Adolescence and Early Adulthood

Abstract

So begins Sylvia Plath’s iconic semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, about the struggle to become an adult. All definitions of this stage in human development stress the difficulties of the transition from childhood to adulthood, yet, as with notions of childhood itself as a distinctly different stage with distinctly different patterns of thinking and emotional reactions, the concept of adolescence is a fairly recent invention. In the eighteenth century children were dressed as, and expected to behave as, young adults. This was a waiting period for full adulthood that offered a few opportunities for practising their future roles. Young people were expected to assume these as quickly as possible — the earlier the more promising. The demands of work and raw economic survival also required this for most, and given the prevailing mortality statistics, particularly among the poor (see Sheldon & Macdonald, 2009: ch. 1), there was no time to dawdle. The more general point holds today:

Traditionally psychologists have focused their attention on the developing individual as distinct from the social–economic–health context in which the child grows up. The assumption has been that these environments were relatively normal, and similar enough for those people being studied that they could be ignored, or discounted as significant contributors to variations in psychological development. (Zimbardo & Gerrig, 2010: 184)

I was supposed to be having the time of my life…

—Sylvia Plath (1964: 1)