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Adolescence is in many ways a culturally constructed category, with different meanings for different societies. Susan Schaefer Davis and Douglas A. Davis have studied adolescence in Zawiya, a town in northern Morocco. They examine changes in views of adolescence, changes in adolescent behavior, and differences in the adolescent experiences of boys and girls over the past few decades.

Rashid was eighteen in 1982, when he helped us understand the feelings and activities of young people in his neighborhood, no longer a boy but not quite a man. He liked to talk about how his feelings and his understanding had grown from the time described, when he was just a kid. He recalled his dreams and plans in one of the hundreds of conversations we had about adolescence in this Moroccan town. His generation of youth in "Zawiya," on the western edge of North Africa, are the subject of this book.

After interviews with teenagers, Youniss and Smollar find that, though adolescents seek independence from the parent-child bond, they do not abandon the relationship.

"A must for anyone interested in adolescent behavior."—Edward Z. Dager, Contemporary Sociology

By the late 1970s, drugs, blue jeans, rock and roll, and sexual precocity appeared to be all that remained of the cultural ferment of the 1960s. In this classic new study of high school-aged youth in the eartly 70s, Gary Schwartz reveals subtle yet significant changes in the style of deviance in adolescent culture. He argues that a new sort of peer-group pluralism emerged from the counter-culture movement of the 60s, a deviance defined less by persistent violations of the law than by disengagement from traditional images of success and civic responsibility.

A century ago, most Americans had ties to the land. Now only one in fifty is engaged in farming and little more than a fourth live in rural communities. Though not new, this exodus from the land represents one of the great social movements of our age and is also symptomatic of an unparalleled transformation of our society.

In Children of the Land, the authors ask whether traditional observations about farm families—strong intergenerational ties, productive roles for youth in work and social leadership, dedicated parents and a network of positive engagement in church, school, and community life—apply to three hundred Iowa children who have grown up with some tie to the land. The answer, as this study shows, is a resounding yes. In spite of the hardships they faced during the agricultural crisis of the 1980s, these children, whose lives we follow from the seventh grade to after high school graduation, proved to be remarkably successful, both academically and socially.

A moving testament to the distinctly positive lifestyle of Iowa families with connections to the land, this uplifting book also suggests important routes to success for youths in other high risk settings.

The Jewish practice of bar mitzvah dates back to the twelfth century, but this ancient cultural ritual has changed radically since then, evolving with the times and adapting to local conditions. For many Jewish-American families, a child’s bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah is both a major social event and a symbolic means of asserting the family’s ongoing connection to the core values of Judaism. Coming of Age in Jewish America takes an inside look at bar and bat mitzvahs in the twenty-first century, examining how the practices have continued to morph and exploring how they serve as a sometimes shaky bridge between the values of contemporary American culture and Judaic tradition.

 

Interviewing over 200 individuals involved in bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies, from family members to religious educators to rabbis, Patricia Keer Munro presents a candid portrait of the conflicts that often emerge and the negotiations that ensue. In the course of her study, she charts how this ritual is rife with contradictions; it is a private family event and a public community activity, and for the child, it is both an educational process and a high-stakes performance.

 

Through detailed observations of Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, and independent congregations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Munro draws intriguing, broad-reaching conclusions about both the current state and likely future of American Judaism.  In the process, she shows not only how American Jews have forged a unique set of bar and bat mitzvah practices, but also how these rituals continue to shape a distinctive Jewish-American identity.  

 

At what age do girls gain the maturity to make sexual choices? This question provokes especially vexed debates in India, where early marriage is a widespread practice. India has served as a focal problem site in NGO campaigns and intergovernmental conferences setting age standards for sexual maturity. Over the last century, the country shifted the legal age of marriage from twelve, among the lowest in the world, to eighteen, at the high end of the global spectrum. Ashwini Tambe illuminates the ideas that shaped such shifts: how the concept of adolescence as a sheltered phase led to delaying both marriage and legal adulthood; how the imperative of population control influenced laws on marriage age; and how imperial moral hierarchies between nations provoked defensive postures within India. Tambe takes a transnational feminist approach to legal history, showing how intergovernmental debates influenced Indian laws and how expert discourses in India changed UN terminology about girls. Ultimately, Tambe argues, the well-meaning focus on child marriage has been tethered less to the interests of girls themselves and more to parents’ interests, achieving population control targets, and preserving national reputation.

