experiences with those of others.

But adolescence is the time when most people begin learning to consider other viewpoints in relation to their own and developing complex ideas about moral, political, and religious questions, among others, in response.

If friends agree that premarital sex is permissible, many teenagers are likely to adopt this idea as their own, at least as a general principle.

But if friends or family believe premarital sex is morally wrong, teenagers may adopt this alternative belief as a principle. (Note, however, that whether a teenager actually acts according to these principles is another matter. Moral action does not always follow from moral belief.)

What did the original longitudinal research find? First, it suggested that early-maturing boys seemed to experience initial advantages as teenagers. They enjoyed a head start on muscle growth compared to their peers, a change that apparently stimulated peers, teachers, and others to treat them like adults sooner. The boys responded positively to this treatment and, through a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, actually became more confident and mature in their behavior.

By the same token, though, they were more conforming to adult standards than usual for adolescents and less open to the minor risk-taking characteristic of adolescents as a whole. These differences continued into early adulthood: a decade after puberty, early-maturing men were still more responsible and self-controlled, but also more rigid in relating to peers. Most important, though, was a lowering of their self-esteem; as later-maturing boys caught up with them physically, the early-maturing boys received less attention and respect from others, and experienced a loss of self-esteem.

In recent years, with the advent of social media, dating has taken on a different aura than what was considered traditional dating just a few years ago. Group dating has become more common, which is less formal than one-to-one dating, and terms like "hooking-up" are often used synonymously with having a date.

Cell phones and Internet access have led to an increase in teen cyberdating, making teens more vulnerable to cyberbullying and incidents of dating violence. Teen dating violence has become more frequent, leading to efforts to educate and protect young women and men as they embark on more intimate relationships.

primary sex characteristics

Characteristics that make sexual reproduction possible. For females, consist of the vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries; for males, consist of the penis, scrotum, testes, prostate gland, and seminal vesicles.

How children perceive their relationships with their parents may also influence their relationships with peers, particularly during early adolescence. Early adolescents strongly desire relationships with parents that are less restrictive and provide increased opportunities to participate in decisions that affect their own lives.

Children who fail to perceive these opportunities may lose hope that their parents will ever acknowledge that they are maturing and deserve to be treated more like adults. These teenagers may sacrifice developmentally important experiences with adults for the sake of peer relationships that appear to offer greater opportunity for respect and support.

The researchers found that both the amount of time adolescents spent with and thought about same-sex friends and the positive feelings they experienced did not decline across adolescence and into high school.

Compared to fifth-and sixth-graders, adolescents in high school spent more time with opposite-sex friends and more time thinking about them. Fifth-and sixth-grade girls spent approximately an hour a week in the presence of a boy and less than two hours thinking about an individual of the opposite sex, while fifth-and sixth-grade boys spent less than an hour in the presence of a girl and less than an hour thinking about girls. By eleventh and twelfth grades, however, girls were spending almost ten hours a week with a male companion, whereas boys were spending approximately five hours a week with a female companion.

These differences are only tendencies, not dramatic or sharply drawn gender differences. But they are enough, argues Gilligan, to make Kohlberg's theory seem to underestimate the moral development of girls and women.

Concern with context and with others' needs causes girls to score closer to the middling, conventional levels of moral judgment, where peers' opinions matter most.

Peer groups can also exert powerful pressures to conform. Especially when the family fails to serve as a constructive corrective force, such pressures may contribute to a prolonged period of identity diffusion or to premature identity foreclosure, for example, as a teenage parent, drug addict, or gang member

Conformity to peer pressure can be particularly disruptive during early adoles-cence. Frank Vitaro and his colleagues examined how the characteristics of their friends affected delinquency among eleven-and twelve-year-old boys who were judged by their teachers to be either highly disruptive, moderately disruptive, moderately conforming, or highly conforming

Crowds usually gather at parties and other organized social functions, which typically take place on weekends. They tend to include both males and females, thereby providing opportunities for mixed-sex interactions and promoting transition from same-sex to mixed-sex cliques.

Crowd membership also provides opportunities to interact with individuals from a broad range of backgrounds and experiences, but can also promote snobbishness and can pose real or imagined threats to parental and teacher authority. Cliques and crowd affiliations were often limited by geography, at least until teens became more mobile after receiving their driver's license. Access to new peer groups and crowds is now available worldwide with adolescent use of the Internet and the new technological advances in social media.

Since the beginning of this century, dating has tended to begin earlier, thus increasing the time span over which teenage dating takes place.

Currently many adolescent girls begin dating at age twelve and boys at age thirteen, with almost one-half of boys and more than one-half of girls reporting dating at least once a week and approximately one-third dating two or three times per week. Only 10 percent of male and female seniors report never having dated

As with the ethics of justice, a few individuals move beyond conventional pleasing of others toward integrated care, in which the young person realizes that pleasing everyone is not always possible but it is important to balance everyone's needs, including her own

Deciding whether or not to take a part-time job, for example, now becomes a matter of reconciling the impact of the job on family, friends, and self. Some individuals may gain (the teenager herself may earn more money and make new friends), but others may lose (parents and friends may see less of her). The gains and losses must be balanced, rather than viewed completely as gains.

Over the past half century, divorce has become a common event in American domestic experience. Almost half of all first marriages in the United States end in divorce, with about one million children experiencing their parents' divorce each year

Divorce affects children of every race, religion, ethnic background, and socioeconomic level. Adolescents feel the impact of a change in family structure, whether that change occurs in their childhood or during their teenage years. In addition, one-third of American children will experience the remarriage of a parent because roughly one-half of divorced adults will remarry within four years of their first divorce

When asked if a child should inform authorities about a friend who often shoplifts small items from a local department store, a girl is likely to give priority to one part of the problem in particular: that of balancing each person's views and needs in the particular situation.

Doing so means wondering, among other things, whether informing will alienate peers not only from the shoplifter but also from the informer.

The popular idea that adolescence is a highly sexual period of life is accurate, but for reasons beyond the physical. Sexual identity and sexual activity are not solely focused on sexual intercourse and the risks of pregnancy

During adolescence, the expression of sexual urges interacts closely with the need to establish a secure sexual identity that is reasonably free from anxiety, shame, or despair—an identity that is capable of fulfilling the need for healthy, intimate relationships with others

Compared to boys, girls' opposite-sex companionship and frequency of thoughts about boys had increased dramatically from eighth to twelfth grade. The oldest girls spent roughly eight hours each week thinking about a boy, while the oldest boys spent approximately five to six hours per week thinking about a girl.

During early adolescence, seventh-and eighth-graders spent more time thinking about the opposite sex (four to six hours) than actually being with the opposite sex (thirty to eighty minutes). By eleventh and twelfth grades, this trend had shifted, and more time was spent in the actual presence of the other sex. In general, girls spent more time interacting with and thinking about boys and girls, whereas boys, when not with their peers, spent very little time thinking about either.

Most adolescents seem to progress toward a status of identity achieved. For both males and females, identity achievement is rarest among early adolescents and most frequent among older high school students, college students, and young adults.

During junior and senior high school, identity diffusion and identity foreclosure are the most common identity statuses. Although diffused and foreclosed statuses significantly decrease during the later high school and college years, only about one-third of college juniors and seniors and one-quarter of adults studied have been found to be identity achieved

According to Erik Erikson, the key developmental challenge of adolescence is to resolve the crisis of identity versus role confusion. In forming an identity, an adolescent selectively accepts or rejects the many different aspects of herself that she acquired as a child and forms a more coherent and integrated sense of unique identity

During middle child-hood, she may have formed separate views of herself based on her school success or athletic abilities, and most significantly, on how her friends viewed her.

How do friendships between girls and boys differ? Friendships formed by boys generally involve lower levels of emotional intimacy than those of girls, who are better able to express feelings and more comfortable with giving emotional support to one another.

During the junior high and early high school years, girls appear to develop greater intimacy with the opposite sex than boys do. They also tend to have one or two close friends, whereas adolescent boys often have many friends with whom they are less intimate. Adolescent boys may be more likely to equate intense intimacy exclusively with heterosexual friendships, whereas girls at this age can be comfortably close with both male and female friends.

