ADOLESCENCE. - One of the most important stages of life (v.); an age of profound crisis that affects the entire individual from the organic, psychological, and moral points of view. Adolescence follows childhood (v.) or boyhood, which ends around the age of 12 and culminates in the pubertal crisis, which manifests itself from the 15th to the 18th year in males and from the 13th to the 15th in females.
1. MEDICINE
While childhood may be considered a period of stability and physiological-psychological peace, in which the organism accumulates its reserves for future growth and development (turgor phase), adolescence is a harsh, arduous period of profound transformation, marked by physical, physiological, neuropsychological, and moral instability, of which a sign is the disharmony of forms, attitudes, and modes of thought. The individual is preparing for the profound transformation of the pubertal crisis, which will turn the boy and girl into fully differentiated men and women, now advancing toward full biological maturity—not only from the sexual point of view but also in intellectual, moral, and social terms.The determinism of these important and radical changes is linked to the behavior of the endocrine glands (v. : ENDOCRINE, GLANDS), especially to the full development of the efficiency of the thyroid, pituitary, and sex glands, particularly in their endocrine portion. Under the influence of these latter, secondary sexual characteristics appear first in an uncertain manner, then increasingly clearly, and in the adolescent they already delineate, with ever more decisive traits, the man and the woman (differential skeletal development; regional fat accumulation; appearance, development, and distribution of hair; voice timbre; differing tastes and orientations of temperament and character).
Adolescence is one of the most delicate and dangerous of the climacteric ages (v.), a bridge between childhood and youth; an age in which cracks and collapses are easily formed in the organic structure, in the block of neuropsychological and moral consciousness of the individual. It is a period on which the educator must focus maximum attention and care, and should not hesitate to enlist the aid of the physician, who in turn should seek the help of the pedagogue and the moral guide. It is precisely in this period that there is a awakening and discovery of new emotional, intellectual, moral, social, and religious horizons; hence, in the fascination of these new visions, deviations and bewilderments are easily incurred by the subject, and misunderstandings between the adolescent and parents, teachers, and educators are most frequent. Left to itself, adolescence can easily lead to distortions of every kind, whose imprint, made at this age of transformation, can determine the direction and lasting orientation of the entire life. *"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it"* (Prov. 22:6).
It represents the second period of the educational age (Pende), which extends from about 7 to 17 years; and while it unfolds in an imitative form in the first part, up to about 12 years (childhood), it becomes in the second period (adolescence) intuitive, individualistic, anarchic, introverted, and romantic. From the neuropsychological and moral points of view, the materials accumulated in the preceding phases are now elaborated; it is in this period that the educator, even while allowing reasonable latitude and independence, must skillfully supervise and guide the course of such an impetuous torrent. Parents and educators must exercise particular care, skill, and prudence during adolescence with regard to sexual formation (v. SEXUAL, EDUCATION), which at this time is subject to the most dangerous deviations, the most lasting impressions, and the most decisive orientations.
Even the pagans were not unaware of the characteristics, importance, and dangers connected with the evolution of this "precious," thankless, unstable, and rebellious age, which Horace skillfully describes (*Ars Poetica*, vv. 161–65).
Giuseppe de Ninno
2. CHRISTIAN PEDAGOGY
Pedagogy regards adolescence as the age in which the vigilance of educators (parents, teachers, spiritual directors) must be more attentive, refined, and perceptive than at any other time, and education must become, in the strictest sense, a mission and an apostolate. Adolescence is often called the thankless age because of the particular difficulties it presents; but the term is neither beautiful nor encouraging and might betray in the educator a sense of inertia or fear rather than the flame that burns all the more brightly the more it encounters adverse elements. Adolescence is, rather, the golden age of life and must be so regarded, for it radiates the dearest hopes and leads 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, on the other hand, needs education (e-ducere = to draw out from within); that is, he can no longer be directed, so to speak, from the outside as a child would be, but must be helped to draw from within himself the motives and impulses for his own actions and conduct. He easily bristles at authority and yet feels the pressing need for guidance, for a firm and experienced hand to direct and support him; then he is capable of the highest and most generous and the most daring and decisive transformations.
