Adolescence

Its Social Psychology

C.M. Fleming

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134684847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1948.
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CHAPTER I
OF ADOLESCENTS AND OTHERS

A compartment full of people in a suburban train. My nearest neighbour reads David Copperfield with absorbed attentiveness. More passengers enter. He gives up his seat. He sways with the movement of the train, and his face comes into view. He is young. He continues to read with firm concentration. He is as tall as many men but not a man. He is obviously not the contemporary of the adults near him. In what does the difference consist?

A group of nurses in a hospital. One face and figure stands out among the others. In height, in dress, in performance, she conforms to the Institution’s pattern; but her uniform does not conceal her age. The others are mature women. She is still a girl.

A half-empty bus. Two at the far end very elegantly attired. High heels, coquettish hats, plucked eyebrows, lipstick, handbags. Highly decorative. Very vivacious. Then, on a closer view, one is little more than a child. The other an old woman.

Two cricket pitches in a park. Two games being played with comparable concentration. Figures are of similar height. One group at a glance can, however, be described as consisting of boys and the other as undoubtedly composed of men.

A class of boys and girls—of ages between thirteen and fourteen. Schooling has been almost identical. Attitude, gesture and performance are quite observably divergent. Alec in the corner has still the body of a child. Robert in the front is almost a man in height. Jean has the fragility of a little girl. Beth is a healthy tomboy. Alice has a matronly maturity of manner and the physique of a well-grown woman. Yet all have in common the attribute of youth. All belong to the group that is commonly described as adolescent. Some among them are scarcely distinguishable from children. Others would appear to be fully adult were it not for the subtle bloom of their youthfulness.

Adolescents cannot be said to form a homogeneous group. It is, however, possible to differentiate between adolescents and adults and also to distinguish adolescents from children. What, then, are the characteristics of the adolescent? Allowing for the infinite variety of social relationships and the wide range of human reactions, what observations can reasonably be made on those to whom that descriptive term can justly be applied?

In the first place, it may be noted that the word “adolescent” is commonly used with more than one connotation. In its simplest sense, it is applied to those within the age-group which is developing from childhood to adult status. The term as so used is somewhat elastic but it refers roughly to young people of chronological ages between, say, twelve and twenty, or, more accurately, to those who are physiologically old enough to have experienced puberty but not yet sufficiently mature to have developed the physical stability of adult life.

The word, however, is also employed to describe personal characteristics often found among such physiological adolescents— wherever those attributes may be found. It is possible, therefore, to speak of an elderly woman as being adolescent in her attitude to life or of a middle-aged man as retaining the social immaturity of his adolescence. The word is not a mere equivalent of puberal. Puberty among quite normal children has been reported to occur at all ages between eight or nine and eighteen or nineteen; and both precocious and delayed puberty are more common than is generally believed. The word adolescent carries with it social as well as physiological implications. It refers not merely to the years of physiological maturing but to the period of social and personal development which is commonly (though not always) contemporaneous with that time of physical change.

In the second place it may be observed that, as these examples suggest, adolescence may be studied from many aspects. It may be described from the point of view of physique, of intellect or of personal development; but, since human beings live in communities, no one of these is profitably considered except in relation to the groupings in which adolescents are found—the home, the school, the factory, the club, the college or the street. Of these, the first and probably the most formative is the home. Adolescents, then, may be considered in their relationship to those others who, with them, form a home.

PART I
THE ADOLESCENT AT HOME

CHAPTER II
BODILY CHANGES

Adolescents at home, probably more frequently than anywhere else, commonly fail to win recognition of their entry upon this stage of growth. Tom is so obviously the same person who not long ago was a toddler and Rosemary seems still a nimble child to the parents and relatives who see her every day. It is therefore difficult for parents to realise that Tom is rapidly approximating to adult height and strength and that Rosemary is a fully mature woman who is physically, if not socially, ready for adult responsibilities.

