I’m a little over a decade into my career working with 6th-12th graders. In those years, I’ve come across the following idea in a variety of places, whether from youth ministry professionals, education advocates, or random think pieces about “this generation.”
The statement will be something like this: adolescence as a life stage is a recent development. Blame might be placed on the invention of the public high school and subsequent “teen culture”, or they might suggest that the word ‘adolescent’ didn’t exist until G. Stanley Hall’s early 20th century book Adolescence, but there seems to be a lot of hand wringing about the fact that as a society we allow children to remain in an immature state called ‘adolescence’, a recent innovation to human society, instead of allowing them to function as full adults at puberty, like our ancestors did.
The person saying this may not be lying, because they may not know they are wrong, but they are most definitely wrong. Really really wrong. Exceptionally wrong and misguided.
You can read all about it yourself in ‘In Search of Adolescence’ by Crystal Kirgiss. She offers a tidy summary of her assertion like this:
If someone says “adolescence is new” and means by that “the practice of sequestering American teenagers in high school for four years is new,” then that person is correct. But if someone says “adolescence is new” and by that means “the stage of life following childhood when a person has developed sexually but is neither viewed nor functions as a full adult in society is new,” then that person is wrong.
What is sad is that while her research is incredibly thorough, just a small portion of if would have been enough to rebut the claim of adolescence as novelty. The book is excellent beyond just telling us that teenagers have always been teenagers; it gives good insight into this long existing life stage between childhood and adulthood throughout time, and what it might tell us about helping adolescents become who they are going to be.
But, in case you don’t believe me, here are just a few of the historical sources she found to dispel that pesky notion that our teenagers are experiencing a recent development in human….development…..
From The Vanity of Childhood and Youth, Wherein the Depraved Nature of Young People Is Represented and Means for Their Reformation Proposed. Being Some Sermons Preached in Hand-Alley, at the Request of Several Young Men. Young people are subject to fleshly lusts, especially uncleanness.
This concerns persons past childhood, and therefore I direct it to young men. You are not ignorant that your appetites are unruly, and your inclinations too lascivious. In eating, you are prone to gluttony: excessive drinking is too common a fault; there be many drunkards short of twenty years old; and voluptuousness seems the idol whom our striplings worship above the living God. Uncleanness is the raging disease: What immodest dalliance, what flighty thoughts, what obscene speeches, what wanton looks, self-pollution; yea, actual fornication, doth conscience charge some of you with! How few possess their vessels in honour, or arrive at Manhood without a forfeiture of chastity! – Daniel Williams, 1691
From Thomas Adams, The Blacke Devill or the Apostate Together with The Wolfe Worrying the Lambes and The Spiritual Navigator Bound for the Holy Land. (London: Printed by William Jaggard, 1615)
This is the Devil’s dispensation, Youth must be born with, to dance, to dice, to drink, to ruffle, scuffle, wear fleeces of vanity on their heads, and to leave no place without some vicious testimony of their presence, non est vitium adolescenti, is no fault in a man.
From A Sure Guide to Hell— By Beelzebub
We may now suppose thee arrived at the age of fifteen or sixteen— many are the youths who have gone [to the university] with good purposes of improving themselves in useful knowledge and establishing themselves in virtuous habits; but so far have they been from effecting the design that I have, by the many agents who do my business there, seduced them to the practice of almost every vice; such as drunkenness, whoredom, profaneness, swearing, [etc.] … ~ Benjamin Bourne writing as Belial (1775, p. 17)
And I have to include my own favorite line, from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, Act 3, Scene III
I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting…”
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