2) Precisely for this reason, the art of guidance must assume certain particular qualities and nuances. First of all, it must appeal to the feeling of friendship and win his confidence. Now the adolescent confides only in those who understand him. Therefore, great understanding is required, which implies: calmness and composure that do not become alarmed or adopt tragic and scandalized attitudes in the face of childish, absurd, painful confidences, or deviations of mind, heart, or sensitivity; a perennial freshness of thought and feeling that transports the educator back to the years of his own adolescence, to his own experiences—whether overcome or endured—to what he might have become and did not; a participation, marked by serene sympathy, in the adolescent’s difficulties, which demonstrates esteem for him, gives importance to what he expresses, and avoids unnecessary reprimands and censures; a prudent flexibility to adapt to characters and circumstances (the adolescent despises or ridicules educators who are rigid and hardened, anchored in the past, and thus pedantic); a paternal constancy that fears neither repetition nor impatience. So imperative is the need to win and maintain intact and full confidence that one must not hesitate, when necessary, to sacrifice certain demands of discipline. I do not hesitate to say that it is far better for an educator to be occasionally deceived by a disloyal adolescent than to adopt, to avoid this inconvenience, an attitude of reserve and purely external authority (Msgr. P. Petit de Julleville, *L’adolescent autour de l’âge ingrat*, Paris 1934, p. 4).
3) Next, appeal must be made to persuasion. Coercive motives are of little use, except in exceptional cases; the most valid and correct method consists in habituating the adolescent to interiorize everything more and more (piety, study, personal, family, and social relationships); to render an account to himself of what he must do and avoid.
4) Above all, the adolescent must be given a sense of and a will for effort. He already tends by nature toward what is difficult; therefore, this tendency must be supported, idealized, and the feeling of love, chivalry, fidelity, and exactitude developed. The adolescent who refuses to struggle is doomed from the start to moral mediocrity or perhaps even to sad declines. Without overburdening him with excessive appeals to energy, one must awaken in him, whenever an opportune occasion arises, the taste and need for II. Energy in the physical order (play, sport) to make him pliable, docile, and strong in body; mastery of the senses to react against instinct and maintain purity; effort in intellectual work to become more attentive and observant, to acquire order, common sense, logic, taste; to learn to think and judge in a personal manner. Effort in the field of conscience. How to improve oneself, to conquer oneself, if he does not know himself, if he ignores his moral temperament, if he does not learn to react against his own defects or failings, if he does not instill into his life the idea of a duty that imposes itself not only under the pressure of external discipline but also in the name of what is most intimate in each of us, and is the call of God to obey Him by fulfilling His will? (ibid., 2-3).
5) Since not only are the temperaments of the two sexes different, but so too is each adolescent in particular, the educator must possess an extraordinary adaptability that can bend to an education suited to each individual. One cannot propose an impersonal and uniform type of education; rather, one must observe how each personality tends to assert itself in order to guide it toward the ideal for which it was made.
6) Redirect to good the various symptomatic tendencies of adolescence noted above (cf. no. 1). Therefore:
1) 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 reading (novels with their fictitious world easily disorient the sense of reality; they become more dangerous when truth and morality are sullied);
2) Supervise amusements and friendships, often formed without thought of the painful consequences that may result;
3) Supervise the awakening of love and provide the warnings, advice, and admonitions that different circumstances demand. Above all, instill a great esteem for love; a great respect for others; a sense, one might say, of the sacredness of future life in two, elevated by Jesus Christ to the dignity of a sacrament;
4) Supervise sexual awakening, both to prevent the formation of bad habits and to strengthen the vigor of the struggle for a serene and strong purity, with full and clear knowledge of what needs to be known at each moment;
5) Deepen the consciousness of religion, both through rational and well-documented exposition of religious truths and through the resolution of difficulties that arise in the adolescent’s mind;
6) Infuse piety into all actions of life; piety must not be an extraneous or parallel element to the life one lives, but the life-giving element of all that one does: study, amusements, work, etc.;
7) Intensify the practice of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, the sacrament of perpetual youth; while respecting freedom, insinuating and inculcating rather than imposing;
8) Direct and strengthen the adolescent’s social tendency, turning it toward philanthropic and charitable activities; nothing is more formative than to see firsthand the physical and spiritual misery of others and to strive to alleviate 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, the watchman stays awake in vain” (Ps. 126:1-2). Therefore, if action is necessary, prayer is even more necessary; and to these must be joined example.