For boys, the most basic sign of sexual maturation is rapid growth of the penis and scrotum (the sack of skin underneath the penis that contains the testicles), which begins at around age twelve and continues for about five years for the penis and seven years for the scrotum

During this time, the penis typically doubles or triples in length, prompting the almost inevitable locker room comparisons as boys become increasingly aware of the physical changes in themselves and their friends. Although penis size has almost nothing to do with eventual success at overall sexual functioning, for adolescent boys it sometimes seems to be an all-important sign of their new status as men

As adolescents experiment with different roles in their search to create a coherent sense of identity, many experience a sense of false self—that is, a sense that one is acting in ways that do not reflect one's true self as a person, or the "real me."

Each of the many different role-related selves that adolescents experience, such as self with parents, self with friends, self as a classmate, and self with a girlfriend or boyfriend, contains qualities that seem to contradict one another. For example, an adolescent may be outgoing with friends but shy with a romantic partner, or cheerful with friends and depressed with parents

In experiencing these feelings and ideas, adolescents fail to realize how other individuals feel about them as well.

Early in adolescence, they still have only limited empathy, or the ability to understand reliably the abstract thoughts and feelings of others and compare those thoughts and feelings with their own.

Susan Harter and her colleagues asked middle school and high school students to describe their true and their false selves. Descriptions of their true selves included "the real me inside," "my true feelings," "what I really think and feel," and "behaving the way I want to behave and not how someone else wants me to be."

False selves were described as "being phony," "putting on an act," "expressing things you don't really believe or feel," or "changing yourself to be something that someone else wants you to be." False-self beliefs and behaviors could have both a positive role in identity formation and a negative one.

A fact sheet by the Guttmacher Institute (2013) broke this down further by age.

Fewer than 2 percent of twelve-year-olds have had sex by their twelfth birthday, but within the next three years, by age fifteen, the figure rises to 16 percent, reaching close to half of all teens (48 percent) by age seventeen, and 61 and 71 percent by ages eighteen and nineteen, respectively

In studies by Reed Larson and his colleagues, fifth-through twelfth-graders from white working-and middle-class backgrounds carried electronic beepers and provided reports on their experiences when contacted at random times over the course of a week

Figure 11.2 shows the amount of time adolescents spent with family decreased from 35 percent of waking hours in fifth grade to just 14 percent in twelfth grade.

Adults who had been rejected by peers in their early adolescence did more poorly in school, had greater difficulty with authorities, had lower levels of aspiration, and participated in fewer organizations and social activities in later adolescence and early adulthood.

Finally, lower levels of peer rejection during early adolescence predicted more successful overall life adjustment and feelings of self-worth in adulthood.

Adolescents from permissive-indulgent homes were psychosocially well adjusted in interactions with peers and family, but showed declines in school adjustment and increases in school misconduct over the year.

Finally, teens raised in permissive-indifferent homes showed the poorest adjustment in all areas at the beginning of the year, with sharp drops in work and school adjustment and increases in delinquency and drug and alcohol abuse one year later.

There is, however, some reason for caution in drawing conclusions. For one thing, it is unlikely that the categories the researchers used to classify family structure, SES, culture, and parenting style adequately capture the range of relationships and contexts that are at work.

For another, these categories do not adequately take into account changes in family structure and parenting style and differences in parenting styles when more than one par-ent is involved.

rates of intercourse increase from ninth through twelfth grade for both males and females, with a higher percentage of males reporting intercourse at each grade level and overall. African American high school students report the highest overall rate of sexual intercourse (60.0 percent), followed by Hispanic teens (48.6 percent) and white teens (44.3 percent)

For each ethnic group, in past surveys, a higher percentage of males than females reported having had sexual intercourse. The exception was this latest YRBS survey (CDC, 2012) which showed white males and white females with almost identical percentages for the category of ever having had sexual intercourse.

Parenting style and the quality of the parent-child relationship can exert influence far beyond the boundaries of the family. Contact among parents in a community and between adolescents and nonfamilial adults can benefit (or harm) children by creating and support-ing shared community expectations regarding adolescent behavior

For example, adolescents whose friends described their parents as authoritative earned higher grades in school, spent more time on homework, felt more academically competent, and reported lower levels of delinquency and substance abuse

The type of psychosocial moratorium an adolescent encounters (or whether she encounters one at all) will largely depend on the opportunities for identity exploration provided by her family, culture, society, and the global pathways available in a changing world

For example, children growing up under conditions of poverty and deprivation, gender inequality, or during periods of war and social upheaval are likely to experience more limited and less supportive moratorium opportunities than are children living under more optimal circumstances.

Other social and emotional effects, such as changes in self-esteem or in peer relationships, are much more variable than similar, both in the short term and in the long term. As older adolescents move into adulthood, furthermore, the effects of puberty become even more obscure and harder to generalize about.

For example, in a longitudinal study based on interviews of women from college age through midlife, the psychologist Ruthellen Josselson found that self-esteem and attitudes about self commonly changed markedly—either for good or for ill—regardless of what they were initially

As a result of their egocentrism, teenagers often believe in a personal fable, the notion that their own lives embody a special story that is heroic and completely unique.

For example, one high school student may be convinced that no love affair has ever reached the romantic heights of his involvement with a classmate. Another may believe she is destined for great fame and fortune by virtue of (what she considers to be) her unparalleled combination of charm and academic talent.

Hormones affect more than just sexual characteristics.

For example, they are responsible for the typical differences between girls' and boys' overall body builds. In general, the sex that has shorter bones and more rounded curves (female) also has higher estrogen levels, and the sex that has longer bones and larger muscles (male) also has higher levels of testosterone

Adolescents who grow up in troubled families that remain together but have high lev-els of unresolved marital conflict and hostility are likely to experience negative develop-mental consequences as well.

For families in which destructive and unresolved conflicts between parents cannot be resolved, divorce may provide the best solution and result in improved developmental outcomes for the teenagers and other children involved

First, earlier stages represent more egocentric thinking than later stages do. Second, earlier stages by their nature require more specific or concrete thinking than later stages do.

For instance, in Stage 1 (called heteronomous morality, which focuses on punishment and obedience), a child makes no distinction between what he believes is right and what the world tells him is right; he simply accepts the perspectives of the authorities as his own, primarily to avoid punishment for doing wrong, or "being bad."

Where adolescents and parents do differ is in the emphasis, or strength, of those attitudes and values. Most disagreements between teens and parents are about relatively mundane matters affecting the teenager's current social life and behavior, such as styles of dress, hair length, choices of friends, dating, curfews, telephone use, participation in household chores and family activities, and choice of music.

For preferences such as these, teenagers agree more with their peers than with their parents, thus leading to arguments about differing points of view and who should decide the outcome. Resolving these conflicts has been the focus of a good deal of research.

Craig Mason and his colleagues found that the style of parental control that African Ame-ican mothers employed depended on who their children's peers were

For teenagers whose peers engaged in a relatively low level of problem behaviors—such as gang activity, drug use, stealing, truancy, and fighting, with or without a weapon—the optimal level of parental control required to influence their problem behaviors was relatively low, and remained relatively low, even if parents increased or decreased their control. But for adolescents who associated with peers involved in higher levels of problem behavior, the optimal level of parental control was higher, and deviations from this level led to significant increases in their own problem behavior.

In the school years, children most commonly show ethical reasoning at Stage 2, the instrumental-relativist orientation, but some may begin showing Stage 3 or 4 reasoning toward the end of this period

For the majority of youth and adults, Stage 3 (interpersonal-conformity orientation) and Stage 4 (social system orientation) characterize their most advanced moral thinking.

This change makes teenagers less opportunistic than children and less inclined to judge based on immediate rewards or punishments they experience personally. Instead, they evaluate actions on the basis of principles of some sort.

For the time being, the principles are rather conventional; they are borrowed either from ideas expressed by immediate peers and their parents, or from socially accepted rules and principles, whatever they may be.

Friends matter a lot during adolescence. Peer relationships temporarily supplant the par-ent's role as the source of greatest influence for the adolescent. As teens become more mobile, and spend more time away from home, they seek the company of others who look, think, feel, and act like themselves.

Friends offer reassurance, understanding and advice, and emotional and social support in stressful situations. The opportunity to share inner feelings of disappointment as well as happiness with close friends enables the adolescent to better deal with her emotional ups and downs. Furthermore, a capacity to form close, intimate friendships during adolescence is related to overall social and emotional adjustment and competence

In spite of these social effects, many of the physical differences between the sexes result from genetically programmed development.

