Adolescence

ADOLESCENCE. - One of the most important of the ages of life (v.); an age of profound crisis that affects the whole individual on the organic, psychological, and moral levels. Adolescence follows childhood (v.), or boyhood/girlhood, which ends at about age 12 and culminates in the pubertal crisis, which manifests itself between the 15th and 18th year in males, and between the 13th and 15th in females.

1. MEDICINE

While that of childhood must be considered a period of physiological and psychological stasis and peace, in which the organism accumulates its reserves for future surges and developments (the phase of turgor), in adolescence the individual undergoes an arduous, thankless labor of profound transformation, of physical, physiological, neuropsychological, and moral instability, one sign of which is the disharmony of forms, attitudes, and ways of thinking; the individual prepares for the profound transformation of the pubertal crisis that will make the boy and the girl into the man and the woman, fully differentiated, by then set upon the path to full biological maturity understood not only from the sexual point of view, but also from the intellectual, moral, and social one.

The determinism of such important and radical changes is bound to the behavior of the glands of internal secretion (v.: ENDOCRINE, GLANDS), especially to the full development of the efficiency of the thyroid, the pituitary, and the sexual glands, particularly in their endocrine portion. Especially under the impulse of the latter, there appear, at first in an undecided manner, then ever more clearly, those secondary sexual characteristics that in the adolescent already sketch out, with ever more decided traits, the man and the woman (different skeletal development; regional accumulation of fat; appearance, development, and topography of hair; timbre of the voice; different tastes and orientations of temperament and character).

Adolescence is among the most delicate and the most dangerous of the climacteric ages (v.), a bridge of passage between the world of childhood and that of youth; an age in which the cracks and landslides of the organic edifice, of the neuropsychological and moral structure of the individual's consciousness, are easy; a period on which the educator must focus his attention and care to the utmost, and must not disdain to have frequent recourse to the work of the physician, and the latter, conversely, to the help of the pedagogue and the teacher of morals. Peculiar to this period is a whole awakening and discovering of new sentimental, intellectual, moral, social, and religious horizons; so that in the fascination of the new visions, deviations and bewilderments on the part of the subject are easy, and misunderstandings between the adolescent and parents, teachers, and educators are very easy. Left to itself, adolescence can therefore easily flow into distortions of every kind, whose mark, impressed in this age of transformation, can determine the lasting direction and orientation of the whole of life. «Adolescens iuxta viam suam, etiam cum senuerit, non recedet ab ea» (Prov. 22, 6).

It represents the second period of the educative age (Pende), which runs from about 7 to 17 years; and while it unfolds in imitative form in the first part, up to about age 12 (childhood), in the second period (adolescence) it becomes intuitive, individualistic, anarchic, introverted, romantic. From the neuropsychological and moral point of view, the materials accumulated in the preceding phases are now elaborated; this is the period in which the educator, even through a reasonable breadth and granting of independence and autonomy, must skillfully supervise and check the course of so impetuous a torrent. And a very particular care, skill, and prudence must also be used by parents and educators in the period of adolescence with regard to sexual formation (v. SEXUAL, EDUCATION), which at this time undergoes the most dangerous overflowings, the most lasting imprints, the most decisive orientations.

Even the pagans did not fail to notice the characteristic features, the importance, and the dangers connected with the evolution of this "precious," thankless, unstable, rebellious age, which Horace skillfully describes (Ep. ad Pisones, vv. 161-65).

Giuseppe de Ninno

2. CHRISTIAN PEDAGOGY

Pedagogy considers adolescence as the age in which the vigilance of educators

(parents, teachers, directors of conscience) must become more attentive, finer, and more perspicacious than in any other, and education must become, in the strictest sense, a mission and an apostolate. Adolescence is usually called the thankless age because of the quite particular difficulties it presents; but the term is neither beautiful nor encouraging, and could betray in the educator rather a sense of inertia or fear than the flame that burns brighter the more adverse elements it encounters. Adolescence, on the contrary, is the golden age of life and must be considered as such, because it radiates the dearest hopes and sets one on the path to the full conquest of personality.

