Our Adolescents and How to Treat Them

We often witness disagreements — indeed, we are present at quarrels that break out in the heart of families of every social condition — and we observe a painful barrier dividing the father from his son and the mother from her daughter. If we search out the cause of this inner tension that tears family relations apart, we find that the scarcity of parents' contact with their children, and their failure to understand them, has the first influence in the decline of the level of affection and devotion between the two sides.

Moreover, everyone has his sacred duties and rights — whether the son's rights and duties toward his father, or the reverse — and they call for corresponding duties and rights on the part of the other side. What grieves those who observe the affairs of adolescents in particular is the unbecoming treatment these receive at home or at school...

The adolescent is not a child like other children, subject to the general laws of childhood; nor is he the young man complete in all his inner faculties, which in principle admit of no modification and no development. What, then, is the adolescent, and what are his true characteristics and circumstances?

He is a marvel in the fullest sense of the word — a marvel that conceals in its mysterious folds the secrets of contents rich in surprises of every kind; contents that keep emerging from time to time, only to fold in upon one another anew and return to their source, leaving those who observe them in a perplexity that lasts until the adolescent reaches the age of young manhood, when he comes within a defined compass, subject to new laws, walking a marked-out road that leads him toward the harbor of maturity — where other bonds await him, and indispensable regulations, which resemble the earlier ones only in certain points that do not directly concern our inquiry.

The adolescent who emerges from the third stage (the length of the third childhood varies from country to country, usually ranging between seven and twelve in the East) is, in the eye of the psychologist — or rather in the eye of one who knows his nature intimately, has observed his particular psychology, and has tried to become acquainted with its various needs and its actual condition in most cases — a person distinguished from others in two respects: delicacy of feeling and strength of nerve. The adolescent is fine of sense, quick to be affected and to take offense, to a degree that would scarcely occur to anyone's mind... And what we say of the adolescent boy — how much truer it is of the adolescent girl! (It is well known that girls precede boys in maturity of mind and body.) Here let me recall a personal incident that some may call trivial or naive, though it received from me the serious regard it deserves, in view of its psychological importance — and that is the aspect that embraces our whole subject:

The incident occurred last year at one of the girls' institutes where I was a teacher. I once asked one of the pupils (her age, which has a useful bearing on this inquiry, was close to sixteen) to recite her lesson; and how great was my astonishment when I heard, instead of the required lesson, the sound of copious weeping pouring from her eyes with the flow of Nahr Ibrahim!

Poor thing — that adolescent girl who had not memorized her lesson, and who would offer no form of apology save the heat and bitterness of her violent weeping!...

Here are two other true examples, stranger than the first, though no further beyond the reach of logic than it. I knew a girl of fourteen who came to the verge of suicide by reason of the ill-treatment she continually received from her tyrannical father. Another threw herself from the window of her room for a motive no less grave than the cause of the previous incident — indeed exceeding it in weight — namely, the neighbors' assault upon her honor. It is worth mentioning that the unhappy young girl was in fact chaste and innocent!

Let us imagine, then, to what lengths of excess the agitated souls of adolescents may go in their fits, if what is necessary is not done to calm them and to guide them with sober, sound direction, so as to check the current that may sweep them wherever it will — into regret and remorse...

How many a story each of us has read that showed him real social tragedies of this kind or another! Do the newspapers not daily sound in our ears the echo of grave incidents whose stage is life, and whose heroes and heroines are most often boys and girls not yet past the age of adolescence? Some may pause and attribute the incidents just mentioned to a psychological derangement or a disorder of the nerves.

Yes, it is a nervous ailment. But since this kind of ailment is general, arising from a natural heredity that overtakes every adolescent boy and girl amid fearful circumstances falling in the most important stages of their individual and social lives, it is not correct to label this condition a nervous disease or a temporary derangement, except in cases of extreme excess — desperate outbursts, rage quick to explode, states of exaltation and continual agitation, and so forth.

Otherwise, the age of adolescence calls, by the nature of things, for a certain kind of nervousness and psychological tension.

What, one asks, are the motives of this tension — or, more exactly, its causes? And how does there fall upon parents in particular, and upon educators in general, the essential task of rearing adolescents, guiding them, and treating them in a way that accords with their psychological condition and their legitimate needs?

The crises of adolescents go back fundamentally to two active causes. The first is physiological, embracing all the organic modifications and developments during the period of adolescence; here we should mention the most important of them, namely the onset of the sexual function, accompanied by the growth of new hair on various parts of the body and a noticeable change in the voice. The second cause is purely psychological: it accompanies the individual's isolation and works with it in the attempt at reconciliation between the outer world and the world of the self. This attempt — this struggle, rather — the boy (or the girl) wages in this rugged stage of his life to find a road that will bring him to steadiness, to balance of mind, and to general stability — that balance and that stability which he has repeatedly sought throughout his three stages of childhood and their earlier upheavals, without obtaining any final result.

It is natural that the adolescent (whose age usually ranges between twelve and eighteen), after his repeated failures, should try to solve his problems by himself. If you turn to look at him, you will find him plunged in a sea of searching — for a future he dreams of, or a mission, or a calling that blazes before him like an alluring meteor, though it is remote of realization, if not a fantastic, impossible mockery...

During these dangerous years the adolescent separates himself from his companions and comrades and teachers — even from his family — in a manner that varies with personality, upbringing, and environment. He goes off alone, pursuing his sweet hopes and nursing them in secret; at one moment he appears to you an upright dreamer ruled by the enthusiasm of youth and its titanic strength, which may drive him to give life and treasure for the sake of certain high ideals; at another you see him — after the fashion of the Romantics — much given to pessimism, hating the world and all that is in it...

It is for us, then — we the company of educators — to acquaint ourselves as far as we are able with the present circumstances of our adolescents, and to study their psychology with a careful, profitable study that will ease our educational task and accord with the interests of the new generation. But this comes only by mixing with them, and by an intelligent contact that increases their desire for practical life and props their hopes upon firm, unshakable foundations — this in addition to winning mutual confidence, which fixes love in hearts and conviction in breasts.

In this way the incidents of adolescents' vagrancy, and their flight from the homes of their families or from certain boarding schools and institutes, can be lessened.

How many and many are the fallen women who fled their homes and joined the houses of prostitution because of repeated disagreements with their families, or ill-treatment at their hands — arising, without doubt, from a failure to understand adolescents at close quarters, and a failure to abide by the rules of sound upbringing!

In this way, too, the crisis of the maidservants can be treated — those who resort to thefts and to mischief in all its branches, a kind of revenge for ill-treatment or severe pressure from the masters of the house.

And thus a suitable solution can be found for other social problems of the present day. In a word: if we try to understand the circumstances of our adolescents, their inclinations and their desires, then we can treat them according to the principles of sound modern education, as the physician does after examination and study; and in handling their affairs lies the best influence upon them and upon us — for the interest is a common one!