MARCO JURÍDICO

Today’s white, middle-class teenagers8 live in a world that, on its surface, seems wonderful.9 These adolescents tend to come from what appear to be fairly stable families who support them in their choices and activities; they attend schools that provide them with an education that can prepare them for college and career. Their access to

electronics, technology, the internet, and, in particular, social media, means that they can form and maintain relationships with a wide variety of people all over the world. The entertainment industry provides them with movies, TV shows, and video games that play to their interests and glorify youth and beauty. Because of their increased buying power, stores – whether brick-and-mortar or online – cater to their desires.

8 _{This chapter focuses on the experiences of white and middle-class adolescents. Since most all-girls’}

Catholic schools are majority white and middle-class, the focus on white and middle-class girls is appropriate. While there is significant research showing that the pressures described below are also experienced by Black and Hispanic adolescents, it is beyond the scope of this dissertation to fully describe these experiences. See, for example, Iris Jacob, My Sisters’ Voices: Teenage Girls of Color Speak Out (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002); Horace R. Hall with Andrea Brown-Thirston,

Understanding Teenage Girls: Culture, Identity, and Schooling (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2011); Jill Denner and Bianca L. Guzman, eds, Latina Girls: Voices of Adolescent Strength in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

9 _{For more information on adolescence as a distinct stage in life, see Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Adolescence}

and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Approach (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2007), 4-11. Arnett defines adolescence as the time between physical maturity at puberty and the taking up of full adult responsibilities. Because different cultures define adulthood in different ways, their understandings of the tasks of adolescence vary as well; in this way adolescence is socially constructed. For a description of childhood and adolescence in non-Western cultures, see Karen Wells, Childhood in a Global Perspective (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009). For a history of childhood in Western Europe, see Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2001).

But, looking below the surface, this life may meet the immediate desires of adolescents, but it is not providing them with what they truly need as they grow into adulthood. Robert Putnam contrasts his own adolescence in small-town Ohio with the experiences of adolescents today and suggests that communities are no longer formed around the common purpose of raising children to adulthood. He describes communities where teens, “whatever their background, lived with two parents… and in neighborhoods where everyone knew everyone else’s first name.”10 The family structures of today’s adolescents are more variable; some live with two parents, some with one parent, some with a parent and step-parent, and some in some other family arrangement. And, even when these family structures are stable, parents are often working long hours in order to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. Also disappearing are the kinds of neighborhoods where people know each other. It is increasingly common for people not to know their neighbors and to not feel any sense of responsibility towards these neighbors or the children of the neighborhood.11

For psychologist David Elkind, this shift is characteristic of the transition from late-modernity to postmodernity. In this shift, the needs of children and adolescents have ceased to be central in the lives of adults. Elkind contends that, prior to the 1960s, families, schools, and communities were generally oriented towards nurturing adolescents and protecting them until they could grow to adulthood.12 In contrast,                                                                                                                

10 _{Putnam, Our Kids, 7.}

11 _{Putnam, Our Kids, 206-212.}

12 _{Elkind is not arguing that this earlier time was a “Golden Age” to which we need to return. In fact, there}

were significant ways in which this kind of community orientation failed young people – silencing those seen as “other” because of race, gender and gender identity, and sexual orientation – and reinforced a sense of forced communal cohesiveness. He is suggesting instead that, in the drive to post-modernity, institutions in communities no longer are primarily oriented towards raising up the next generation. See David Elkind, All Grown Up and No Place to Go: Teenagers in Crisis, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1998), 240. Chap Clark echoes this concern that institutions that, in the past, were primarily focused on the needs

today’s adolescents are viewed as socially sophisticated, technologically savvy, sexually active, and, according to Elkind, prematurely adult.13 Having reached puberty,

adolescents are pushed into a world of sophisticated marketing, highly sexualized

entertainment, and adult choices even before their cognitive development has a chance to catch up to their physical development.14

Because of the premature adulthood of adolescence and the lack of a protective community, Elkind argues that adolescence in postmodernity is one that is characterized by stress.15 This stress means that teenagers are anxious, frustrated, and angry; they do not know how to react to the stress in their lives because they have few adult models to show them how. This stress can lead to anxiety and depression and to a variety of maladaptive behaviors: violence and aggression; risky behaviors such as drinking, drug use, unprotected and promiscuous sex, and dangerous driving; eating disorders and self- harm; and suicide.