Discovering Successful Pathways in Children's Development provides a new perspective on the study of childhood and family life. Successful development is enhanced when communities provide meaningful life pathways that children can seek out and engage.  Successful pathways include both a culturally valued direction for development and competence in skills that matter for a child's subsequent success as a person as well as a student, parent, worker, or citizen. To understand successful pathways requires a mix of qualitative, quantitative, and ethnographic methods—the state of the art for research practice among developmentalists, educators, and policymakers alike.

This volume includes new studies of minority and immigrant families, school achievement, culture, race and gender, poverty, identity, and experiments and interventions meant to improve family and child contexts. Discovering Successful Pathways in Children's Development will be of enormous value to everyone interested in the issues of human development, education, and social welfare, and among professionals charged with the task of improving the lives of children in our communities.

Adolescence is a difficult time, but it can be particularly stressful for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identifying youth. In order to avoid harassment and rejection, many LGBTQ teens hide their identities from their families, peers, and even themselves.
 
Educator Michael Sadowski deftly brings the voices of LGBTQ youth out into the open in his poignant and important book, In a Queer Voice. Drawing on two waves of interviews conducted six years apart, Sadowski chronicles how queer youth, who were often “silenced” in school and elsewhere, now can approach adulthood with a strong, queer voice.
 
In a Queer Voice continues the critical conversation about LGBTQ youth issues—from bullying and suicide to other risks involving drug and alcohol abuse—by focusing on the factors that help young people develop positive, self-affirming identities. Using the participants’ heartfelt, impassioned voices, we hear what schools, families, and communities can do to help LGBTQ youth become resilient, confident adults.

The 1960s are commonly considered to be the beginning of a distinct "teenage culture" in America. But did this highly visible era of free love and rock 'n' roll really mark the start of adolescent defiance? In Inventing Modern Adolescence Sarah E. Chinn follows the roots of American teenage identity further back, to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. She argues that the concept of the "generation gap"—a stereotypical complaint against American teens—actually originated with the division between immigrant parents and their American-born or -raised children. Melding a uniquely urban immigrant sensibility with commercialized consumer culture and a youth-oriented ethos characterized by fun, leisure, and overt sexual behavior, these young people formed a new identity that provided the framework for today's concepts of teenage lifestyle.Addressing the intersecting issues of urban life, race, gender, sexuality, and class consciousness, Inventing Modern Adolescence is an authoritative and engaging look at a pivotal point in American history and the intriguing, complicated, and still very pertinent teenage identity that emerged from it.

One of the myths about families in inner-city neighborhoods is that they are characterized by poor parenting. Sociologist Frank Furstenberg and his colleagues explode this and other misconceptions about success, parenting, and socioeconomic advantage in Managing to Make It. This unique study—the first in the MacArthur Foundation Studies on Successful Adolescent Development series—focuses on how and why youth are able to overcome social disadvantages.
Based on nearly 500 interviews and case studies of families in inner-city Philadelphia, Managing to Make It lays out in detail the creative means parents use to manage risks and opportunities in their communities. More importantly, it also depicts the strategies parents develop to steer their children away from risk and toward resources that foster positive development and lead to success.

"Indispensible to anyone concerned about breaking the cycle of poverty and helplessness among at-risk adolescents, this book has a readable, graphic style easily grasped by those unfamiliar with statistical techniques." —Library Journal

On the Frontier of Adulthood reveals a startling new fact: adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends. A lengthy period before adulthood, often spanning the twenties and even extending into the thirties, is now devoted to further education, job exploration, experimentation in romantic relationships, and personal development. Pathways into and through adulthood have become much less linear and predictable, and these changes carry tremendous social and cultural significance, especially as institutions and policies aimed at supporting young adults have not kept pace with these changes.