Genetically triggered changes in estro-gen levels during adolescence, for example, lead to increases in the fat deposited under the skin, as well as to final maturation of b ones. The higher concentration of estrogen in girls, combined with the higher concentration of testosterone in boys mentioned earlier, means that girls end up with more fat tissue than boys do as a proportion of their body weight, and boys end up with more muscle tissue than girls do. Hence, the tendency toward conventional sex differences in physical appearance: boys look more muscular and girls have more curves though only as average trends.

For example, adolescent girls who personally confront the decision of whether to engage in premarital intercourse often show more concern than do boys for the context in which they make their decisions and for the impact of their decisions on relationships with others.

Gilligan's claims of gender bias in Kohlberg's stages have also proven to be unfounded; studies have shown females exhibiting higher levels of ethical reasoning than males using Kohlberg's stages. What appears consistent across both theories is that justice-oriented moral reasoning and needs/care-oriented moral reasoning takes time—years, in fact—to develop.

For both male and female adolescents, participation in household work and the con-sequences of such involvement depend on the helper's motivations, the meaning of the work activity, and the social context in which it occurs. In a two-year longitudinal study of one thousand ninth-graders and their parents, Kathleen Call, Jeylan Mortimer, and Michael Shanahan (1995) found that adolescents from large families with fewer financial resources and mothers who were employed responded to the needs of their families by taking on more household responsibilities than adolescents from smaller families with more resources

Girls who were more competent to begin with chose work that allowed them to be helpful to others, and the opportunity to be helpful to others at work strengthened their sense of competency. Doing household chores increased a sense of competency for African American and Hispanic American boys, but decreased such feelings for European American boys, perhaps because the former group saw helping out as being important to their families' functioning, whereas the latter saw them as burdensome and lacking in value.

Girls first develop breast "buds," or slightly raised nipples, at the beginning of puberty. During the following several years, the nipples grow darker, the areolas (the pigmented areas surrounding the nipples) increase in size, and the breasts continue to grow until they reach their full size.

Given the attention our culture devotes to breasts, it is not surprising that breast development is a potential source of concern for many adolescent girls. Breasts that are "too big," "too small," different sizes, or the "wrong" shape may cause embarrassment, lower self-esteem, and depressive symptoms and in many cases, girls experience outright harassment due to these physical developments.

Kohlberg identified three distinct levels of moral reasoning. Level 1 was preconventional reasoning, based on one's automatic acceptance of cultural rules of right and wrong, and the perception of the consequences (rewards or punishments) that may result from one's actions.

Good behaviors are those that are rewarded, while a behavior is reasoned to be bad if punishment follows that action. Level 2 was defined as involving conventional reasoning. At this level, reasoning is less egocentric and embraces the expectations of others important to the individual, including family, school, and community.

Especially during early and middle adolescence, friendships help teens to become more independent of parents and other authority figures and to resist the seemingly arbitrary demands of family living. Friends provide one another with cognitive and social scaffold-ing that differs from what acquaintances provide.

Having good friends supports positive developmental outcomes during periods of developmental change. Friends also promote independence simply by providing knowledge of a world beyond the family.

Guided by Erikson's ideas, researchers such as James Marcia (1966, 1980) and Jane Kroger (2007; Kroger et al., 2010) have empirically studied identity development during adolescence. Marcia interviewed students ages eighteen to twenty-two about their occupational choices and religious and political beliefs and values, all central aspects of identity

He classified students into four categories of identity status, based on varying combinations of (1) exploration (whether or not they had gone through an "identity crisis" as described by Erikson) and (2) commitment (the degree to which they were now committed to an occupational choice and to a set of personal, religious, and political values and beliefs).

They found that only moderately disruptive boys appeared to be negatively influenced by hostile-aggressive friends and exhibited more delinquent behavior at age thirteen.

Highly disruptive boys were the most delinquent at age thirteen, regardless of their friends' characteristics, and boys who were judged to be moderately or highly conforming appeared to be unaffected by their friends' characteristics.

According to Erikson, successful resolution of the crisis of identity versus role confusion prepares the adolescent for the crisis of intimacy versus isolation, which occurs in early adulthood. A clear and coherent sense of identity provides a basis for achieving intimacy in friendships and love relationships and for tolerating the fear of losing one's sense of self when intimacy becomes very intense and of experiencing loneliness and isolation if a relationship ends.

However, as we will see in Chapter 13's discussion of psychosocial development in early adult-hood, the establishment of an intimate relationship with a partner frequently occurs prior to, or simultaneously with, the resolution of identity issues. The lifelong challenges of successfully forming and maintaining intimate long-term relationships with friends, co-workers, lovers, marriage partners, and eventually our own children all require that we develop an increasingly reliable sense of who we are and where we are going.

There is evidence that activity among certain genes, with-out differences in DNA, is linked to homosexuality among men (Balter, 2015), and there have also been links to prenatal development in that men with more older brothers are more likely to identify as gay

However, as with most aspects of development, who we become is due to an interplay of nature and nurture that is different for each of us, and sexual orientation is likely due to a complex interaction between environment and genetics

Identity diffusion is one of the four identity statuses researched by Marcia (1966) that we will explore in detail.

However, in a broader context, identity diffusion is the failure to achieve a relatively coherent, integrated, and stable identity, and it may take a number of forms.

Due largely to the political and educational efforts of the "equal rights" and "gay rights" movements, public acceptance of gay, lesbian, and bisexual orientations has increased significantly during the past several decades. This acceptance acknowledges the right of individuals to freely practice their own sexual orientations and lifestyles and to receive protection from discrimination.

However, other researchers have found that homophobia (dislike and fear of homosexuals) remains strong among adolescents. Negative attitudes toward gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered individuals put LGBT youth at risk for greater mistreatment and victimization than other students. Violence against students in the LGBT community can include bullying and cyberbullying, harassment, and physical assault. In one large study of middle school and high school students, 80 percent of the students had been harassed verbally at school, while 40 percent were physically harassed, and one in five had been physically assaulted, all because of their sexual orientation. Unsurprisingly, in this same study, roughly 60 percent of the LGBT youth indicated they did not feel safe at school.

According to Richards and her colleagues, it is developmentally normative for pre-and young adolescents to be more romantically involved in fantasy than in reality. The adolescents in their study reported that time spent with opposite-sex peers was more exciting and that they felt more attractive and important, enjoyed more positive feelings, and felt much more "in love" than when they were with same-sex peers.

However, when alone and think-ing about the opposite sex, subjective experiences were less positive. Older adolescents felt especially negative and unmotivated, perhaps because they missed the company of their girlfriend or boyfriend.

Although making progress in mastering Erikson's crisis of identity versus role confusion is a central task of adolescence, the process of developing an identity continues throughout the entire lifespan

Identities continue to be formed as the young adult establishes a sense of intimacy in her relationships, rather than experience social isolation in her life. Similarly, in Erikson's final two stages, a stable identity allows a man in middle and late adulthood to successfully achieve a sense of generativity and ego integrity.

In day-to-day encounters with peers, the imaginary audience can make life miserable for a self-conscious teen. Can you recall going to school the day after you got your hair cut, or the day a pimple appeared on your nose or forehead?

If you were like most teenagers, you were certain that everyone would notice and that they would tease and make fun of you. Throughout the day, you likely focused on wanting to go home or hide in the restroom.

When to Be Concerned

If your adolescent has no friends at all • If your adolescent is secretive about her or his social life • If your adolescent suddenly loses all interest in friends • If all of your adolescent's friends are much older than him or her

postconventional moral judgment

In Kohlberg's theory, an orientation to moral justice that develops beyond conventional rules and beliefs

As teens move from early to later adolescence, they seek more of an equal say in their daily activities, and parents are not opposed to join them in this.

In a perfect world, the ideal transition from vertical, asymmetrical parent-child relationships to ones that are more horizontal and even would happen without conflict.

Early-maturing girls did not experience early timing as an advantage as boys did. Their earlier physical development put them out of step with gender-role expectations for girls of the same age. Because they now looked older and more sexually mature, parents and teachers worried about their behavior, especially because they often received attention from older students at their school.

