Problems of Youth

Transition to Adulthood in a Changing World

Muzafer Sherif

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138530799
• eBook ISBN: 9781351496568
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book describes and analyzes, from an interdisciplinary point of view, those problems of youth that are currently objects of remedial action on both community and national levels. It explores the many causes of adolescent happiness and discontent, behavior and misbehavior, aspirations and aversions in the rapidly changing patterns of contemporary class, institutional, and cultural settings. It provides practical information for all professionals concerned with adolescent problems and affords small comfort to any who hopes for quick results.Problems of Youth first considers problems traditionally considered in youth research, discussing adolescent attitudes and goals within a broadly applicable theory of adolescent development. The second part concentrates on youth problems in terms of their dynamics in social and cultural settings undergoing change at different rates. The third part presents studies of youth in trouble, offering guidelines for new theoretical and empirical approaches and underscoring the need, to study individual youth problems within their socio-cultural and class frameworks. The final part attempts through research and measurement the major sources of influences affecting youth.Reflecting the position that there is a constant danger of viewing adolescence exclusively through the eyes of one's own specialty, the contributors to this volume take a cross-disciplinary approach to the subject, drawing on resources of other fields to expand the perspective of their particular area of specialization. In doing so, they offer all students of sociology, social psychology, and related disciplines a new, unified approach to the timely paradox of youth in transition with itself and with a world that is itself in transition.

PART I

THE INDIVIDUAL ADOLESCENT, YOUTH SUBCULTURES AND FAMILY

ONE

ADOLESCENT ATTITUDES AND GOALS

John E. Horrocks

This chapter will discuss adolescent attitudes and goals and consider some of the major motivations characteristic of the adolescent period, particularly as they are displayed in a social context.

In considering the attitudes and goals of adolescence it is necessary to remember that the adolescent is first a human, and only secondarily a member of a specific category of humans. Thus, he is not unique to the extent that much of his psychology separates him from other humans. The essential bases of his motivations, the structural aspects of his personality, the mechanics of his attitude formation, the processes by which he learns do not differentiate him from other humans. Yet there are differences, so particular and so dynamic that we are justified in saying that there are behaviors and interpretations specific to adolescence, and that these must be included in the consideration of an adolescent operating either in isolation or in concert with his peers.

Development of the Self-Concept

The adolescent is normally a highly reactive person in the process of building and consolidating his impression of the world about him. Equally, since birth he has been in process of building a concept of self— a concept still in formation during the second decade of life, although already structurally complex and beginning to exhibit aspects of its ultimate inflexibility. And here we have one of the basic problem areas of adolescence. As the adolescent confronts the world and as he gains an impression of it, he must relate it to himself, and himself to it, so that it seems, as he construes it, relatively compatible with the self-concept he has been developing since birth. Where he perceives incompatibility the adolescent has the difficult task of explaining this incompatibility to himself, as well as of coping with it in such a manner that his developing self-concept and system of values remain intact or at least self-consistent.

But all of this is not a solitary matter. The adolescent’s environment contains persons as well as objects and concepts, and the impact of others (socialization) is a major force shaping the developing individual. The end product of his personal evolution must, ideally, be a concept of self that is not static but constantly shifting and re-evaluating as it moves toward consolidation in a context in which personal needs and reality must be brought into at least a working relationship, if not into harmonious congruence. However, the adolescent is typically an idealist who seeks a harmonious congruence hardly possible of attainment. In the area of personal relations he finds a proving ground for the kind of person he conceives himself to be. This is the period when the individual child develops strong loyalties and equally strong rejections which he feels are not only just, but immutable. Actually, with the passing of years these loyalties and rejections do, of course, change or find modification, but while they last they are of tremendous significance and act as exceedingly strong motivators.

But the problem of integrating self and environment, as the adolescent must live with it, is far from simple, and there is great need for help and support. Because he is embarking on many new experiences, because he is assuming new values and new attitudes and trying to integrate these with ones previously held, because he is undergoing new and strange sensations and changes, and above all, because he is not sure how to cope with his environment, the adolescent tends to feel insecure in many areas of his daily living. As a result he looks for an anchor to help him find a measure of security and ego defense.

The most available anchor—and most tempting because of its potential for self-assertion—is the peer group. Among those of his own age the adolescent can find others in a situation and a state of mind similar to his own. In such company he can either ignore his problems or even imagine they do not exist. In the peer group, as in no other context in his environment, he can find “belonging,” affiliation, and acceptance as well as status as a nondependent person that he so strongly desires. The peer group has the further advantage of offering the young person the experiences and training for which he is striving. It offers him a stage on which he can play out the role of self relatively unhampered by the inhibitions and child-adult assumptions of the adult world. For this reason it is little wonder that the peer group becomes so important to an adolescent and that exclusion from it or lack of adequate status within it often constitutes a traumatic, or at least a thwarting, experience.