This volume considers the nature and consequences of changes in early adulthood by drawing upon a wide variety of historical and contemporary data from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Especially dramatic shifts have occurred in the conventional markers of adulthood—leaving home, finishing school, getting a job, getting married, and having children—and in how these experiences are configured as a set. These accounts reveal how the process of becoming an adult has changed over the past century, the challenges faced by young people today, and what societies can do to smooth the transition to adulthood.
 
"This book is the most thorough, wide-reaching, and insightful analysis of the new life stage of early adulthood."—Andrew Cherlin, Johns Hopkins University
 
"From West to East, young people today enter adulthood in widely diverse ways that affect their life chances. This book provides a rich portrait of this journey-an essential font of knowledge for all who care about the younger generation."—Glen H. Elder Jr., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
 
"On the Frontier of Adulthood adds considerably to our knowledge about the transition from adolescence to adulthood. . . . It will indeed be the definitive resource for researchers for years to come. Anyone working in the area—whether in demography, sociology, economics, or developmental psychology—will wish to make use of what is gathered here."—John Modell, Brown University
 
"This is a must-read for scholars and policymakers who are concerned with the future of today's youth and will become a touchpoint for an emerging field of inquiry focused on adult transitions."—Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Columbia University

 
 


 

Phil Cohen is a founding scholar in the study of British youth subculture and a key figure at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. In Rethinking the Youth Question, essays representing twenty years of Cohen’s work—beginning in 1969—are presented together for the first time. Some of these essays have not previously been published, others have been difficult to locate, and together they provide a precise conceptual history of the development of British cultural studies and a thoughtful contemplation of the significance of the entire cultural studies enterprise.
With a preface that contextualizes Cohen’s essays for an American audience, Rethinking the Youth Question reflects his tenure as a community organizer and activist in inner-city London and includes ethnographic, theoretical, and historical studies of Britain’s urban youth. Cohen offers an enlightening analysis of British educational policy, develops historical and structural accounts of generational and gendered divisions of labor, and discusses such topics as racism and the rise of the New Right. Also exploring broader questions such as the theoretical and sociological significance of youth as a category, this book is a model of useful methodology and engaged cultural reflection.
With empirical research that combines biographical, autobiographical, critical, cultural, and social elements, Rethinking the Youth Question is sure to impact debates surrounding the pedagogical value of cultural studies and the nature and future of this field in both the United States and Britain. This collection will be informative reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, sociologists, and others interested in the category of youth.

Every day young people engage in risky behaviors that affect not only their immediate well-being but their long-term health and safety. These well-honed essays apply diverse economic analyses to a wide range of unsafe activities, including teen drinking and driving, smoking, drug use, unprotected sex, and criminal activity. Economic principles are further applied to mental health and performance issues such as teenage depression, suicide, nutritional disorders, and high school dropout rates. Together, the essays yield notable findings: price and regulatory incentives are critical determinants of high-risk behavior, suggesting that youths do apply some sort of cost/benefit calculation when making decisions; the macroeconomic environment in which those decisions are made matters greatly; and youths who pursue high-risk behaviors are significantly more likely to engage in similar behaviors as adults.

This important volume provides both a key data source for public policy makers and a clear affirmation of the usefulness of economic analysis to our understanding of risky behavior.

What does it mean to be young, American, and white at the dawn of the twenty-first century? By exploring this question and revealing the everyday social processes by which high schoolers define white identities, Pamela Perry offers much-needed insights into the social construction of race and whiteness among youth.
Through ethnographic research and in-depth interviews of students in two demographically distinct U.S. high schools—one suburban and predominantly white; the other urban, multiracial, and minority white—Perry shares students’ candor about race and self-identification. By examining the meanings students attached (or didn’t attach) to their social lives and everyday cultural practices, including their taste in music and clothes, she shows that the ways white students defined white identity were not only markedly different between the two schools but were considerably diverse and ambiguous within them as well. Challenging reductionist notions of whiteness and white racism, this study suggests how we might go “beyond whiteness” to new directions in antiracist activism and school reform.
Shades of White is emblematic of an emerging second wave of whiteness studies that focuses on the racial identity of whites. It will appeal to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, as well as to those involved with high school education and antiracist activities.