In addition, because they were relatively short when they acquired normal female fat tissue and "curves," they tended to look plumper than average. Both changes tended to create stress for early-maturing girls. Yet the effect did not last into adulthood: at age thirty, the early maturers reported feeling more poised and self-directed than usual, perhaps because of experiencing and surviving social disapproval as teenagers.

For instance, children have a better sense of fairness about playing four-square on the playground than about whether to steal a drug for a spouse who is dying (one of Kohlberg's fictional dilemmas)

In addition, young women think in more mature (more "developed") ways about ethical problems of special concern and familiarity to women, such as whether to engage in premarital sex or whether to have an abortion. To some extent, therefore, what someone thinks about affects the ethics she or he applies.

In addition, 85 percent will share their actual birthdays online, 53 percent will post their e-mail addresses, 25 percent will include "selfie" videos of various activities, while 20 percent of all teens will give out their cell phone numbers.

In keeping with the advances in technology, roughly 16 percent of all teens will activate the location app on their social media sites, so anyone who is following them knows exactly where they are at that moment. The privacy paradox emerges when the latest survey data indicate that only 60 percent of all adolescents using social media set their profiles to private! What may be private to mothers and fathers, who do not access their teens' websites, is common knowledge to friends, acquaintances, and total strangers.

By the end of senior high school, these teenagers were spending significantly less time in lei-sure and daily maintenance activities with family, and this decline was greatest for time spent with the entire family and time spent with siblings. Despite these changes, however, the connection between these adolescents and their parents remained stable over time, as reflected in the amount of time they spent talking with and being alone with their parents.

In many cases, stable parent-teen relationships encourage more time for exploration—first in the home and then outside the home. Early adolescents replaced family time with time spent alone at home, whereas for older adolescents, access to friends, having a car, having a job, and receiving permission from parents to stay out later all affected time spent away from home. Table 11.2 presents the changes in percentage of different activities with family by grade.

For girls, the appearance of the first menstrual period, called menarche, signals sexual maturity.

In most societies, menarche also symbolizes the shift from girlhood to womanhood, and typically occurs after the peak of the girls' growth spurt. Even though the girls may be experiencing their first periods, it does not necessarily mean that they are fertile. From the occurrence of the girls' first periods, their menstrual cycles may take between twelve and eighteen months to achieve regularity in terms of predictable timing and consistency with respect to the release of ova from the ovaries. Menarche occurs rather late in a girl's sexual maturation and is preceded by a number of other changes, including enlargement of the breasts, the appearance of pubic hair, and broadening of the hips and shoulders. As the growth spurt peaks, the uterus, vagina, labia, and clitoris continue to develop, as do the ovaries.

Reliable statistics on sexual orientation are difficult to obtain. Kaufman (2008) reports on a large-scale Canadian study in which 1.5 percent of adolescent males and 3 percent of females identified themselves as either bisexual, mostly homosexual, or 100 percent homosexual.

In one large-scale study in the United States of thirty-eight thousand adolescents in grades seven through twelve, 88.2 percent described themselves as predominantly heterosexual (exclusively interested in the other sex), 1.1 percent as predominantly homosexual (exclusively interested in the same sex) or bisexual (interested in members of both sexes), and 10.7 percent as uncertain about their sexual orientation. Other studies have found that between 3 and 6 percent of teenagers report that they are lesbian or gay

Although the trends regarding the timing of puberty are intriguing, they also mask variability in teenagers' experiences. Newer research about the psychological impact of puberty has highlighted this fact, and has been more cautious in generalizing about both the short-and long-term effects of timing. In reviewing studies about this question, the psychologist Sucheta Connolly and her colleagues concluded that puberty has little last-ing impact on adolescents, immediately or during emerging adulthood

In the short term, physical changes are co-occurring with stresses in the family. As a result, parents and the young adolescent are conflicted about how to respond to the changes—as a welcome transition or as a source of ongoing worry. Yet, in the long run, during later adolescence or early adulthood, family relationships return to a quality characteristic of the prepubescent family dynamic, good or bad.

When "hanging out" on these social media sites, many adolescents wrestle with a classic adolescent paradox. In striving for identity formation, all teens crave the dual constructs of privacy from their parents and greater personal and social independence

In their virtual neighbor-hoods, where their online reputations are formed, many teens are vulnerable to sharing too much private information, especially to strangers. Madden et al. (2013) found that while on various social media sites, 92 percent of teens use their real names and post pictures of themselves and their friends and family.

In a discussion of plans to go to a multiband rock concert with his friends, for example, Alonzo will completely dismiss his parents' concerns about the risks and dangers in attending.

Instead, he will convincingly plead to his parents (and himself) that his friends, who went to last year's concert, have assured him that it was perfectly safe. After all, they know what they are talking about!

Advantages of clique membership include security, a feeling of importance, and acquisition of socially acceptable behaviors (such as academic, social, or athletic competence) that are part of conforming to the clique's norms. However, conformity can also suppress individuality and may promote "in-group" snobbishness, intolerance, and other negative values and behaviors.

Involvement with a clique of antisocial peers is associated with various adolescent adjustment problems, including substance abuse, school dropout, delinquency, and gang membership, although which is cause and which is effect is uncertain

On the other hand, it also means wondering whether keeping silent will make her risk losing the trust and respect of important adults, such as parents and teachers.

It also means considering the amount of emotional pain that will befall the shoplifting friend at the hands of either angry parents or the police. Taking all of these considerations into account can make the final decision seem hesitant, tentative, and apparently lacking in principle, whichever way the decision goes.

Stage 4 (social system orientation), for example, seems to refer to social conventions as well as to moral matters, but Stage 5 (social contract orientation) refers only to moral judgment.

It is also important to keep in mind that Kohlberg's focus was not delineating between social conventions and morality per se, but in viewing the moral reasoning used in commenting on the actions of people facing the fictional moral dilemmas.

When there is a confluence of sexual intimacy, social media, and adolescent disinhibition, a perfect storm of tragic proportions is a very real potential outcome. The suicidal death of Jessica Logan is such an occurrence.

Jessica, a high school senior in Ohio, sent nude pictures of herself to her boyfriend, at his urging. When they broke up, the pictures appeared on social media sites of Jessica's classmates, and the cyberbullying went viral at her school. Jessica even appeared on a local TV station in her hometown to share her story in hopes that no one else would have to go through what she had to endure. After that show, and after her graduation, having attended a friend's funeral, Jessica returned home and hung herself. Jessica's story made national news, and in 2012, the state of Ohio passed the Jessica Logan Act to help schools enforce cyberbullying in their school districts

Differences in social class, culture, and ethnicity may also affect identity development, depending on the context specific to an individual's life circumstances.

Just as adolescents growing up during the Depression were much less likely to have the opportunity to experience a moratorium, minority youths living in poverty today are also likely to be much more limited in opportunities for identity status exploration than middle-class sub-urban teens attending college. Youngsters who live in poor neighborhoods where gangs, drugs, and violence are common and rates of school dropout and unemployment are high, and who lack positive adult and peer role models, are more likely to encounter difficulties in forming positive identities than adolescents growing up in a more supportive environment

social cognition

Knowledge and beliefs about interpersonal and social matters

Each of these trends is somewhat related to gender: boys tend to emphasize ethical thinking about justice rather abstractly, and girls typically emphasize an ethics of care. But the gender difference is not large; most individuals develop both kinds of ethical thinking to a significant extent.

Lawrence Kohlberg developed a major theory of moral development constructed around the issues of fairness and justice, while Carol Gilligan. looked at the ethics of care as the basis for moral development in women. Both are stage theories in the cognitive developmental tradition, reminiscent of Piaget's approach to cognitive development.

For teens who are socially awkward in face-to-face interactions, social media allow them to engage in conversations that may reinforce their social confidence.

Like any new phenomenon that gains enormous popularity with adolescents, more research is needed to assess both the benefits and the cost of social media for teens, their parents, and the community

Living in a neighborhood with children from other ethnic groups appears to increase the likelihood of having close other-race friends outside of school. Having a higher pro-portion of neighborhood friends attending one's school also affects other-race friendship.

Living in a racially mixed neighborhood may help to create more positive attitudes toward members of other ethnic groups and provide a meeting ground on which cross-race friendships can develop outside of school. The informal peer activities that occur in neighborhood settings are more likely to promote close friendships across groups than the more formal, teacher-directed activities in school. Interethnic friendships are strongly influenced by the attitudes adolescents hold about their own and other ethnic groups

Although the majority of college students expect to live briefly with their parents after graduation, in our culture leaving home is still a powerful metaphor for achieving psychological separation, and differences in how parents and adolescents understand and react to this experience are common.

