Adolescence is traditionally seen as a time of turmoil and stress- is this inevitable?

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Adolescence is traditionally seen as a time of turmoil and stress- is this inevitable?

Adolescence marks the transition between childhood and adulthood and involves many physical and psychological changes that may cause stress and turmoil. Hendry and Kloep ('99) proposed that adolescence is a time for several shifts to take place, shifts may be normative maturational, normative society-dependent or non normative such as parental divorce, family bereavement or illness. It may be the case that non-normative shifts make the transition particularly difficult to cope with and are more likely to result in stress and turmoil.

In Western society adolescence serves as a moratorium, it delays adulthood to free the adolescent from responsibility to help the transition, whereas in some societies the transition occurs in an initiation ceremony. Hall (1904) proposed that each person's psychological development recapitulates both the biological and cultural evolution of human species and that this mirrors the volatile history of humans over the last two thousand years. This is the 'storm and stress' theory and would suggest that adolescence is inevitably a time of turmoil and stress. There is some evidence to suggest that adolescents have very intense and volatile emotions and other indicators of