While headlines about violent crimes committed by adolescents often capture the public's attention, many more young people excel in the classroom, on the athletic field, and in the community. Why do some youngsters strive to achieve while others court disaster? Using new data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), a survey of more than nine thousand young people between the ages of twelve and sixteen, Social Awakening explores the choices adolescents make about their lives and their futures. The book focuses on the key role the family plays as teenagers navigate the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood. Social Awakening analyzes a wide range of adolescent behavior and issues that affect teenagers' lives—from their dating and sexual behavior, drug and alcohol use, and physical and mental well-being, to their career goals and expectations for the future. The findings strengthen our understanding of how an array of family characteristics—single parenthood, income, educational level, race, and geographical location—influences teens' lives. One contributor explores why children from single-parent families are more likely to perform poorly in school and to indulge in risky behavior, such as drug abuse or promiscuous sexual activity. Another chapter examines why children of parents with a college degree are less likely to engage in early sexual activity. And another looks at different levels of criminal behavior among urban and rural youths. One of the advantages of an in-depth interview such as the NLSY is the wide array of behavior and experiences by the same youths that can be mutually investigated. The analysis in Social Awakening helps confirm or refute what we think we know—to explore what we could not explore with older or less complex surveys. The NLSY, which forms the foundation of Social Awakening, will be updated annually over the coming decades to enable experts to learn how those who were adolescents at the dawn of the twenty-first century handled the move to adulthood. Social Awakening provides a compelling first look at these young peoples' lives.

“In this personal account that reads like a novel,
 Allen describes the exhilaration of his youthful rule-breaking behavior
as well as the crushing reality that followed.”
– William Stephens, Ph.D.

Since the 1960s, recurring cycles of political activism over youth crime have motivated efforts to remove adolescents from the juvenile court. Periodic surges of crime—youth violence in the 1970s, the spread of gangs in the 1980s, and more recently, epidemic gun violence and drug-related crime—have spurred laws and policies aimed at narrowing the reach of the juvenile court. Despite declining juvenile crime rates, every state in the country has increased the number of youths tried and punished as adults.

Research in this area has not kept pace with these legislative developments. There has never been a detailed, sociolegal analytic book devoted to this topic. In this important collection, researchers discuss policy, substantive procedural and empirical dimensions of waivers, and where the boundaries of the courts lie. Part 1 provides an overview of the origins and development of law and contemporary policy on the jurisdiction of adolescents. Part 2 examines the effects of jurisdictional shifts. Part 3 offers valuable insight into the developmental and psychological aspects of current and future reforms.

Contributors: Donna Bishop, Richard Bonnie, M. A. Bortner, Elizabeth Cauffman, Linda Frost Clausel, Robert O. Dawson, Jeffrey Fagan, Barry Feld, Charles Frazier, Thomas Grisso, Darnell Hawkins, James C. Howell, Akiva Liberman, Richard Redding, Simon Singer, Laurence Steinberg, David Tanenhaus, Marjorie Zatz, and Franklin E. Zimring

In this revealing social history, Daniel Thomas Cook explores the roots of children’s consumer culture—and the commodification of childhood itself—by looking at the rise, growth, and segmentation of the children’s clothing industry. Cook describes how in the early twentieth century merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers of children’s clothing began to aim commercial messages at the child rather than the mother. Cook situates this fundamental shift in perspective within the broader transformation of the child into a legitimate, individualized, self-contained consumer.

The Commodification of Childhood begins with the publication of the children’s wear industry’s first trade journal, The Infants’ Department, in 1917 and extends into the early 1960s, by which time the changes Cook chronicles were largely complete. Analyzing trade journals and other documentary sources, Cook shows how the industry created a market by developing and promulgating new understandings of the “nature,” needs, and motivations of the child consumer. He discusses various ways that discursive constructions of the consuming child were made material: in the creation of separate children’s clothing departments, in their segmentation and layout by age and gender gradations (such as infant, toddler, boys, girls, tweens, and teens), in merchants’ treatment of children as individuals on the retail floor, and in displays designed to appeal directly to children. Ultimately, The Commodification of Childhood provides a compelling argument that any consideration of “the child” must necessarily take into account how childhood came to be understood through, and structured by, a market idiom.