Many of the everyday conflicts between adolescents and their parents over chores, curfews, school, and social activities reflect different perspectives about the approach-ing separation. Adolescents' tendency to view themselves as increasingly emancipated from their parents' conventional perspectives and control may create conflict between a parent's need to maintain the usual family norms while allowing the child increasing independence. We will examine the varying dynamics behind parent-adolescent conflicts, but first, let's explore the changes that occur in the amount of time, the interests, and the activities that teenagers share with their family from early through later adolescence.

Adult children of divorced and remarried families have more adjustment problems, less satisfaction with their lives, lower socioeconomic achievement, higher marital instability, and more problems in their marital interactions than adults from families that remained intact

Many young adults who are children of divorce have witnessed their separated, divorced, or widowed mothers become displaced homemakers due to loss of their conventional roles of wife and mother and lack of preparation for employment and single parenthood.

Most developmental psychologists agree that the new cognitive skills of adolescents have important effects on their social cognition, or their knowledge and beliefs about inter-personal and social matters.

Moral beliefs are one example of social cognition; in this section we look at three others: egocentrism and its expression as beliefs in an imaginary audience and a personal fable.

As adolescents move into adulthood and gradually develop formal thought, allowing them to reason with concepts of greater complexity and abstract thinking, they also develop a personal morality, or sensitivity to and knowledge of what is right and wrong.

Moral thinking develops in two ways: in the form of increasingly logical and abstract principles related to fairness and justice and in the form of increasingly sophisticated ways of caring about the welfare of friends, family, and self

What is considered right is whatever conforms to the rules or values established by society at the macro level and the family at the micro level. Level 3 of moral development identified by Kohlberg was postconventional reasoning.

Moral values, or what is right, are now considered independent of what an authority says is right. What is right is based on an individual's perception of universal moral principles apart from the group's rules or laws. Each of Kohlberg's three levels of moral development was subdivided into two stages, resulting in a model of moral reasoning that comprised six stages.

. Yet, in reality, this change takes place by successfully navigating and negotiating the minefields of parent-adolescent conflict. Despite the many changes taking place, the majority of adolescents and parents continue to get along rather well together. They also tend to share similar attitudes and values about important issues and decisions, such as ideas of right and wrong, what makes a marriage good, and the long-run value of education.

More importantly, despite the increasing time that teens spend with peers and the increasing influence of peers, when it comes to the basic attitudes and values that guide long-term life choices, adolescents have consistently rated their parents' advice more highly than their friends'

These are important ingredients in an adolescent's development of self-concept and identity

Most important, peer groups provide a support base outside of the family from which the teenager can more freely try on the different identity roles that ultimately will contribute to her adult personality: popular, brain, normal, druggie, outcast, partyer, punk, grind, clown, banger, nerd, lover, and so forth

During the rapprochement subphase, teens begin to make a healthy course correction. Toward the middle of adolescence, a teenager has achieved enough separateness from her parents that she is now able to conditionally reaccept their authority.

Often, she will alternate between experimentation and rapprochement—on some occasions, challenging her parents, and at other times, being conciliatory and cooperative.

Puberty changes this gender equality to some extent.

On average, boys become more muscular than the average girl does, even though postpubescent girls are more muscular than their childhood selves. From early childhood to adolescence, boys experience close to a fourteen-fold increase in the size of the largest muscles in their bodies (for example, in their thighs), but girls experience only a ten-fold increase. Because these changes are only averages, it is not unusual for many adolescent girls in middle school and high school to actually be stronger than some of their male classmates.

A number of researchers are also exploring the contributions of biological and genetic predispositions to the development of sexual-minority orientations

One approach has sought to discover physical differences between the brains of male and female animals and humans; the second has explored the role of genes by using family and twin adoption studies to analyze the frequencies with which homosexuality occurs in families and by directly examining DNA.

Even so, Kohlberg's theory of moral judgment leaves a number of important questions unanswered.

One is whether the theory really recognizes the impact of prior knowledge on beliefs; another is whether the theory distinguishes clearly enough between conventions and morality. One especially important question has to do with gender differences: does Kohlberg's theory really describe the moral development of girls as well as that of boys?

The other half of the paradoxical problem with teens and social media is in their desire for independence in establishing their own separate identity. The identity they form online may not be congruent with their persona in the "real" world of day-to-day interactions with people at home and at school.

Opportunities or pressure to participate in cyberbully-ing or being coerced to engage in innocent flirting that may evolve into hard-core sexting are often hard to resist. In much the same way as face-to-face peer pressure is difficult to resist for the developing adolescent, giving in to "virtual" social pressures can define an adolescent's online reputation in ways that can be hurtful and damaging

The disconnectedness that parents and teenagers sometimes feel may also reflect teenagers' sensitivity to the discrepancies between their own and their parents' views of how their families function—whether individuals really get along with one another, for example, and who really makes decisions around the house

Parents may think they listen to their teenager's opinions about what household chores she should do, but she herself may regard the "listening" as shallow or meaningless because parents evidently decide who does what chores anyway.

Adolescents balance many roles: son or daughter, friend, peer, student. Many also add "employee" to the mix. As we saw in Chapter 10, work has an impact on cognitive development and on identity formation as well.

Participation in work within and outside the family provides a major base for the development of competence and sense of identity and self, especially during adolescence. Working with others can produce a broad range of benefits, from sound work habits to the development of helpfulness toward others, responsibility for the welfare of others, a sense of agency or personal efficacy, and an appreciation of the needs and feelings of others

Peer groups play an even greater role in the everyday lives of adolescents than they do for younger children. They also tend to be more structured and organized, frequently include individuals from a relatively wide age range, and are much less likely to be all male or all female.

Peer groups are an important component of an adolescent's social convoy, the network of social relationships that follow a person over his or her lifetime, changing in structure but providing continuity in the exchange of support, as we will see in Chapter 17 on psychosocial development in late adulthood.

Who is included in this social convoy of support is determined by the adolescent's emotional attachment to the person and by the person's role in the adolescent's life.

Peers provide a teenager with critical information about who he is, how he should act, what he is like, and so forth. They offer him an environment for making social comparisons between his own actions, attitudes, and feelings and those of others.

Authoritarian parents also exercise high degrees of demandingness and control, but provide low levels of emotional responsiveness, warmth, and nurturance.

Permissive-indulgent parents are low in demanding behavioral controls, mixed in their clarity of communication, and very high in warmth and nurturance, whereas permissive-indifferent parents do little to monitor their children's behavior and exhibit low levels of control, clarity of communication, maturity demands, and nurturance authoritative parenting style have been found to experience better relationships at home and better performance and social adjustment at school. Adolescents with permissive-indifferent (neglectful) parents experience the lowest level of adjustment.

By nature, adolescents struggle with the self-regulation of their behaviors and emotions, and thus are very susceptible to peer pressure as they navigate through their vast social media networks. But not all peer pressure is negative.

Proper use of social media often benefits adolescents by enhancing their technological skills, developing their communication skills, and providing opportunities for social connections with peers who share similar interests

Although sexuality plays an important role in adolescents' feelings, fantasies, and social relationships, it does not necessarily dominate their lives. As noted earlier, changes in sexuality during adolescence involve not only physical maturation and the development of new social skills; they also play a major role in the development of intimacy and personal identity.

Reasons for engaging in sexual activity or for not having sex during adolescence vary, based on social, emotional, and moral attitudes and beliefs of the teenager. For those who abstain from having sex, religious reasons tend to predominate for males and females, followed by the desire to not get pregnant or to get someone pregnant, followed by not having found the right person yet

Not surprisingly, the parenting styles discussed in Chapter 7 are related to various aspects of adolescent development, including personality, academic achievement, and social and emotional adjustment

Recall that authoritative parents exercise high degrees of demandingness in setting appropriate behavioral boundaries and establishing high levels of responsiveness to their children's needs and moods.

Traditional people said that "their religious beliefs always guide their sexual behavior." Relational people said that "sex should be part of a loving relationship."

