I was excited to see this piece titled “Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today”, not so much because it was new information for me, but because it was good to see this wake up call to parents and our public education establishment getting aired in the mainstream media (Newsweek magazine in this case). The article reviews a book, Escaping the Endless Adolescence, written by Dr. Claudia Worrell Allen and her partner Dr. Joe Allen, highlighting their research on human development particularly during the teenage years…
Allen has concluded that our urge to protect teenagers from real life – because we don’t think they’re ready yet – has tragically backfired. By insulating them from adult-like work, adult social relationships, and adult consequences, we have only delayed their development. We have made it harder for them to grow up. Maybe even made it impossible to grow up on time.
Their conclusion is consistent with my own experience interacting with or hearing about a fairly large circle of older youth and young adults. Those among the larger group who have spent 13 or even 17 straight years in school tend to have an obvious lack of real-world experience and the maturity and sophistication that goes with that experience.
What the Allens’ have found in their work is that for many of these young people school has generally been a long ordeal of practicing for real life in an artificial institutional environment, an experience that may have given them degrees and other credentials and a broad skill set, but may also have hindered or even stunted their growth in other ways including maturity.
If you spend any time with the parents of teenagers or the adults who work with teenagers (particularly in schools) you are exposed to the conventional wisdom that teens have limited capabilities due to their “raging hormones” or their incomplete brain development. These factors explain their erratic at times irresponsible or at times listless behavior. Says Allen…
Most parents will tell you that this idea of the immature teen brain is one of the few notions that truly provides them comfort. They feel like it gets them off the hook – that it’s biological, not a fault of parenting.
The Allens acknowledge that these biological developmental factors exist and may affect behavior, but their research shows that environmental factors appear to be more significant…
Without real consequences and real rewards, teens never learn to distinguish between good risks they should take and bad risks they shouldn’t. “We park kids on the sidelines, thinking their brains will develop if we just wait, let time pass, as if all they need is more prep courses, lessons, and enrichment courses. They need real stress and challenges.”
Our unexamined conventional assumptions about what constitutes an appropriate developmental environment for teens may be doing a great disservice to millions of them.
The “sidelines” where most kids get “parked” are their schools, where there is generally a one-size-fits-all approach to education, and quoting Allen…
There’s no recognition, in the structure of school, that these are very different people with different capabilities… We place kids in schools together with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other kids typically from similar economic and cultural backgrounds. We group them all within a year or so of one another in age… We ask them all to take almost the exact same courses and do the exact same work and be graded relative to one another. We give them only a handful of ways in which they can meaningfully demonstrate their competencies. And then we’re surprised they have some difficulty establishing a sense of their own individuality.
Article author Po Bronson’s take…
Strapped to desks for 13+ years, school becomes both incredibly monotonous, artificial, and cookie-cutter…
Bronson makes the point that if we were forced as adults to into such a regimen of endless practice in an artificial environment…
Even if we enjoyed the activity of our job, intrinsically, it would rapidly lose depth and relevance. It’d lose purpose. We’d become bored, lethargic, and disengaged… In other words, we’d turn into teenagers.
Supposed intrinsic teen behavior may well be instead a reaction to an inappropriate environment, one that lacks sufficient developmental oxygen. Teens may be acting out and indulging in excessive risk-taking because there is so little real or thrilling in their day to day experience. This is an important perspective for all parents and other adults that work with teens to think twice about.
Beyond that, the Allens’ work gives support to those of us who are involved in or otherwise support alternative approaches to education as part of trying to provide a “portfolio” of more learner-directed education options to our youth and their families. This is particularly true for parents like my partner Sally and I, who let our kids opt out of formal education altogether in their teen years. We went instead with our kids’ natural inclination towards completely self-directed learning in a real-life context and let them unschool instead of go to high school. In their case, that self-direction has involved not going to college either (though many other homeschooled and even unschooled kids do choose to go to college and generally do very well).
To let our kids opt out of high school was pretty freaky for us as parents. It felt at best like a calculated risk at the time we made those decisions (particularly for our daughter, who though mostly bored in her public school environment could perform well at least in terms of grades). In each of their cases, after pulling them out of school, it took a couple of years before we saw the upside in terms of their growing maturity level and sense that they were developing the agency to live their own lives and direct their own development. Certainly having access to the Internet, thoughtful adults and a big community of peers through our Unitarian-Universalist denomination all contributed significantly to giving them an environment where they could take on various projects and have other real-life experiences with real consequences, both positive and negative. (For details on some of those projects, see my pieces TBD).
The Allens saw similar experiences tracking the teens who were free to do what they wanted instead of the programmed activities, in school and after that adults would typically arrange for them…
They found a way to do something meaningful in real life, interacting with adults, outside the realm of the high school artificial bubble, and outside the hovering control of their parents. For some, it was volunteering at organizations that really needed their help – where they felt they were making a real contribution. For others it was tutoring younger kids. For others, exploring a passion without regard to its value to their college application. Or it could be a job (not a McJob) where they interacted with adults. A little went a long way.
Hopefully by reading about the Allens’ work in Newsweek, thousands of other parents who are considering these unorthodox alternatives to traditional “schooling”, will have more information and support for taking the plunge outside the conventional educational “box”. (Recent estimates I have seen say that perhaps two percent of US kids are now homeschooling and the percentage continues to grow.) Others whose kids are already focused on more informal learning in the real world should find support in this as well.