In his insightful book, Chap Clark investigates this sense that teenagers in the twenty-first century feel isolated from the adults in their lives. Like Elkind, Clark

believes that society, at least in the United States, has reoriented itself from being focused primarily on the care and nurturing of children and adolescents to meeting the needs of adults. Clark names this as an abandonment of adolescents by the adults and

communities in their lives.

of children and adolescents, are often now more focused on institutional continuity. See Chap Clark, Hurt 2.0: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 35.

13 _{Elkind, All Grown Up, 5-7.}

14 _{Elkind, All Grown Up, 167. Elkind argues that schools, especially public schools, no longer provide a}

protected place for adolescents where the adults know them well and support their development. Rather, “large schools, unfortunately, make it more difficult for young people to find meaningful relationships with mentor, a necessary condition for constructing a healthy sense of identity” (167).

Adolescents have suffered the loss of the safe relationships and intimate settings that served as the primary nurturing community for those traveling the path from child to adult. The most obvious example of this is in the family. The

postmodern family is often so concerned about the needs, struggles, and issues of parents that the emotional and developmental needs of the children go largely unmet.16

To compensate for the lack of time and attention that they give to their teenagers, parents will often get their teenager involved, often from childhood, in a variety of

extracurricular activities. This kind of over-scheduling, Clark argues, both reinforces the sense of abandonment that adolescents feel and puts a great deal of pressure on them to be successful at all of these activities.17 At the same time, adolescents have a sense that the adults that are in their lives – teachers, coaches, youth ministers, and so on – are there because they are paid to be there and because they want something from the adolescent such as good performance, team wins, a robust program.18

For Clark, one of the results of this abandonment of adolescents by the adults and institutions that should be nurturing them into a healthy adulthood is that adolescents are left without any guidance. At a time in their cognitive development when adolescents need support to develop the more complex ways of making meaning that are required in adulthood, they find that they are left to fend for themselves. Because of this, Clark argues, they have a sense of multiple selves that function in the varying social roles in which they find themselves: son or daughter, sibling, student, athlete, youth group member, volunteer, friend, boyfriend or girlfriend, worker, and so on. While this is                                                                                                                

16 _{Clark, Hurt 2.0, 35.}

17 _{Clark, Hurt 2.0, 30. “We have evolved to the point where we believe driving is support, being active is}

love, and providing any and every opportunity is selfless nurture” (31).

18 _{Clark, Hurt 2.0, 34. Clark puts it this way: “Organizations, structures, and institutions that were}

originally concerned with children’s care, welfare, and development have become less interested in individual nurture and development and more interested in institutional perpetuation (or the competitive, even pathological, needs of the adult in charge)” (34).

developmentally appropriate,19 the number and variety of roles that adolescents are asked to juggle makes the task of developing an integrated sense of a self that operates in a variety of roles more difficult.20

The analysis that Clark offers of the systematic abandonment of adolescents by adults, including parents, and by institutions, including schools and churches, is an important and useful one. However, as suggested by Theresa O’Keefe, his analysis ascribes an intentionality to adults that is unwarranted and fails to prescribe solutions (other than that adults need to do better).21 Rather, she argues that the isolation (a term she prefers to abandonment) that adolescents experience is due to changes in how society is structured. In particular, there have been significant changes in the number of

relationships that adolescents must manage, the mobility of adolescents through a variety of cultural and value worlds, and in the kinds of interactions that adolescents have with adults. Adolescents of the past needed to know the people in their immediate

community; today, changes in travel and technology make it possible for adolescents to establish and maintain connections with people not only in the local community, but potentially from a wide variety of geographical, social, and value worlds. Furthermore,                                                                                                                