Recreational people said that "sex need not have anything to do with love." Not surprisingly, older married people had more traditional views of sex, whereas younger unmarried people held more recreational views.

Dating is a major avenue for exploring sexual activity in both consensual (Zani, 1993) and nonconsensual (Small & Kerns, 1993) experiences. Because dating is occurring at younger ages and can also lead to violence and victimization, where and how young people learn about dating can be an important asset to establishing healthy boundaries in relationships.

Regarding sources of information on dating and relationships, young girls tend to use a wider range of sources than their male peers. Not only do girls seek out friends, parents, and traditional and social media, as well as sexual education teachers in school, but they also trust these sources of information more than young boys. Boys, according to Wood et al. (2002), tend to explore fewer sources of information and appear to trust and value what they learn from the girls they date.

According to some psychologists, some inconsistencies in moral beliefs may arise because the theory does not fully distinguish between social conventions and morality

Social conventions refer to the arbitrary customs and agreements about behavior that members of society use, such as table manners and forms of greeting and dressing.

Marital conflict is a well-known source of distress for both parents and children, and particularly for adolescents, whose struggles to separate from their families to establish an independent and autonomous identity often involve an increased need for a safe "home base" from which to separate and a heightened awareness of hostility and conflict between their parents

Some conflict is normal in marriages; in fact, children learn the strategies and skills needed to deal with conflict in their own lives by observing their parents' successful strate-gies for coping with marital discord. However, in families where levels of conflict and disagreement are too high because parents are unable to resolve them, children and adolescents are negatively affected

During adolescence, enough live sperm are produced in the testes to make reproduction a real possibility for the first time.

Sometime around age twelve, boys are likely to experience their first ejaculation of semen, a sticky fluid produced by the prostate gland, which is located near the penis just inside the body cavity. Semen carries the sperm to the penis and provides it with a medium in which to live after ejaculation. Most boys have their first ejaculation during masturbation; as nocturnal emissions, or "wet dreams," during sleep; or, less frequently, as emissions that occur spontaneously upon waking. Most males report experiencing nocturnal emissions about one or two years before puberty and the accompanying dreams are frequently, but not always, erotic in nature. The sexual changes just discussed and the unexpected erections and uncomfortable sexual fantasies and sensations that boys sometimes experience are common sources of embarrassment. Less frequently, they are a source of more serious discomfort and conflict.

Keep in mind, however, that the nature and role of sexual activity in the lives of adolescents vary considerably depending on culture, SES, and overall life circumstances

Sometimes, identity development is complicated by sexual issues. It can also be affected by social problems specific to teenagers

As noted earlier, the type of family in which they grow up significantly influences adolescents. One useful way to describe families is by SES (socioeconomic status, or social class), which is determined by parents' levels of education, incomes, and type of work, as well as by their lifestyles and cultural values.

Studies of families in the United States, Great Britain, and Italy have found that differences between the values, child-rearing practices, and expectations of middle-class parents and those of working-and lower-class parents closely parallel differences in the amount of autonomy, independence, and satisfaction enjoyed in their day-to-day work experiences

Family dynamics also affected the relationship between helping with household work and feelings of competency and concern for others. For girls living in families where the father-daughter relationship was not supportive and the mother's manner of assigning household tasks diminished the girl's sense of autonomy and independence, participating in household chores undermined rather than enhanced feelings of competency

Teenagers who were expected to do household work that benefited members of the family and expected to do it on a routine or self-regulated basis were more likely to show spontaneous concern for the welfare of others. Work that focused on what is one's "own," such as cleaning one's own room, or was based on frequent requests for assistance (i.e., nagging) was not associated with increased concern for others. How work outside the family influences adolescent development depends on how well it fits the developmental needs of the individual and his or her family, including the type and level of workplace stress, the relevance of job-related skills to future careers, and the compatibility between the demands and experiences of work and those of school.

The path taken by a teen is often influenced by parental support and one's perception of exploring their false self. Adolescents who reported high levels of positive support from parents and peers engaged in fewer false-self behaviors than those who experienced lower levels and poorer quality of support.

Teens who engaged in false-self behavior as a healthy way to experiment with new roles reported more positive feelings about themselves, higher self-worth, greater hopefulness about the future, and more knowledge of their true selves than teens who engaged in false-self behavior to please, impress, or win the approval of parents and peers or because they were experiencing depression or other problems.

For all four ethnic groups, unilateral teen decisions were associated with poorer adolescent adjustment one year later, whereas joint parent-teen decision making was associated with improved adjustment.

Teens whose parents allowed them a great deal of decision-making autonomy over a wide range of issues reported higher rates of deviant behavior, lower academic competence, and poorer psychosocial function-ing, whereas those whose parents engaged in joint decision making with them reported higher academic competence and more positive psychosocial functioning.

In fact, early adolescents share a fascination with the particular interests, life histories, and personalities of their friends; young teenagers want to understand friends as unique individuals and be understood by them in the same way.

The ability of adolescents to recognize the advantages of complementary relationships—relationships in which two people with different strengths and abilities cooperate for mutual benefit—makes possible friendships that involve greater commitment, permanence, and loyalty. Intimacy in adolescent friendships includes self-revelation, confidence (in keeping secrets), and a sense of exclusivity

Teenagers also reveal concern with an imaginary audience through strategic interactions with their peers, encounters that aim to either reveal or conceal personal information indirectly.

The almost universal use of the Internet and social media by adolescents today serves as a means of interacting with real people who make up an imaginary audience. Teens use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts to solicit "likes" or "followers" that create the perception of popularity to the individual and to others.

One especially important criticism of Kohlberg's theory of moral justice has to do with possible gender bias. Do Kohlberg's stages describe both genders equally well? And does his theory undervalue ethical attitudes that may develop more fully in girls and women than in boys and men?

The best-known investigations of these questions have been pursued by one of Kohlberg's colleagues at Harvard, Carol Gilligan, and her associates.

Puberty is a set of physical changes that marks the completion of sexual development, or reproductive maturity.

The changes that contribute directly to making sexual reproduction possible are called primary sex characteristics. Other changes, which are simply correlated or associated with the primary changes, are called secondary sex characteristics.

In Stage 3, a person's chief concern is with the opinions of her peers: an action is morally right if her immediate circle of friends says it is right. Often, this way of thinking leads to helpful actions, such as taking turns and sharing possessions. But often it does not, such as when friends decide to shoplift from a store or bully a kid at school who is perceived as weaker and more vulnerable.

The desire to be a "good boy" or "good girl" is often defined by what the peer group determines is the right thing to do.

During the differentiation subphase early in adolescence, the teenager recognizes that she is psychologically different from her parents.

The dual discovery that she is no longer an extension of her parents and that they are not as wise, powerful, and all-knowing as she thought earlier sometimes leads her to often question and reject her parents' values and advice, even if they are reasonable.

When their genital development is relatively advanced, both boys and girls acquire more body hair, although boys generally grow more of it than girls do

The first growth is simply a fine fuzz around the genitals called pubic hair, which then darkens and becomes coarser. At the same time, underarm or axillary hair begins to appear which eventually becomes dark and coarse as well

menarche

The first menstrual period.

According to Erikson (1968), adolescence provides a psychosocial moratorium, a period during which the youth is free to suspend or delay taking on adult commitments and to explore new social roles.

The goal of role experimentation is to find a place, or niche, that is clearly defined and yet seems uniquely made for him. The adolescent may devote this time to study, work, travel, or even rebellious and/or delinquent behaviors, depending on prevailing social, cultural, and economic conditions, as well as on his individual capacities and needs.

Lawrence Kohlberg proposed six stages of moral judgment that develop slowly across three levels, well into middle adulthood. The stages were derived initially from interviews of boys aged ten, thirteen, and sixteen, but later research included adolescent females.

The interviews were conducted in much the same style as Piaget's classic interviews about cognitive development: Children and adults of various ages responded individually to hypothetical stories that contained moral dilemmas. Kohlberg, like Piaget, believed that moral development occurred in a stage-like fashion and was based on an individual's level of cognitive development; over time, as cognitive abilities change, one's moral reasoning will also change.

