Plights of passage

Today’s teens have turned inwards and socialise more online, with profound effects for them and society.

- JEREMY REES

Adolescents can be worrisome to parents, but recently they have been especially worrying for society. COVID may have disrupted their social development. Is social media destroying their relationships? One of the biggest hits on Netflix this year has been Adolescence, about why a 13-year-old boy kills a classmate.

In How we Grow Up, Matt Richtel tries to explain the adolescent mind (it's complex) and decide whether adolescents have it worse now than previously (yes, in some ways).

Adolescence was established in the public mind as a time of tumult in one of the 18th-century's bestsellers, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Goethe. Boy pines for girl. Boy becomes melancholy, has mood swings and suicidal thoughts. A researcher at the beginning of last century, Stanley Hall, theorised that development mirrored the ascent of human civilisation: adolescents emerged from a time of innocence into a period of grappling with "perversions" before ascending to a higher civilised adulthood.

Freudians agreed with the sex part.

Richtel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning health reporter for The New York Times, focuses on the science. Here are studies of puberty in Zambia, scientists counting adolescent synapses, teens being put in MRI scanners to study their brains.