Self-Assertion

To this point I have contended that the prime business of growing up is the development of a self-concept and the relating of that concept to both the outer and the inner environment. I pointed out the potential problem posed to the adolescent as he attempts a harmonious relationship between the realities of his environment and his developing concept of self. In doing this I have implied the adolescent’s need for self-assertion and his quest to find a place where he may assert himself as an independent individual in his own right. In my opinion the drive for self-assertion is a prime motivating force in a child’s development as, indeed, it is in a different way during the years of maturity. The difference is one of control, of perspective, and, in the case of the adult, of freedom from the complication of coming to terms with a developing self. Here we have, of course, the background for the development and consolidation of many of the attitudes an individual acquires.

Perhaps at this time it would be well to pause a moment and examine the matter of self-assertion as a fundamental need. The concept is, of course, not a new one. A perennial question in psychology has to do with the impulsions to behavior. Various lists have been composed, usually with some attempt at categorization, as “innate” versus “acquired,” or “learned” versus “unlearned.” Commonly appearing on such lists is the “power drive,” which from my position I would amend in somewhat less drastic terminology to read “need for self-assertion.” Although I would not, for example, place this need for self-assertion in as central a position in a behavior system as the Adlerian concept of mastery, I would not deny its importance or its motivational role in the development of self concept. In his Conquest of Happiness (1930), Bertrand Russell says, “Speaking more generally, one may say that some kind of power forms the normal and legitimate aim of every person whose natural desires are not atrophied. The kind of power that a man desires depends upon his predominant passion.” Russell lists among his impulsions to power, “power over actions of men,” “power over their thoughts,” “power over their emotions.” He notes that some persons desire to “change the material environment,” others desire “intellectual mastery,” and so on. I would add to these the generalized desire to assert oneself over the environment by construing it in accord with the self-concept that one has built, and even by bringing the environment to serve and nourish that self-concept. The adolescent’s problem is that the process is reciprocal, and the environment is even more likely to change the self-concept than the self-concept is to change the environment. The environment’s change of the self-concept must, of course, be resisted, and when it occurs it must be explained and rationalized if mental health is to be retained. Naturally, for some the self-concept is powerful enough to enable the individual to effect changes in his environment. For others we find a retreat to fantasy and the construction of an artificial environment which does not test reality and does not exist except in the minds of its inventors. To some extent every adolescent lives for a time in such a self-constructed, selfdefensive world. It is an individual matter as to how all-pervasive and how consistent across the modalities of behavior such a construction becomes.

In any event, men’s apparent hope for mastery or power over their environment, or for self-assertion, is a common phenomenon. But it is not very helpful to let it rest at that. The prior question must be asked: “Why do they want this power?” Survival is one reason, prestige another, curiosity a third, and ego-defense a fourth. Looked at in this manner, the power drive may be conceived as a second order rather than as a truly primary impulsion. Power impulsions appear to be a result of environmental necessity and of social or personal pressures. Returning to Russell’s position quoted previously, the impulsion to power can hardly be assumed to be an inevitable universal human attribute common to all cultures and all periods of history. It certainly does, however, appear valid for western culture. This is particularly true when one considers how western culture is ordered and how it grants and withholds its rewards from earliest childhood on. To say that the power drive is necessarily innate is going beyond the data. But this is not to deny either its importance or its fundamental relationship to other motivations. In a sense power is only a technique for manipulating the environment in such a manner that one may achieve the major desires that one’s self-concept and one’s biological necessities have promulgated. The peasant wishes, for example, to dominate nature, his fields, and his animals to the end that he may through these means achieve his wants. The adolescent wishes to operate in and be accepted by a milieu which will reinforce not only his feelings about himself and his importance as a person but which will also permit behavior that will simultaneously enable him to role-play the concept he has of himself and reassure him that his construction of the world is correct. In this sense the power or self-assertion drive is fundamental to other drives since it is the operative or implementing means to their achievement.

I have been speaking of the power drive in individual terms, but there is also the social or “effect-on-others” aspect of the power drive—an aspect that must certainly be taken into account in any consideration of the social psychology of adolescence. Russell speaks of the good and the bad aspects of the power drive and notes on the positive side that it is “... in part the equipment of the kind of men out of whom a good community can be made.” He sees it, if not thwarted, as representing “a correlative form of effort.” He warns, however, that a certain amount of selective resignation must be in the picture for those whose power drives are not attained or for whom they are unattainable. That is, good adjustment is partly composed of resignation, in the sense that one must consider reality in one’s role playing. Unfortunately one hardly expects resignation, even of a constructive or of a selective nature, to come easily for the young. Resignation, or at least reasoned acceptance, is an attribute of maturity, and the adolescent must tilt at his windmills as he attempts to make sense of himself and his world.