Trends in adolescent sexual activity in the United States peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, showing earlier initiation of intercourse, increased premarital intercourse, a greater number of partners, and ineffective and inconsistent use of contraceptives. Recent studies have attempted to add clarity to the prevailing data that the median age of first intercourse was 15.5 years for girls and 14.75 years for boys

The national Youth Risk Behavior Survey reviewed the trends in adolescent sexual behaviors from 1991 to 2011. The trends in prevalence data showed a steady decrease from a high in 1991 of 54.1 percent of teens reporting they had had sexual intercourse, to a low of 45.6 percent a decade later in 2001. Over the next ten years, the prevalence rates remained statistically unchanged

The effects of divorce and remarriage are experienced throughout the lifespan. Compared to children from two-parent, nondivorced families, children, adolescents, and adults from divorced and remarried families are at increased risk for developing difficulties in adjustment, including academic problems, psychological disorders, lower self-esteem, and problems in their relationships with parents, siblings, and peers.

The normative develop-mental tasks of adolescence and early adulthood—developing intimate relationships and autonomy—are especially hard. In addition to experiencing some of the same behavior problems found in childhood, adolescents are more likely to drop out of school, be unemployed, become sexually active at an earlier age, have children out of wedlock, associate with antisocial peers, and be involved in delinquent activities and substance abuse. Both male and female adolescents whose parents have divorced are more likely to become teenage parents, and single parenthood most adversely affects the lives of adolescents who experience declining SES and who drop out of school

individuation

The process by which an adolescent develops a unique and separate personal identity. Consists of four subphases: differentiation, practice and experimentation, rapprochement, and consolidation.

Teenagers learn that not every young person is required to be home by the same hour every night, that some parents expect their children to do more household chores than other parents do, and that other families hold different religious or political views.

The processes of sharing feelings and beliefs and exploring new ideas and opinions with friends play an important role in helping adolescents define their sense of self

Dunkle and Anthis (2001) conducted a short-term longitudinal study testing the relation-ship of identity exploration and commitment to the creation of possible selves. As young adolescents begin to imagine possible selves, both ideal and feared, identity exploration was more active as the number of possible selves generated grew.

The researchers also discovered that as teens entered later adolescence and established more consistent possible selves, the commitment to setting and working toward these goals also increased. By exploring many possible selves in early adolescence, young teens begin to prune and shape the real self they present to the world as they transition from later adolescence into emerging adulthood.

Clique membership allows teenagers to have a few select friends they know well and who share important interests and activities, whereas membership in a crowd provides contact with a much broader group of peers on a more casual basis.

The small size and intimacy of a clique make it like a family in which the adolescent can feel comfortable and secure. The major clique activity seems to be talking, and cliques generally meet during the school week.

Research exploring the social-emotional consequences related to when an adolescent begins and ends puberty accelerated in the 1980s. A series of longitudinal studies explored the impact of the timing of puberty on individuals' well-being

The studies tried to answer some very important questions: Was it better to experience puberty earlier than usual, or later, or "on time"? And did these timings have a different effect depending on whether you were a boy or a girl?—Teenage participants were followed for several years, and eventually even for several decades—they were especially helpful in deter-mining the effects of timing. This research suggested intriguing trends in the effects of timing and gender, as summarized in Table 10.1. The trends themselves, however, also masked important individual differences in responses to puberty, which more recent research has highlighted.

adolescent egocentrism

The tendency of adolescents to perceive the world (and themselves) from their own perspective.

Teens in the second decade of the twenty-first century are as connected to the Inter-net for social development as earlier generations were to the schoolyard or their community neighborhood. In fact, most adolescents spend as much time, if not more, in their "virtual neighborhoods" as they do interacting with peers in the hallways of their schools or the streets of their hometown.

The use of social media and accessing social media sites on the Web is, according to O'Keeffe and Clark-Pearson (2011), one of the most common activities engaged in by children and teens today. In a recent survey con-ducted by the Pew Research Center (Madden et al., 2013), 95 percent of teens reported that they use the Internet. Every day, and multiple times each week, young teens and transitional teens go online to share "what's happening" with others in their school, in neighboring towns, and across the globe.

The challenging task of achieving a secure sexual identity is considerably more difficult for nonheterosexual adolescents, who have the added burdens of grappling with their difference and the anxieties and dangers involved. Homosexual and bisexual teenagers frequently experience rejection by their families, peer groups, schools, places of worship, and other community institutions—the very groups adolescents depend on for support.

The verbal abuse, the AIDS-related stigmatization, the threat of physical attack, and other forms of victimization they encounter put them at greater risk for mental health problems. However, strong support from family, friends, school and community, and antidiscrimination legislation and education about nonheterosexuality can all serve as buffers against these negative outcomes by creating an environment that allows these adolescents to successfully master the challenges of identity formation

Late-maturing boys, on the other hand, face some very specific and paradoxical out-comes. Many still resembled children as late as age sixteen, and unfortunately, tended to be judged as children as a result. Teachers and parents rated these individuals as impulsive, immature, and lacking self-confidence.

Their ratings may have been partly stereotypical based on how the boys looked, but also partly based on accurate observations. The late-maturing boys generally participated less in key social activities, such as sports and sports-focused social activities, and therefore had fewer opportunities to learn social skills in the same way as their early maturing peers. The good news, how-ever, was that these boys tended to feel less pressure to become socially or sexually active. Perhaps as a result, they felt better about themselves as young adults than did the early maturers.

Both boys and girls experience a number of physical changes that create secondary sex characteristics, notably in their breasts, body hair, and voices.

These changes do not directly contribute to their physical ability to reproduce, but they do make the two sexes look more adultlike and more stereotypically masculine or feminine.

In both sexes, the voice deepens near the end of puberty and becomes richer in over-tones so that it sounds less like a flute or whistle and more like a violin or clarinet.

These changes make the adolescent's voice sound more truly adult, but the fluctuations in voice qualities that some adolescents experience can be a cause of considerable (although usually temporary) embarrassment.

From the perspectives of adolescents themselves, the most significant indicators of successful separation from parents are gaining economic independence, living on their own, graduating from school, and being free to make their own life choices without being overly concerned about what their parents may think

These indicators may continue to need more time to fully develop before feeling fully independent. This further exploration occurs during emerging adulthood, a new period of development that Jeffery Arnett (2004) described as the winding road from the late teens through the mid-twenties.

They reported more positive psychosocial development, more positive family relationships, more frequent church attendance, greater commitment to education, and lower involvement with problem behaviors than those who initiated intercourse earlier.

These longitudinal out-comes were not associated with the timing of first intercourse; rather, they appeared to be a continuation of enduring developmental paths based on childhood differences in temperament, personality, and family and life circumstances that were already well established before ninth grade

While showing a slight decline in adolescent sexual behaviors from previous decades, one area that has remained constant is the timing of a teen's first sexual activity and its impact on later development. In a sequential longitudinal study of the timing of first intercourse and psychosocial adjustment, Raymond Bingham and Lisa Crockett (1996) surveyed seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade adolescents annually through their graduation from twelfth grade.

They found that for both boys and girls, earlier timing of first sexual intercourse was associated with longitudinal patterns of greater difficulty with the transition to adolescence and with poorer psychosocial adjustment. Similarly, Armour and Haynie's (2007) longitudinal study also found that an early debut of sexual experience increased the risks of engaging in delinquent behaviors within the following year for both genders. Later developmental difficulties were found to last well beyond that first year and were more disruptive if teens were sexually active much earlier than members of their peers

In 1992 Robert Michael, John Gagnon, and Edward Laumann conducted the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS). They interviewed more than three thousand U.S. residents ages eighteen to fifty-nine about their sex lives, histories, and attitudes

They report that people's attitudes about sex fell into three broad categories: traditional, relational, or recreational.

When adolescents first begin to reason abstractly, they often become overly impressed with this skill; it seems to them that anything can be solved "if only people would be reasonable" (that is, logical).

This attitude can make teenagers idealistic and keep them from appreciating the practical limits of logic. They may wonder why no one has ever "realized" that world war might be abolished simply by explaining to all the world powers the obvious dangers of war. Or they may wonder why their parents have not noticed the many "errors" they have made in raising children.

In Stage 4, the person shifts from concern with peers to concern with the opinions of community or society in the abstract: now something is right if the institutions approve.

This broader source of moral judgment spares Stage 4 children from the occasional tyranny of friends' opinions; now they may refuse to sneak a smoke or to experiment with alcohol or drugs just because their friends urge them to do so.