With hate crimes on the rise and social movements like Black Lives Matter bringing increased attention to the issue of police brutality, the American public continues to be divided by issues of race. How do adolescents and young adults form friendships and romantic relationships that bridge the racial divide? In The Company We Keep, sociologists Grace Kao, Kara Joyner, and Kelly Stamper Balistreri examine how race, gender, socioeconomic status, and other factors affect the formation of interracial friendships and romantic relationships among youth. They highlight two factors that increase the likelihood of interracial romantic relationships in young adulthood: attending a diverse school and having an interracial friendship or romance in adolescence.

While research on interracial social ties has often focused on whites and blacks, Hispanics are the largest minority group and Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the United States. The Company We Keep examines friendships and romantic relationships among blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asian Americans to better understand the full spectrum of contemporary race relations. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the authors explore the social ties of more than 15,000 individuals from their first survey responses as middle and high school students in the mid-1990s through young adulthood nearly fifteen years later. They find that while approval for interracial marriages has increased and is nearly universal among young people, interracial friendships and romantic relationships remain relatively rare, especially for whites and blacks. Black women are particularly disadvantaged in forming interracial romantic relationships, while Asian men are disadvantaged in the formation of any romantic relationships, both as adolescents and as young adults. They also find that people in same-sex romantic relationships are more likely to have partners from a different racial group than are people in different-sex relationships. The authors pay close attention to how the formation of interracial friendships and romantic relationships depends on opportunities for interracial contact. They find that the number of students choosing different-race friends and romantic partners is greater in schools that are more racially diverse, indicating that school segregation has a profound impact on young people’s social ties.

Kao, Joyner, and Balistreri analyze the ways school diversity and adolescent interracial contact intersect to lay the groundwork for interracial relationships in young adulthood. The Company We Keep provides compelling insights and hope for the future of living and loving across racial divides.

The Modern Age examines the discourses that have come to characterize adolescence and argues that commonplace views of adolescents as impulsive, conflicted, and rebellious are constructions inspired by broader cultural anxieties that characterized American society in early-twentieth-century America.

The idea of adolescence, argues Kent Baxter, came into being because it fulfilled specific historical and cultural needs: to define a quickly expanding segment of the population, and to express concerns associated with the movement into a new era. Adolescence—a term that had little currency before 1900 and made a sudden and pronounced appearance in a wide variety of discourses thereafter—is a “modern age” not only because it sprung from changes in American society that are synonymous with modernity, but also because it came to represent all that was threatening about “modern life.”

Baxter provides a preliminary history of adolescence, focusing specifically on changes in the American educational system and the creation of the juvenile justice system that carved out a developmental space between the child and the adult. He looks at the psychological works of G. Stanley Hall and the anthropological works of Margaret Mead and explores what might have inspired their markedly negative descriptions of this new demographic. He examines the rise of the Woodcraft Indian youth movement and its promotion of “red skin” values while also studying the proliferation of off-reservation boarding schools for Native American youth, where educators attempted to eradicate the very “red skin” values promoted by the Woodcraft movement.

Finally Baxter studies reading at the turn of the century, focusing specifically on Horatio Alger (the Ragged Dick series) and Edward Stratemeyer (the Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, and Hardy Boys series) and what those works reveal about the “problem” of adolescence and its solutions in terms of value, both economic and moral.

This volume shows that the separation of the teaching of reading and writing has been a dominant feature of educational practice at the elementary and secondary levels since colonial times. The editors identify current movements in education that have fostered connections between reading and writing as well as those that tend to push them apart.

In Youth on Trial, a wide range of leaders in developmental psychology and law combine their expertise to investigate the limitations of our youth policy—including the problematic trend of trying alleged juvenile criminals as adults.