The realisation of a change of some kind very often comes first to the adolescents themselves. It may happen in various ways. There are certain alterations in appearance to which attention may be drawn by the casual comments of their contemporaries or their seniors. There are changes of shape or function which are at first apparent to themselves alone. There are modifications of wishes and ambitions of which also they only may be aware. There are variations in interests and changes in attitudes which may puzzle or alarm the adolescents or their friends.

Each of these is sufficiently important to warrant further discussion; but each is significant only in its relationship to the past history of the adolescents, to their present attitudes and wishes and to their expectations for the future. Each in turn also derives its effect from the nature and the attitude of the groups of which the adolescents find themselves members. In some circles, development towards maturity may be linked with more or less acute anxiety. In others, there may be an absence of fear or distress which permits the changes to take place with no accompanying mental disturbance or emotional strain.

For this reason the reactions both of adolescents and of adults to the manifestations of growth can be observed to vary from family to family, from district to district and from country to country as well as from one generation to another.

What, then, are these phenomena of growth? Changes in physical development may profitably be considered at this point,¹ since it is first of all in the home that adolescents commonly notice such modifications.

Growth in itself is not a new experience to children. It has been one of the accompaniments of living from their earliest days. Puberty is, however, preceded by a definite acceleration of rate, and this is accompanied by changes in structure which are greater than anything of which adolescents have any recollection. The developmental changes of comparable extent which occurred during intra-uterine life or in the first months after birth have not only been forgotten but their social significance was also very different from that of the alterations which startle them as they change from relatively small children to adults in bodily proportions, facial appearance and physical power.

Perhaps the most surprising of their experiences is that they become aware of the fact that they are not only changing rapidly in certain scarcely specified directions, but that they are now recognisably different from their nearest associates. Such individual differences were undoubtedly also observable in childhood, but their range was smaller and their social importance was less. Adolescents are often exposed more continuously than little children to social pressure from parents and friends who wish them to excel; and in response to this they begin to pay more attention to the bewildering variety of human appearance which is exemplified by themselves and their contemporaries.

Differences in bodily proportions and physique have attracted the interest of investigators for many centuries, and many attempts have been made to simplify their description by suitable classifications. Hippocrates, four hundred years before Christ, proposed a division of human beings into those with a habitus apoplecticus (short and thick) and those with a habitus phthisicus (long and thin); and an Aristotelian delight in such analyses has since appeared in modern guise in distinctions² based upon dominant functions (cerebral, digestive, respiratory and muscular), upon habitual diet (herbivorous or carnivorous), or upon descriptions of relative length and breadth such as linear and lateral,³ leptosome or asthenic (slender), pyknic (broad) and athletic (muscular).⁴ More recent studies accompanied by increasingly accurate measurements with specially constructed instruments have, however, cast doubt upon the existence of a small number of clearly defined and discrete types. Sheldon, for example,⁵ describes three main physical patterns: endomorphic (thick-set, with a tendency to lay on fat), mesomorphic (muscular, with broad shoulders and hips) and ectomorphic (thin with light bones and poorly developed muscles); but he recognises that the variations in relative proportions are so many that a subsidiary classification into seventy-six combinations of seven differing degrees of these primary bodily components is barely sufficient to account for all the varieties of bodily build observable in the adult population.

No two bodies are exactly alike, and the ways in which two physiques may differ are endless. Even a mesh of seventy-six holes is admittedly too coarse to provide adequate means of describing the measurable variations in human structure. The attempt to classify human beings into two or three physical types has, therefore, aptly been said to be comparable to trying to build a language with three adjectives. Careful anthropometric measurements provide no support for a belief in the existence of a small number of discrete kinds of people except in so far as these are regarded as the extremes of a continuous distribution of physiques. As in other descriptive systems, the path of progress has been from the notion of two-fold and three-fold classifications to the concept of variations along differing dimensional axes.