The development of formal thought also leads to a new kind of confusion between an adolescent's own thoughts and those of others.

This confusion of viewpoints amounts to a form of egocentrism. Unlike the egocentrism of preschoolers, which is based on concrete problems, adolescent egocentrism concerns more abstract thoughts and problems.

Adolescents born between the early 1980s and 2000 are collectively known as the Millennials, or Generation Y. Following on the heels of the preceding generations identified as the Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and Generation X (born between 1965 and 1982)

This generation has grown up in an ever-expanding world of technological advances and the rise of the global community. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Millennials' involvement in and interactions with social media.

Even though the majority of teens get along well with their parents on a daily basis, parent-teenager relationships are likely to feel slightly "unstable" or "out of joint" some of the time.

This is in part a result of the increasingly stressful pace of modern family life and the different ways adolescents and their parents choose to spend their time. Both adolescents and their parents tend to agree that differences in the activities, expectations, and interests of each family member make it difficult for them to find times to do things together and find activities that are of mutual interest

An authoritative style of parenting continues to be positively associated with the quality of parent-child relationships throughout the lifespan.

This is true of the relationships sandwich generation parents have with their adult children and aging parents in middle adulthood and of the relationships grandparents have with their grandchildren and their grandchildren's parents during late adulthood

By and large, girls tend to be more conservative than boys in their sexual attitudes, values, and actions, whereas boys tend to be more sexually active and to have more sexual encounters.

This may be due to the fact that although boys' and girls' interest in sex is driven, in part, by testosterone, girls tend to be influenced more by environment and social expectations than are boys. Girls are more likely to emphasize intimacy and love as a necessary part of sexual activity and less likely to engage in sex merely as a physically pleasurable activity

By Stage 4 (social system orientation), when the child is an adolescent, he realizes that individuals vary in their points of view, but he still takes for granted the existing overall conventions of society as a whole.

This stage is often referred to as the "law-and-order" stage because laws are needed to maintain the social order. He cannot yet imagine a society in which those. conventions might be purposely modified, for example, by passing laws or agreeing on new rules.

Current understanding of the development of sexual-minority orientations is that the trajectory of development—same-sex interest, recognizing one's sexual orientation, and dating—is quite different for different individuals, depending on where they live, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.

Though cross-gender behavior in childhood appears to be strongly associated with sexual-minority orientations in adolescence and adulthood for both males and females, a substantial proportion of gay and lesbian adults report no or few cross-gender behaviors in childhood

Testosterone stimulates muscle and bone growth in both sexes

Throughout most of childhood, boys and girls are about equally muscular. Prior to adolescence boys and girls have roughly the same number and sizes of muscle fibers, and they can exert about the same amount of strength with their muscles. Although individual children vary around the averages, as groups, the two sexes differ very little until the onset of puberty

During the teenage years, the basis of what makes a close friendship changes. When asked to define close friendships and how they are initiated, maintained, and ended, adolescents report that mutual understanding and intimacy are most important, whereas school-age children emphasize shared activities

Unlike cooperation between younger children, adolescent mutuality depends on the understanding that other people share some of one's own abilities, interests, and inner experiences and on an appreciation of each person's uniqueness.

Full-blown upheavals and more serious problems of adolescence are most likely to occur in families and communities in which a poor fit exists between the developmental needs of adolescents and the opportunities and supports that are available

We first explore relationships within the family, and then look at social relationships in the wider world.

Given how rapid the physical changes of puberty are, it is not surprising that adolescents often are preoccupied—and dissatisfied—with how they look.

When dissatisfaction occurs, it is most noticeable early in the adolescent years, but it is also common during the later teen years and well into adulthood. It would seem, then, that a milestone as important as puberty should affect individuals deeply, perhaps leading to long-term effects that last even into adulthood. Psychologists there-fore have searched for predictable psychological effects of physical growth, both short term and long term; however, the results of this research have not been fully conclusive.

Reviews of moral judgment have qualified Gilligan's ideas somewhat but have also lent them support. When faced with hypothetical dilemmas, females show as much capacity as males to reason in terms of abstract ethical principles

When faced with real-life dilemmas, however, girls make different choices

To better understand developmental changes in the patterns and gender differences in the activities, thoughts, and feelings associated with friendship during adolescence, Maryse Rich-ards and her colleagues had 218 adolescents in fifth through eighth grade carry electronic pagers for one week and complete self-report forms in response to signals received at random times during their waking hours

When paged, the teens responded to questions about with whom they were talking, about whom they were thinking, and what their subjective experiences were, including body image, mood, motivation, self-esteem, and excitement, at the moment they were contacted. These same adolescents underwent the same procedure four years later, when they were in grades nine through twelve.

Kohlberg's six stages of moral judgment have held up well when tested on a wide variety of children, adolescents, and adults. The stages of moral thinking shown in Table 10.2 do seem to describe how moral judgment develops, at least when individuals focus on hypothetical dilemmas posed in stories

When presented with stories about risky but fictional sexual behaviors, adolescents of both sexes evaluated the actions of the stories' characters in line with Kohlberg's stages

Between one-quarter and one-third of adolescents in divorced and remarried families become disengaged from their families, minimizing the time they spend at home and avoiding interactions, activities, and communication with family members.

When this disengagement is associated with lack of adult support and supervision and with involvement with a delinquent peer group, antisocial behavior and school problems are more likely. However, if the adolescent has a relationship with a caring adult outside the home, such as the parent of a friend, a teacher, a neighbor, or a coach, disengagement may be a positive solution to a disrupted family situation

Achieving psychological separation from one's parents entails four important accomplishments:

functional independence—the ability to manage one's own personal and practical affairs with minimal help from one's parents; attitudinal independence—a view of oneself as unique and separate from one's parents and having a personal set of values and beliefs; emotional independence—freedom from being overly dependent on parents for approval, intimacy, and emotional support; and conflictual independence—freedom from excessive anxiety, guilt, resentment, anger, or responsibility toward one's parents

The proportion of individuals at each identity status appears to vary with the specific identity area involved.

identity achievement was the most frequent status in the area of religious beliefs; identity achievement and moratorium were the most frequent statuses where vocational choice was concerned; identity foreclosure was the most common status in the area of gender-role preferences; and identity diffusion was the most frequent status in the area of political philosophies

Moratorium

individuals are presently in crisis, actively struggling to make commitments based on their own beliefs and goals. They remain preoccupied with exploring, and hopefully achieving, successful compromises among their parents' wishes, the demands of society, and their own capabilities.

Foreclosed

individuals have "prematurely" committed themselves to important aspects of identity without having experienced any significant exploration through conflict or crisis. Consequently, the commitments formed are mostly through identification with their parents' beliefs and goals, or the influence of another external authority.

Identity-achieved

individuals have experienced and successfully resolved a period of crisis by either reevaluating past choices and beliefs and accepting those of value or by adopting new beliefs based on their own terms and exploration, not solely those of their parents or another authority figure.

Identity-diffused

individuals may or may not have experienced a crisis but are defined by the absence of exploration and commitment regarding their values and beliefs. These individuals lack a meaningful sense of direction in general and display little concern about personal identity formation

They tend to hold more negative views of marriage as a result (see Chapter 13). Many divorced fathers lack the kinkeeping skills needed to keep in touch with their children and other family members, such as phoning, sending birthday cards, or visiting, skills that traditionally have been in the province of women.

married people of all ages have the lowest risk of suicide and widowed or divorced people have the highest, particularly in late adulthood.

Adolescent egocentrism sometimes shows itself in teenagers' preoccupation with the reactions of others.

thirteen-year-olds often fail to differentiate between how they feel about themselves and how others feel about them. Instead, they act as though they are performing for an imaginary audience, one that is as concerned with their appearance and behavior as they themselves are

Susie Lamborn, Sanford Dornbusch, and Laurence Steinberg (1996) conducted a two-year longitudinal study of the relationship among ethnicity, community context, and styles of family decision making and adolescent adjustment among European American, Hispanic American, African American, and Asian American high school students. Three types of family decision making were studied:

unilateral teen (decisions made by the teenager alone), unilateral parent (decisions made by the parent alone), and joint parent-teen (decisions made jointly be parent and teenager).

Stage 6—a level that few individuals exhibit—describes a per-son who has developed an independent moral code based on universal ethical principles

which may justify violating established laws to honor these principles.