Social Development

388 T ANYA BERGEVIN, WILLIAM M. BUKOWSKI, AND RICHARD MINERS chapter 16 Social Development Tanya Bergevin, William M. Bukowski, and Richard Miners K EY CONCEPTS AUTHORITARIAN PARENTING EMOTION REGULATION ONTOGENY AUTHORITATIVE PARENTING EPIGENETIC PRINCIPLE PARENTAL STYLE AUTONOMY FIELD THEORY PEERS COGNITION ID PHYLOGENY COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT INDULGENT PARENTING PRIMARY DRIVES CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY LIBIDINAL FORCES PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES DEFENSE MECHANISMS LIFE SPACE RECAPITULATION EGO MORATORIUM SELF-CONCEPT EMOTION NEGLECTFUL PARENTING ZEITGEIST O VERVIEW Recognizing the multifaceted nature of adolescence, this chapter approaches the topic by reviewing the contrasting accounts of five major figures in the field, along with the research that has followed in their wake. According to G. Stanley Hall, adolescence is a time of storm and stress, a form of second birth through which individuals make a transition from the primitive ways of childhood to the refined values of adulthood. Fascinating though this picture may be, the authors point out that adolescence is not typically as stormy and stressful as he portrays it. The claim of Kurt Lewin’s field theory is that interactional forces existing between individual and environment can predict individual behavior, and Lewin suggests that adolescent problems can be understood as conflicts between competing forces. Such conflicts arise during adolescence in particular because individuals are in transition between child and adult group membership. S OCIAL DEVELOPMENT 389 Anna Freud takes a psychoanalytic approach to adolescence, claiming that the upheavals of adolescence result from the growing challenge to the ego presented by developing sexuality. The prediction is that the onset of puberty should see an increase in “moody” behavior. It turns out that there is little evidence for this. However, boys’ relationships with parents suffer during puberty. The strongest evidence concerns timing of puberty: early puberty in girls and late puberty in boys is associated with problems and conflict. Peter Blos saw adolescence as part of a series of psychosexual stages during which personality development was completed. According to this account, a key factor in adolescence concerns the balance between the growing need for independence and the maintenance of parental bonds. The authors show how parental style has much to do with the success of this transition. The work of Harry Stack Sullivan focuses particularly on peer relationships. Sullivan argues that behavior can only be understood as the result of interaction processes between self and others, claiming that psychological growth is driven by the need to satisfy interpersonal needs. In adolescence the need is for romantic relationships and friendships with peers. Erik Erikson sees adolescence as a transition to adult identity during which the individual goes through a period in which he or she does not have a stable sense of identity. Consequently, he or she may adhere to a wide range of beliefs and ideologies. Thus according to Erikson, a major focus in adolescence is development toward a stable identity and self-concept. In reviewing these accounts and the evidence that stems from them, the authors provide a convincing case for the need to consider many different factors in explaining developmental processes during adolescence. Introduction Social and personality development in adolescence is multifaceted and dynamic. It involves several highly interrelated forms of development that encompass a broad range of behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and health-related consequences. Compared to the school-age period, the social domains in which adolescents participate are more numerous, more complex, more challenging, and potentially more exciting and dan- gerous. In these domains, adolescents think, feel, act, and interact with others in ways that are new to them. It can be a period of intense interest, excitement, achievement, and happiness. It can be a time of confusion, anxiety, sadness, and disruption. For many youths, adolescence represents a time of accomplishments, health, and well- being; for others it is a time of insurmountable challenges that lead to an unsatisfying, troubled, and frustrating adulthood. Key Characteristics of Development What are the major characteristics of social and personality development in adolescence? Social development in adolescence has three central features. They are growth, differentiation, and synthesis. By growth we mean that adolescents develop new skills and concepts, experience new emotions, and begin to function in a larger number of social and personal domains. They display a wider repertoire of behaviors and experience a 390 T ANYA BERGEVIN, WILLIAM M. BUKOWSKI, AND RICHARD MINERS significant broadening of their social worlds. Certainly, some of the most pronounced forms of growth in adolescence are the quantitative and qualitative physical changes that result from puberty. Of the transformations that occur during adolescence, many are characterized by differentiation. That is, one’s range of activities, behaviors, skills, ideas, social contacts, and emotions becomes broader, or more different, during adolescence than in childhood. Moreover, the differences, or variability, between individuals become larger as individual adolescents set off on their own developmental traject- ories. As the range of an adolescent’s behavior, thoughts, and experiences becomes larger and more complex, the adolescent is confronted with the challenge of bringing this diversity together. That is, adolescents need to synthesize this “newness” into a comprehensible and coherent approach to the world. Adolescents who can bring these new experiences and challenges together are likely to be on a trajectory toward a healthy and rewarding adulthood, whereas failing to do so may add to the challenges of becoming an adult. Just as there are central features to adolescent development, there are also central goals or challenges that adolescents need to address. By the time they are ready to enter adulthood, adolescents should (1) be autonomous and emotionally regulated; (2) have a sense of their identity; and (3) be able to form close relationships with both same- and other-sex peers. These developments occur within five types of domains. They are the social environment, puberty, the family, the peer group, and the self. Separate sections of this chapter are devoted to each of these domains. Within each section, we use the intellectual biographies of the pioneering theorists to introduce the important issues of adolescent development. Their ideas provide the conceptual groundwork for our discussion of current research on adolescent social development. Relations Between Social and Cognitive Development Before we begin this discussion it should be stated that one cannot understand social development in adolescence without understanding parallels in cognitive development during this time. It comes as little surprise that many of the ways in which adolescents come to think about themselves and others, about the way they behave, and about the emotions they experience can be traced to changes in cognition. It is likely also that experiences with parents and peers can challenge adolescents to think in new ways. Certainly, one cannot think about social and cognitive development as independent of each other. We begin our discussion of social development in adolescence by considering an idea that has formed the foundation for the study of adolescence, proposed first by G. Stanley Hall. It is the idea that adolescence represents a period of storm and stress. We explain this idea and then evaluate it according to the data that are currently avail- able. Following this we discuss the changes in the social domains in which adolescents function. To begin this discussion, we present the ideas of Kurt Lewin. We then discuss the question of how puberty affects the behavior and emotions of adolescents. This section is introduced with a discussion of the ideas of Anna Freud. Next, we focus on adolescent development within the family. The ideas of Peter Blos serve as the point of departure for this discussion. We next consider the peer system during adolescence, S OCIAL DEVELOPMENT 391 using the ideas of Harry Stack Sullivan as the foundation for this discussion. The last domain we consider is the self. Here we rely heavily on the ideas of Erik Erikson and his concept of identity. G. Stanley Hall: Adolescence as Storm and Stress If any idea has dominated the study of adolescent development, it is G. Stanley Hall’s pronouncement that adolescence is a time of storm and stress. According to this theory, human development is sequenced according to an evolutionary timeline. That is, each individual retraces the historical record of his or her species development (phylogeny) in his or her own growth (ontogeny) (Grinder, 1969, p. 357). Hence, according to Hall, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Based on the notion that human development runs through the successive stages through which the human species has passed (Averill, 1982), Hall argued that normal human development follows a progression from animal-like dispositions to “civilized” higher-order functioning described as the “attainment of a superior mode or social existence or way of life” (White, 1992, p. 31). Believed to be mediated by biology, Hall argued that recapitulation occurs by virtue of the fact that more primitive areas of the brain mature before the ones that appeared more recently in our evolutionary

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