The existence of such varying assortments of physical dimensions renders very complicated any attempt at description of the incidence of changes which occur during adolescence. There is a wide range of variations at each age for each bodily dimension which has been studied, as well as great diversity in the combination of all physical characteristics. Some are fat. Some are thin. Some are muscular. Some are fragile. Some have sturdy bodies and ineffective hands or feet. Some are short in the legs. Some are long in the trunk. Some are deep chested. Some are wide in the waist. These diversities have been included in the deliberate calculation of indices devised to express the ratio of hip width to height, the relationship between chest circumference or shoulder width and total stature, or the relative proportions of the length of the head and the trunk as compared with that of the legs. The full description of an individual is now known to require the use of several such indices. It needs also to be supplemented by indications as to the texture, pigmentation and hairiness of the skin, the relative harmony of bodily development and the degree of approximation to the physical characteristics of the opposite sex.⁶ The importance of such findings for the student of adolescence lies less in the exact information they give than in their emphasis upon the infinite variety of types of bodily appearance and in their reminder of the need to prepare adolescents for the fact that their rate of development, and the resulting relationships of their height to their width or their weight, are unlikely to be quite like those of any other young person whom they know. Adolescents differ in the age at which their growth spurt occurs and in the rate at which they develop just as much as grown-up people differ in size, shape and physical proportions. The parent who can casually draw attention to this variety, and who is convinced of its relative unimportance for the future happiness of his child, will do much to calm the fears of an adolescent who imagines himself to be as remarkably unattractive and different from his fellows as the ugly duckling was in the fairy tale.

It is important to note that early reports on growth and development were for the most part based either on anecdotal illustrations of personal impressions (in the style since popularised by Piaget) or on averages obtained from cross-sectional studies—measurements in these being taken from different boys and girls at different ages. These averages were often reported without any indication as to the variations which they obscured* and an illusory impression of regularity of growth was conveyed by the graphs which portrayed the findings of such measurements of different groups. When, for example, graphs were constructed which showed the average heights of groups of boys and girls at different ages from one year to twenty, there was a temptation to forget that an average represents merely the central tendency of a set of findings and that there are necessarily many normal girls and boys whose actual dimensions differ very considerably from those of the average of their group. Observation of the graphs showed marked acceleration at certain ages; and statements were made which implied an expectation of the uniform appearance of increased growth at these periods—about the age of ten and a half for girls and twelve and a half for boys. There was a tendency to label as abnormal the development of those boys and girls in whom it failed to appear and also a tendency to exaggerate the extent of the differences between members of the groups of girls and members of the groups of boys. Both interpretations have had important social and educational sequels; and conclusions based upon them still find an echo in current discussions of adolescence. They have to be read with extreme caution and interpreted with a knowledge of their definite limitations.

There are, however, certain quite useful generalisations which can be drawn from these earlier reports. The years of adolescence are characterised by a period of more rapid physical growth than has appeared in the latter years of childhood; and this is followed by a gradual slowing down of the rate of development. Older reports tended, by their method of presentation, to over-emphasise the sameness of this sequence. If, however, a calculation is made of the extent of variation from the mean of these measurements at each age, it is more easy to realise both the degree of overlapping in actual dimensions from one year to another and the wide differences at each age between the most fully developed child and the least mature. The recognition of this overlapping and these differences is probably the most important finding of the last fifty years.

A similar anticipation of regularity was encouraged by the analysis sometimes made of the same type of evidence in terms of average yearly increments in growth. When this was done it was shown, in the case of height, for example, that the average height (length) of boys is somewhat greater than that of girls at birth, that it increases at approximately the same rate to about the age of eight, that the rate for girls then begins to exceed that of boys and that this relatively larger increase maintains itself for approximately five yearly measurements. About the age of ten, therefore, the average height of girls equals that of boys. From the ages of eleven to fourteen their yearly increment is greater than that of boys, but from ages thirteen to nineteen their annual increment decreases steadily to such an extent that by the age of fifteen the boys on the average have again become somewhat taller.

An even more spectacular difference in the relative increment of growth is reported in the girls’ increase in weight about the age of eleven and the boys’ spurt about the age of fourteen. Such curves and the histograms which represen...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FOREWORD
• CHAPTER I OF ADOLESCENTS AND OTHERS
• PART I THE ADOLESCENT AT HOME
• PART II THE ADOLESCENT AT SCHOOL
• PART III ON THE THRESHOLD OF MATURITY
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX SOME STATISTICAL TERMS