Research by Caspi et al (’93) suggests that whether adolescence is stressful or not may depend on when puberty occurs. The teenage years are necessary for the child to physically develop into an adult and the changes associated with puberty such as a growth spurt, extra body hair, menarche and growth of breasts in girls, wet dreams and the voice breaking in boys are maturational normative shifts. Adolescents may become very critical of their changing self as they are confronted by cultural standards of beauty in evaluating their own body image, this may lead to dieting and non-normative behaviours such as eating disorders (Davies and Furnham ’86). The time at which changes occur may be important in determining how the adolescent feels about the transition. Caspi studied children in Dunedin in New Zealand, who were studied every 2 years between the ages of 3 and 15. It was found that girls who mature early are at risk of early delinquency (breaking windows, getting drunk, prank phone calls and stealing at school), tend to associate with people who carry out these behaviours and show more delinquent behaviours in later adolescence such as shoplifting, smoking marijuana, car theft or using weapons. This study showed that only those in mixed sex schools were at risk. Results cannot be generalised because the sample was only taken from a small area. In boys off time puberty was linked to increased alcohol consumption.
Girls may find the transition of adolescence more stressful because during puberty they will gain body fat and move further away from their cultural ideal. Girls also have to deal with menstruation which is negatively associated with blood and discomfort. This may explain why it is early maturing girls that are most at risk of delinquency. Males tend to move closer to their ideal during puberty by gaining muscle. This cultural ideal hypothesis (Simmons and Blyth ’87) would suggest that inner turmoil and stress are not inevitable and that this depends on when physical maturation occurs, if puberty is early the individual will have spent too little time on ego development and this may lead to turmoil. Wichstrom (’98) argued that it might not be true that girls move away from the Western ideal as long as they do not put on too much weight. The cultural ideal hypothesis is also sensitive to changes in time and context. For example, in Norway there is less emphasis on male stature so late maturing boys may feel less stressed, and in America girls are more embarrassed about sex and menstruation than in Norway.
The teenage years are a time where the individual has the challenge of establishing their personal identity and finding their place in adult society. Erikson (’63) suggested that people go through genetically determined psychosocial stages, each stage is a struggle between two conflicting outcomes, one is adaptive and one is maladaptive. If an identity crisis is experienced this may cause the adolescent to experience turmoil and role confusion. The adolescent may fear commitment and intimacy because they do not want to lose their identity, may experience an inability to retain sense of time or channel themselves into work or study, may lack concentration or engage in abnormal or delinquent behaviours to try and resolve the crisis and this will create a negative identity. Erikson sees identity as a single goal, which the adolescent either achieves or fails to achieve, and he emphasises the importance of crisis. However, it is more likely that adolescence involves several transitions and goals and many people go through adolescence without appearing to experience crisis and do not become delinquent. Identity is also likely to be more complex than Erikson suggests. The suggestion that identity achievement is final is questionable- in our rapidly changing society there are increasing challenges to a stable identity and a person’s identity may change. It is also questionable that failure to achieve identity leads to delinquency and sexual confusion, as there is very little support for this from research. Erikson also mainly used case studies to base his theories on so his sample was not very representative.
Marcia (’80) developed Erikson’s theory of how identity is formed during adolescence and suggested that the adolescent must experience a high crisis and show high commitment before forming an identity. This means that stress is inevitable for all normal adolescents but this stress is adaptive because it will eventually lead to an identity where the person has firm goals and ideals. If the individual does not experience crisis and shows low commitment this leads to diffusion where the adolescent has not started thinking seriously about major life issues. This may mean that the adolescent does not have to experience stress and turmoil by making up there opinions but remaining in this stage may result in apathy and depression, so without crisis the adolescent will not develop into a healthy adult. An identity crisis is experienced when there is high crisis and low commitment, different lifestyles and identities are experimented with but no firm commitments are made, an adolescent in this situation is likely to feel very stressed because they have no clear identity. To avoid stress the adolescent may make a commitment without seriously considering alternatives or questioning identities imposed by parents or society, this is known as foreclosure. If someone experiences foreclosure then Marcia suggests they will not fulfil their potential as an individual so some degree of crisis would be beneficial to the adolescent in the long term.
This theory is supported by Coleman and Hendry (’90) who found that identity achievers had higher self-esteem and fewer problems in adolescence. However, it has been criticised for emphasising crisis as the root to identity when evidence shows that only a minority of adolescents experience great stress and turmoil and that the transition into adulthood is generally not that bad. Marcia’s picture of identity statuses may be oversimplified , Archer (’82) found that at any one time only 5% of adolescents have the same identity status in their occupational choice and their political and religious beliefs. Marcia obtained evidence from a very untypical generation, adolescents in the 1960’s were generally not very conformist. It may be that the transition of adolescence caused a different amount of stress in teenagers from that generation than in teenagers these days.
Another purpose of being a teenager is to allow time for role change and new relationships to form. During adolescence the child-parent relationship must change into a young adult-parent relationship, with the adolescent steadily gaining more freedom. Adolescents strive for independence and autonomy and this may cause teenagers to withdraw into their peer groups away from adult control. This change in relationships may make adolescence a more stressful time than childhood. Both peer groups and parents have some role to play in helping teenagers through his time, peer groups are important for leisure and discussing clothes and music whereas parents are important for discussing careers or the future. Different generations may have different experiences, as shown in a study by Rossi (’90) who looked at child- parent relationships in the ‘40s to ‘50s and the ‘60s to ‘70s, both groups had the worst relationships with their parents at 16 but there was a lower ebb in the later generation. This suggests that adolescence may not be such a time of stress and turmoil as it used to be because relationships with parents are now better. Hendry et al (’93) found that adolescents were more likely to discuss problems about friends and doubts about their abilities to their mother. It may be that adolescents without a mother figure in their lives are more prone to a stressful transition because most teenagers find it harder to discuss problems with their fathers.
The difficulties experienced by adolescents in Western cultures may not be so likely in cultures where the beginning of adulthood is marked by a ceremony. Initiation ceremonies are often dramatic and painful for boys so that they can prove their manhood, this is very different to the way childhood and adulthood are separated by adolescence in our culture. In our culture it is unclear exactly when childhood ends and adulthood starts because there are differences between when someone id legally an adult and when they are treated as one. Mead described adolescence in the 1920’s in Samoa as ‘the age of maximum ease’ with no emotional turmoil, so adolescence may not cause stress and turmoil in some cultures. However, Freeman (’83, ’96) questioned these findings because Mead’s understanding of the local language was poor and she may have been conned by teenage girls she interviewed. In some cultures there is no recognition of adolescence and young people are economically self sufficient by mid childhood and can marry and reproduce as soon as sexual maturity is reached. These children do not seem to have the same identity crisis as those in Western cultures because it is clear what is expected from them from an early age and they are treated as adults in the teenage years.
In conclusion, the teenage years are necessary to allow a transition into adulthood, to develop identity and to go through puberty to become physically mature. These years are likely to cause some degree of stress due to the number of changes people must experience but most evidence would suggest that the claim that adolescence always causes stress and turmoil is greatly exaggerated and that in most cases adolescence is a relatively smooth transition. The extent to which a teenager feels stress or turmoil is largely dependent on individual, time and cultural differences. Stress and turmoil are more likely if the individual experiences non-normative shifts, if they grow up in a culture where the beginning of adulthood is unclear, if puberty occurs early or late or if they experience an identity crisis. It may also be the case that adolescents now experience a different amount of stress than in previous generations because teenagers tend to have more freedom to explore new identities than they used to.