The consequences of the frustration so often experienced by the adolescent in self-assertion and self-rationalization are important in understanding adolescent attitudes and behavior. A person frustrated in power satisfaction in one direction is likely to turn in another direction. For example, in adult life we may turn from our occupations and find our satisfactions in our hobbies. Similarly the adolescent may turn from school or from some other constructive effort to delinquency or some other less approved activity. He may turn from the adult to the peer world. Or he may have to embark upon the task of changing his whole structure of attitudes and interpretations of himself and his environment.

Influence of the Family

Much has been said about the relationship of an adolescent with his parents and of the importance of these relationships upon the attitudes and goals he possesses. Any valid consideration of childhood or of adolescence must sooner or later deal with the problem of these relationships— usually in terms of the effect of parental activities and attitudes on a child’s behavior and character formation, as well as the economic and social benefits which parents provide or fail to provide the child. During the first decade of life the home is certainly the center of the child’s, existence, It is the place in which he spends the vast majority of both his waking and his sleeping hours; and it is the place in which he initially learns about other people and how to cope with them as the process of socialization and of self-conceptualization begins in the days immediately following his birth.

The family transmits and interprets the culture to the child, at the same time evaluating it for him. It is here that the child forms his first sense of values, both personal and social; it is here that he encounters security and insecurity, punishments, and rewards; and it is here that he experiences acceptance or rejection. In his family he observes human contact and gains direct knowledge of the methods of control—whether democratic or autocratic or their variations—that we use on each other. When he first encounters the outside world it is from the vantage point of his family circle and in a real sense he views the outside world through his family’s eyes; and if it is only with their consent, it is equally with their protection. As Bossard notes, the family is “the place from which the child goes to participate in the larger social life,” and it is “the place to which he returns after his social experience.” But not only is the home an experience-defining agency, it is also a status-defining agency. As a member of a family a child takes on the caste and class of his parents; their socioeconomic status defines him to others, while from the viewpoint of this status, he in turn defines them. Many of his attitudes, his interests, his values, and his activities are based upon the family socioeconomic position in the community. In effect their position becomes his position. As Hollingshead points out, there is “a functional relationship between the class position of an adolescent’s family and his social behavior in the community.” It is no exaggeration to say that in the first years of life there is nothing in his world that he questions less. To him the family is inevitable and he sees no alternatives.

But time passes. The first decade merges into the second, and with the advent of puberty the world has enlarged to include many other elements, many of them competing with or inconsistent with the family stand. There are new desires for independence, experiences outside the scope of the family’s interest, knowledge, or approval, and a growing need for self-assertion. The developing self has become more complex, more uncertain, more insecure, and is now beginning to face head-on the realities of the non-family-dominated world. Rebel can meet rebel and compare notes, and family opinion is no longer the criterion of right and wrong. Increasingly it becomes apparent that there is a frequent lack of common ground in adolescent-parental relationships. There are many reasons for this lack, such as maturity, interests, responsibilities, role, etc., but there are some that are not so obvious yet are probably just as pertinent. Himmelweit, Halsey and Oppenheim astutely mention one. They write:

The Upward Steps of all American families, taken together, constitute the American standard of living . . . But one serious disadvantage of the Upward Step is that it means that parents and children can not live in the same world. The child starts off on a higher social and economic level than the one his parents inhabited when they were children. Consequently, parents and children do not share a common experience of childhood. To the child, his parents’ childhood seems remote, unfamiliar, and rather meaningless—if indeed he can bring himself to believe that they had one at all. Nor does the gap ever close. If the child grows up into a conscientious, purposeful American who has advanced himself in life, his relationship with his parents in maturity is as necessarily superficial as it was when he was young.¹

In short, the new generation has arrived, and the old slowly and sometimes reluctantly begins to leave the scene. It is not easy for the old generation to recognize that it is old and, in the eyes of the new, already obsolescent. Nor is it easy for the new generation to accept what they regard as outmoded behavior.

The Peer Culture

Thus, the major area around which an adolescent focuses his behavior tends to become that of his interpersonal relations with his peers. The family—important as it is as a defining and limiting agency, and as much as it is the central focus of any child’s existence—nevertheless cannot usually transcend, nor, indeed, in many cases even meet, the achievement of the peer group in shaping values and in providing perceived personal security as an individual.

Research has suggested that within ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Illustrations
• Problems of Youth
• Introduction: Problems of Youth in Transition
• Part I: THE INDIVIDUAL ADOLESCENT, YOUTH SUBCULTURES AND FAMILY
• Part II: ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT SOCIAL SETTINGS
• Part III: YOUTH IN TROUBLE
• Part IV: AGE-MATE REFERENCE SETS WITHIN DIFFERENTIATED NEIGHBORHOODS
• Index