19 _{Robert Kegan, for example, describes this as characteristic of the transition from second to third order}

thinking. In this transition, adolescents are acquiring the ability to see themselves as a part of a

relationship. However, they are not yet able to stand apart from those relationships and think about them or to think about how those relationships interact with each other – this is a characteristic of fourth-order thinking. In this transition, adolescents can see themselves as a self in relationship, but the self they construct in one relationship may be very different from the self they construct in a different relationship – and they are not yet able to see that there is a difference. See Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 24-28. Joann Wolski Conn describes the difficulties that result from these multiple senses of self: “My personal conflicts are not really conflicts about what I want and what someone else wants. On closer examination, they consistently turn out to be conflicts between what I want as a part of this shared reality and what I want as a part of that shared reality. To ask me in this evolutionary balance to resolve such a conflict by bringing both shared realities before me is to touch precisely the limits of this way of making my self and the other.” See Joann Wolski Conn, Spirituality and Personal Maturity (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 54.

20 _{Clark, Hurt 2.0, 51.}

21 _{Theresa O’Keefe, “Growing Up Alone: The New Normal of Isolation in Adolescence,” The Journal of}

managing this quantity of connections can make it more challenging for them “to know and to be known well by any one of them.”22 In an increasingly mobile world,

adolescents will routinely meet people from other towns, states, and countries and will travel widely and often; the sense of the protected neighborhood or village that Putnam described has vanished for most adolescents. These broad networks of relationships and the mobility and wide exposure of today’s adolescents means that the kinds of

relationships that they have with adults has changed. In the past, adolescents spent the majority of their time in the company of adults – watching them, learning from them, working with them; now, adolescents spend the majority of their time in the company of their peers without significant interactions with adults. Changes in the way that adults live and work – no longer on farms or in small industries – means that adults are not available to form the same kinds of relationships with their adolescent children.23 O’Keefe stresses that these changes – in the scale, mobility, and types of relationships that adolescents have – have resulted in a separation between adults and adolescents; this separation has led to adolescents feeling isolated and lonely. Adults have not

intentionally or systematically abandoned adolescents; rather, in the challenge to manage their own lives, they have become separated from their teenaged children.24

22 _{O’Keefe, “Growing Up Alone,” 79.}

23 _{O’Keefe, “Growing Up Alone,” 81. According to O’Keefe, mandatory schooling plays into this}

separation because it meets two needs: “the need to keep youth safely occupied while parents were away from the home; and the need to prepare youth for the demands of eventual employment as adults” (81).

24 _{O’Keefe, “Growing Up Alone,” 81-83. This separation is what has changed in the ways that postmodern}

adolescence is experienced. “What has been lost over the centuries were the multiple means by which youth were initiated into the social, cultural, and value worlds of adults. Quite simply, they spent their lives together, doing the normal work of living. In that social framework, adults were acting simply as adults accomplishing the work of life (labor, family, community membership, religious practice, etc.) and the adolescents were present for it all. Additionally adults were not interacting around adolescents primarily in their role relative to the adolescent (teacher, master, tutor, or coach), so adolescents had the chance to see the multi-faceted nature of adult lives. Over time it has been the separation of youth from the ubiquitous and ongoing company of multiple significant adults that has necessitated the need for

This separation and its accompanying sense of isolation means that adolescents are having to negotiate their growing up by themselves. Adolescents are reaching

puberty at earlier ages, are being pushed into a premature adulthood, and, because of their comfort with digital technologies,25 are presenting a façade of sophistication. Adults and institutions, distracted by their own concerns, no longer are primarily focused on guiding adolescents into adulthood. For adolescent boys, this milieu is difficult enough; for adolescent girls, this milieu is complicated by the set of conflicting pressures put on them by Hinshaw’s triple bind.

2.2 VULNERABILITY: FEMALE ADOLESCENCE IN THE