In practice, the following essential principles must be kept in mind: 1) If the child needs training, the adolescent instead needs education (educare = to draw out from within); that is, he can no longer be directed, so to speak, from the outside, as a child can; rather, he must be helped to draw from within himself the motives and impulses of his own actions and conduct. He easily bristles in the face of authority, and yet he feels an imperious need for a guide, for a firm and experienced hand to direct and sustain him; and then he is capable even of the highest heroisms and of the boldest and most decisive transformations. 2) Precisely for this reason the art of direction must be clothed with certain particular qualities and nuances. First of all, it must appeal to the sentiment of friendship and win his confidence. Now the adolescent confides only in one who knows how to understand him. A great understanding is therefore required, which entails: a calm and a coolness that are not astonished, nor adopt tragic and scandalized attitudes, in the face of puerile or absurd or painful confidences, or of deviations of the mind, the heart, the sensibility; a perennial freshness of thought and feeling, which transports the educator to the years of his own adolescence, to his own experiences overcome or endured, to what he might have become and did not become; a participation, made of serene sympathy, in the adolescent's difficulties, which shows esteem for him, gives importance to what he expresses, avoids unnecessary rebukes and censures; a prudent elasticity to adapt to characters and circumstances (the adolescent disdains or derides educators who are hardened and dried up and anchored to the past, and therefore pedantic); a paternal constancy that has no fear or impatience of repeating itself. So imperious is the necessity of winning and keeping confidence intact and full, "that one must not hesitate, in case of necessity, to sacrifice to it certain demands of discipline. I do not hesitate to say that it is much better for an educator to remain from time to time deceived by an disloyal adolescent, than to adopt, in order not to fall into this inconvenience, an attitude of purely external reserve and authority" (Msgr. P. Petit de Julleville, L'adolescent autour de l'âge ingrat, Paris 1934, p. 4). 3) Then appeal to persuasion. Coercive motives are of no use, except in exceptional cases; the most valid and exact method consists in accustoming the adolescent to interiorize himself ever more in everything (piety, study, personal, family and social relations); to give himself a reason for what he must do and avoid. 4) Above all, the adolescent must be given the sense and the will of effort. He already tends of himself toward what is arduous; this tendency must therefore be sustained, idealized, and the sentiment of love, of chivalry, of fidelity, of exactness developed. "The adolescent who refuses to fight is doomed from the outset to moral mediocrity or perhaps even to sad downfalls. Without tiring him too much with excessive appeals to energy, one must awaken in him, whenever a favorable occasion presents itself, the taste and the need for it. Energies in the physical order (play, sport) to make the body supple, docile and strong; mastery of the senses to react against instinct and to keep oneself integrally pure; effort in intellectual work to become more attentive and more observant, to acquire order, good sense, logic, taste; to learn to think and to judge in a personal manner. Effort in the field of conscience. How is he to improve himself, to overcome himself, when necessary, if he does not know himself, if he is ignorant of his moral temperament, if he does not learn to react against his own defects or failings, if he does not introduce into his life the idea of a duty that imposes itself not only under the pressure of an external discipline, but also in the name of what is most intimate in each of us, and is God's appeal to obey Him, fulfilling His will?" (ibid., 2-3). 5) Since not only the temperaments of the two sexes differ, but also those of each adolescent in particular, the educator must possess an uncommon malleability that bends to an education suited to each one in particular. No impersonal and uniform type of education can be proposed; rather, one must observe how each personality tends to assert itself, in order to guide it to that ideal for which it is made. 6) To make the various symptomatic tendencies of adolescence listed above converge toward the good (cf. n. 1). Therefore: 1) to supervise mental activity especially in the field of philosophy (the adolescent is inclined to criticize systems and ideas and to form personal judgments, which are often deviations) and of romantic readings (novels, with their fictitious world, easily disorient the sense of reality; they become more dangerous when truth and morality are maltreated); 2) to supervise amusements and friendships, often formed without even thinking of the painful consequences that might derive from them; 3) to supervise the awakening of love and to provide the warnings, counsels and admonitions that the various circumstances impose. Above all, to instill a great esteem for love; a great respect toward others; a sense, one might say, that is sacred of the future life as a couple, raised by Jesus Christ to the dignity of a sacrament; 4) to supervise sexual awakening, both to prevent the contracting of bad habits and to strengthen the vigor of the struggle for a serene and strong purity, in the full and clear knowledge of what from time to time one needs to know; 5) to make the consciousness of religion more profound, both by the rational and well-documented exposition of religious truths and by the solution of the difficulties that arise in the adolescent's mind; 6) to introduce piety into all the actions of life; piety must not be an element extraneous or parallel to the life one lives, but the vivifying element of all that one does: study, amusements, work, etc.; 7) to intensify the practice of the sacraments, especially of the Eucharist, the sacrament of perennial youth; respecting, however, freedom; insinuating, inculcating, rather than imposing; 8) to direct and strengthen the adolescent's social tendency, turning it toward philanthropic and charitable activities; nothing is more formative than to touch with one's own hand the physical and spiritual misery of others, lavishing oneself to relieve pain, suffering and poverty.

Finally, the educator must never forget that "unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, in vain does the watchman keep vigil" (Ps. 126, 1-2). If action is therefore necessary, prayer is even more necessary; to which must be joined example, which opens the way and demonstrates as possible what one wishes to inculcate.

Celestino Testore