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Comment by comrade_ogilvy | Hacker News Reader

Let's keep some things in mind.

Adolescence is the onset of adulthood before the capacity to function as a real adult in the real world is reached. One of the things that adolescents search for is some form of personal validation besides their parents and immediate family. It is probably close enough to true that we are biologically driven to look for this outside acceptance.

Unfortunately our society favors heavily segregating children based on age. That results in confused & clueless teens begging for acceptance from equally clueless people from the same wing of the same asylum.

Once in the real world a functional adult who can hold down a job finds there are a million ways to find personal validation. Teens do not have that opportunity; they (often) imagine that the opinion of other teenagers is the only path to validation.

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The whole adolescence thing is also quite a ridiculous social construct (it didn't exist in the 19th century).

Young people (13-21 year olds) should be seen as adults in training.

Instead they are given the role of adolescents, a role that they gladly take on. When you call someone an adolescent you set a very, very low bar. An adolescent doesn't want to grow, its pleasures are vain, its world secluded. The adolescent doesn't become an adult, since it is already "there" (the place that pop-culture glamorizes). Adolescence is thus seem as an end in itself.

Now if we lived in world where people didn't get old, and bills didn't need to be paid, we could all be adolescents forever and maybe there would not be any problem (though I would object on aesthetic grounds).

But the world being what it is, letting a young person live its youth as an "adolescent" and then forcing it to become an adult is a cruel thing. (And lets not forget all the kids for whom "adolescence" is far from pleasurable.)

"Adolescence is the onset of adulthood before the capacity to function as a real adult in the real world is reached."

In the past, adolescence was the onset of adulthood, period. In many parts of the world that's probably still true. It's our modern society that keeps young adults trapped in childhood until they're 18-21+.

That aside, I think it's the parent's responsibility to make sure their kids develop the capacity to function as adults by the time they have to start dealing with this stuff. Unfortunately that often doesn't happen, which leads to the problems you describe.

Maybe what we need to be doing is teaching the parents how to teach their children to be adults, through a medium that reaches both the parents and the children. We need "How to be an Adult" video games on mobile phones, perhaps.

This is a humorous book that contains some actually useful information for the young male adolescent trying to make the shaky steps

http://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Man-John-Birmingham/dp/18759892...

It's written tongue in cheek but beneath the humor lies some great messages : you're all grown up now, start looking after things.

Here in Germany I saw people up to 26 years old being referred to as adolescents. That's the typical age when you're done with the university.

I'd never heard of the age segregation explanation, it's very interesting since it implies this degree of behavior isn't inevitable. Are there any references for this claim?

This very long NY Magazine piece meditates on that topic, "Why You Never Truly Leave High School": http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/

I can't remember if the author states any scholarly work to support the idea, but she talks about it at length. One thing that I think is well established is that kids mostly being around other kids all day is a relatively modern phenomenon. It's a long piece, but it resonated with me.

I went searching for a great article I read on this lately but couldn't find it: the gist is that until schools become de rigueur, adolescents never spent time together as a group as they would be at work/apprenticeships whathaveyou with adult 'supervision'. It's a new phenomenon that leaves delicate minds in a Lord of the Flies situation. The study I read showed that even the 'cool' kids thought they weren't cool and the various coping mechanisms have been fodder for hollywood movies and novels since the last decades.

I found this http://www.faqs.org/childhood/So-Th/Teenagers.html that claims that schooling past the age of 14 went from rare to normal between 1901 and 1940.

And then of course there is further segregation based on academic ability, which may be even worse than age segregation.

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