The Teenager's Reality

SPECIAL REPORT The teenager’s reality David Elkind, PhD Jean Piaget (1973)has argued persuasively that When we understand the realities of children and children develop they construct and reconstruct reality adolescents, then, we are also able to avoid attributing out of their experiences with the environment. Reality, bad motives to behaviors that children and adolescents from this perspective, is not something entirely outside engage in because of their differing realities rather than of us and which we merely copy or photograph with our because of their bad "characters." This paper reviews senses; rather we always participate in and contribute to someof the realities constructed by adolescents as an aid what we know as reality. Twopeople can, for example, to a better understanding of their behavior and as a witness the same event, yet come away from it with means of preventing our attributing bad motives to quite different impressions of what they have observed. actions which derive from different but quite innocent While the notion that reality is a mental construction realities. is commonly accepted in cases such as the example given above, Piaget argues that construction is present in all aspects of our knowledge. In addition, since Thinking in a New Key children have different mental abilities than adults, To understand the realities constructed by teenagers their realities will differ in fundamental ways from the one first has to review the new mental abilities which realities constructed by adults. Youngchildren, ages emerge in early adolescence and which make these new four to six, believe that everything in the world has a realities possible. Fromancient times, the age of six or purpose, that parents are all knowing and all powerful, seven has been recognized as the age of reason. It was and that events which occur together cause one another. Jean Piaget, however, who demonstrated that there was Piaget’s work has helped us to understand the differ- in effect a "second" age of reason which emerged in ent realities constructed by children and adolescents early adolescence. Just as the first age of reason was and howthese differ from adult realities. This under- associated with the syllogistic logic of Aristotle, Piaget standing has more than theoretical value and has quite identified the second age of reason with the new sym- important practical consequences. This is true because bolic (propositional) logic of Boole and others. as humans we have a dismaying tendency to attribute The difference in these two logics highlights the bad motives to people whofail to share our reality. This difference in the thinking abilities of children and ado- is most obvious when some Americans travel abroad lescents. First of all, syllogistic reasoning deals with and get angry at natives of the host country when they only two variables. In the syllogism: "All men are do not behave in the same way that people behave "back mortal; .... Socrates was a man; .... Socrates was mortal." home." People in different cultures have different reali- The two variables are men and mortal. Secondly, the ties too, and they maynot behave as we do because their cultural reality is different from our own. syllogism deals only with established facts and catego- ries and cannot deal with possibilities. The idea that reality is a construction should not be taken to meanthat all differences in realities are due to Symboliclogic, in contrast, deals with multiple vari- differences in age and experience. Somerealities are not ables as well as with probabilities including those which only different but, like prejudice, are bad. To say that are contrary to fact. Consider the following possibili- reality is a construction and that manyrealities are ties: "It is rainy and cold" (pq); "It is rainy and warm" simply different from one another and are not bad or ~q); "It is dry and cold" (P~l); "It is dry and warm"(~-q). good but morally neutral, should not be taken to mean There are four variables and the propositions have to that all realities are morally neutral. Our real task is to do with possibilities rather than with realities. In addi- discriminate between those realities which are morally tion, these various propositions can be combined with neutral, simply different, and those which are not. regard to their logical truth without regard to what is PEDIATRICDENTISTRY: DECEMBER 1987/ VOL.9 No.4 337 happening in the real world. If it rainy and cold (pq), The Imaginary Audience then it cannot be dry and warm (p~). Children think, but they do not think about thinking; While syllogistic logic has to do with deduction, teenagers do. A simple research illustration mayhelp to going from the general to the particular, symbolic logic make this point more concrete. In studies of religious has to do with processes like implication, negation, development (Elkind 1978) large numbers of children reciprocity, and correlation. The differences in these and adolescents from different religious denominations two logics define the differences between the reality were asked questions designed to elicit some spontane- constructions of children and adolescents. That is to say, ous ideas about their religious denomination. One of children can reason about the here and now with a those questions was, "Can a dog or a cat be a Protestant couple of variables whereas adolescents can reason (Catholic or Jew)?" The children (7-10 years) answered about multiple variables and with possibilities includ- that the pet might be, if they thought of it as belonging ing contrary-to-fact propositions. This is easy to dem- to the family. But when they thought of the practical onstrate in a concrete way. All one needs to do is to ask consequences, they insisted it could not be because "He an eight year old and a 14 year old the following ques- would bark and the minister (priest or rabbi) wouldn’t tion: In a world where coal was white what color would let him in to the church (synagogue)." Teenagers, snow be? The eight year old, unless he was extremely contrast, answered, "They don’t have intelligence, they precocious, will have great difficulty with this question can’t understand, they don’t believe..." and will get hung up on the fact that coal is black not Whenyoung people begin to use terms like "intelli- white. The 14 year old, in contrast, will have no problem gence", "belief", and "understanding", they give evi- with dealing with the possibility of a world in which dence of having begun to think about and to conceptu- black was white and vice versa. alize thinking. Nonetheless, because young people are still unused to their new mental abilities, they make Reality Constructions Associated with characteristic errors when it comes to thinking about Thinking in a New Key thinking. Although they can now think about their own thinking and about the thinking of others, they rou- The new level of logical thinking attained by adoles- tinely mistake what other people are thinking about cents makes it possible for them to construct muchmore with what they are thinking about. Just as the young abstract concepts of space, time, and number than was child has difficulty putting himself or herself in the true when they were children. Adolescents, for ex- physical place of someone else ( a young child makes ample, can begin to imagine the length of time involved mistakes when asked to name the right and left hands of in a century and thus begin to acquire a true sense of someone standing opposite him), the teenager has historical time. In the same way, teenagers can begin to trouble taking the mental position of another person get a true sense of geographical space and even a begin- when it is different from his own. ning sense of celestial space (i.e., light years). After the Because young teenagers must adapt to the momen- age of 13, most teenagers can also begin to grasp algebra, tous changes in their bodies, feelings, emotions, and a second order symbol system in which letters stand for thinking, they are entirely preoccupied with these ef- numbers. In short, the conceptual world of the teenager forts. And when young teenagers contemplate what has much larger and deeper time, space, and number other people are thinking about, they simply assume coordinates than is true for the child. that everyone else is thinking about what they are These newly acquired mental abilities are not with- thinking about, namely, themselves. They tend to as- out their drawbacks, particularly in the early stages sume that everyone is as concerned with their bodies, when they have just begun to be acquired and the young their actions, their feelings as they are themselves. person is not quite used to them. The situation is not Accordingly, they construct what I have called an unlike that of the young man who suddenly grows six imaginary audience (Elkind 1967). They assume that inches in height and has to get used to looking down they are constantly being observed, admired, or criti- rather than up, at his parents, to being careful not to cized by others. bump into things, and to adjust his reach to the new Although the imaginary audience first appears as an length of his arms; or that of the young womanwho error of adolescent thinking, it becomes in modified matures physically over the summerand and has to deal form, a construction that all of us carry with us for the with boys and men who now look at and respond to her rest of our lives. The audience serves important social as in different ways than they did before. In the case of well as personal functions.

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