Adolescence and the next generation

2012

Adolescence is a life phase in which the opportunities for health are great and future patterns of adult health are established. Health in adolescence is the result of interactions between prenatal and early childhood development and the specific biological and social-role changes that accompany puberty, shaped by social determinants and risk and protective factors that affect the uptake of health-related behaviours.

Nature, 2018

This review summarizes the case for investing in adolescence as a period of rapid growth, learning, adaptation, and formational neurobiological development. Adolescence is a dynamic maturational period during which young lives can pivot rapidly-in both negative and positive directions. Scientific progress in understanding adolescent development provides actionable insights into windows of opportunity during which policies can have a positive impact on developmental trajectories relating to health, education, and social and economic success. Given current global changes and challenges that affect adolescents, there is a compelling need to leverage these advances in developmental science to inform strategic investments in adolescent health.

GHMJ (Global Health Management Journal)

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1996

2014

Educational Theory, 1996

12. Dorothy Smith emphasizes that concepts are expressions of social relations, and concepts such as adolescence carry "a universe for exploration that is "present' in them but not explicated"; Dorothy Smith,

Adolescent is a very crucial time for one self growth and development.

In 1960 Philippe ARIES 1 wrote that, if youth was the favourite age during the 18th century, and childhood during the 19th, then the 20th century was the age of adolescence . Nobody doubts any longer that adolescence is a socially and culturally determined phenomenon. Every epoch, society and class, views adolescence differently. These differing views, have a modifying effect on the course of adolescence, to an extent that we would not have believed a few short years ago. If the transformations which are inherent in the process of adolescence, involve much psychic activity, the forms these transformations take, and their failures are particularly dependent on the environment existing in the associated society 2 . Adolescence as a moment of psychic transformations, usually radical and spectacular, only approximately associates with the physiological transformations of puberty. Although it's birth was recent, it is valid to wonder in what historical circumstances this phenomenon of the omnipresent "Teenager" arose. Antiquity, at the climax of Greek-Latin civilisation, certainly had some teenagers similar to ours. It's not fortuitous that the cult of Adonis coincided with the Golden Century of Greece. It was then equally a fast changing society, inventing democracy and individualism, which put great value and hope on the progress of its youth. The adolescens, expanding and growing, was in those days, to paraphrase FREUD, the "adultus" father, the one who had stopped growing up. However, this teenager has disappeared from the scale of ages for centuries. We will see further that the archaic or traditional cultures, like formerly the lower social classes in our society, have always reduced this age to its simplest expression.

The Lancet, 2012