Everything I Ever Needed to Know…

I've been trying to read a lot of background material for the book including several marketing oriented books that describe the "Millennial" generation. One of these books accused Gen Xers like me (we really have a bad rap in marketing land) of labeling today's teens Generation Y because we see them as somehow being iterative instead of their own special, unique generation (I just do it because it fits with my URL). I just find a lot of the attempts to categorize different generations to sound kind of silly: "They're optimistic! Conservative! Team players!" Some of them may be, some may not.

Anyway my husband is in school studying to be a psychologist so I borrowed his Life Span Development text book and opened up the chapter on adolescence. I have a feeling everything I ever needed to know about teens is in these pages (or a lot anyway). This is the stuff — the hormones, neuroscience and sociology behind being a teenager. I wanted to share one quote from this pretty typical text book that I loved reading:

"Adolescence is not a time of rebellion, crisis, pathology and deviance. A far more accurate vision of adolescence is of a time of evaluation, of decision making, of commitment, of carving out a place in the world. Most of the problems of today's youth are not with the youth themselves. What adolescents need is access to a range of legitimate opportunities and to long-term support from adults who care deeply about them." (Hamburg & Hamburg, 2004)

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.