...but what about what we've learned in the last century about neurological and cognitive development? Obviously institutions have risen up to shape children into adult workers/citizens in a complex society instead of simply implementing them as unpaid farmhands on homesteads, but isn't there something to be said for the existence of adolescence as a recognizable phase in late childhood?

Didn't society recognize that young adults were irresponsible idiots long before marketers invented a name and a target demo for them? Plus ca change....

I totally agree that adolescence is a cultural construct. What I don't understand is what society gets out of reinforcing the dependence of people for ten or even twenty years beyond when they ought to be capable of functioning as fully contributing members of society. If Dr Epstein is correct in his assessments, there are significant costs in terms of crime, psychological problems, lost productivity, and plain old unhappiness by extending childhood too long. So what are we getting out of this deal?

Part of it I imagine is that our modern economy requires workers with more elaborate education and skills than were required for agriculturally based economies, and those skills take longer to master.

Having recently watched "Waiting for Superman" and thinking about this article, I wonder if the demands of our economic system for perpetual growth and innovation are taking us beyond the capabilities of average humans. I mean, is it really in humanity's best interest for it to take 25-30 years for rank and file citizens to acquire all the skills necessary to contribute as more or less self-sufficient members of society? And the constant educational chant of "more math and science" - yes of course we all should gain at least basic competencies in those areas, but we are not all gifted in them. Yet it seems that the direction our economy is taking us will mean that those who are not gifted in math and science, or alternately financial services, will be doomed to struggle.

What stood out glaringly to me in WFS was the push for young children to spend more and more time away from their families in formal educational settings, even to the extent of removing them from their families almost all together in the case of the boy sent to boarding school. In our modern economy families play a smaller and more passive role in preparing children for adulthood. It just makes me wonder, when will it end? Will it end? And, whose interests are being served by this economy? It seems like more and more of us are finding we are square pegs trying to meet the remands of our economy. Shouldn't the economy be our tool, and not so much our task master?

(Sorry for getting lost in my own tangent :0)

I don't have my references handy...but The Children's Culture Reader has a diversity of articles which describe conceptions of childhood across the West, starting in the Middle Ages. Those conceptions seem to have been vastly different from our own, but children weren't just viewed as very short, physically vulnerable adults. There are well-documented schools and pedagogical materials for children throughout history wherever societies grew complex enough to support them and wherever parents could afford to send their children - ie, the Chinese schools run for the children of the upper classes in the 16th/17th centuries, the cathedral schools in Europe in the Middle Ages, etc. Children who could walk and reason often (but not always) had far more autonomy than children do today, but they were not figured as adults.

Through the Middle Ages in Europe, apprentices and students were considered to be wild and dangerous--and they were. Apprentice-hood and university were times of student societies, lots and lots of drinking, pranks and riots. That's not adolescence precisely as we conceive it - again, students and apprentices had far greater autonomy than teens do today--but it certainly wasn't adulthood.

Franco Moretti's At Home In The World, a history of the bildungsroman, or novel of character formation, describes something like adolescence in its treatment of Goethe's late-18th-century Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship--that is, young adulthood in the novel is described as a time of character formation separate from adulthood.

If anything, adolescence and childhood have come into being wherever there were resources to support them--there are all kinds of social advantages to recognizing life stages quite separate from the marketing angle. More time for education before work begins, the pleasure of spending time with one's children, the creation of better methods of discipline and teaching that are more appropriate to the physical state of the child, etc etc. You could easily argue that it is childhood which is encoded into humanity, appearing whenever it's not destroyed by hardship. (I wouldn't argue that.)

Philippe Aries, author of the landmark social history Centuries of Childhood (which to my mind suggests that childhood is an evolving category, but not a novel one), was criticized in recent years because he hypothesized that since children were painted dressed as miniature adults, they were treated socially that way. It now appears that children weren't actually dressed as miniature adults every day; those clothes were for best and were worn in portraits to make the families look important.

I agree with the point, but suing a particular word to make the point is very sketchy. Words go in and out of vogue somewhat more quickly than the social constructs they describe.

The thing we forget is that while yes, adolescents were expected to do adult labor, they were not usually expected to be adults in other senses. They weren't expected to go and live on their own or run a business. Most continued to live with their parents, though some would have a small house of their own a few doors down. They would go to their parents for advice on most issues. Girls might marry, but her spouse was her guardian and she was not expected to perform as an independent adult until much later, once she had been a mother for a while (assuming a post-agricultural society; of course teens didn't usually marry until 18+ in non agricultural societies). Some would go into universities and apprenticeships or the military, but they were essentially replacing their parents with other adults who supervised them. In a way, it's not that we suddenly created a transition between childhood and adulthood, it's that we acknowledged that most parents are no longer in a position to employ their child, apprenticeships and the military were often exploitative, early marriage is dangerous, and adults today are so isolated that it is difficult to supervise a young adult unless you have legal guardianship over them.

Hm. I feel like this idea that prior to a certain time (depending on who you ask, this could be anywhere between the 1890s and the 1970s) that everyone started doing 'adult work' and were treated 'as adults' the second it was physically possible is historically inaccurate, and also isn't consistent across history, societies, and various subgroups within societies. One big example given is the idea that 'your grandmother/great-grandmother had to get married and have babies basically the second she hit puberty' (plus probably a quip about how the man was probably 30 when she was 15, and her father 'owning' her). This is very indicative of our own racialized and class-based focus on history, as well as an apparent inability to discern between any time period between 1300 and 1960. Neither of my grandmothers got married and started pushing out babies the second they got their periods; they were born in the 1920s, and based on their lifestyles (working class people) that would be totally irrational. By the time they were teens, world war 2 had broken out; there weren't many men their age around to marry. Plus, that left a lot of jobs open; girls their age had to be in school or working (though I suppose working would count as an adult task, but a different one than the example). Working class men also tend not to have the means or motivations to sell off their daughters to wealthy business associates. Both of them finished high school and had jobs before getting married and popping out babies, and one continued to work until the 1980s. And when they were in high school, they had VERY MUCH an 'adolescence.' If you look at the statistics, honestly, only specific groups in the US practiced the idea of 'selling your daughters' like that even long before the rising life expectancy and independence of women. Most of them were very wealthy, or poor and rural. Just because you were an 'old maid' at 21 doesn't mean everyone got married at 13; generally women married in their late teens or early 20s. Men, who got married later, typically had AMPLE time to behave like teenagers, well into their 20s or 30s.

Also, just because a word was made popular at a certain time doesn't mean the idea was unheard of. It may have just been spoken of or treated differently. Honestly, I'd attribute the huge spike post-1940 at least partially to the fact that prior to that point, not many books were written specifically targeting young adults, or about young adults. After that point, not only was there more of a 'teenager culture' emerging (as opposed to a pre-adult culture, because honestly, the idea that there was no type of adolescence is silly), but there was more hysteria among adults regarding that teenager culture (paradoxically, probably caused by parents being less controlling with teenagers). Language evolves just as much as cultures do. To say that eyeballs weren't a popular culture prior to the Elizabethan age because no books before them mentioned the word would be a ridiculous claim.

And finally, just because teenagers had to take on adult tasks (almost always out of necessity, rarely just because they were there) doesn't mean they SHOULD have taken on adult tasks. If your life expectancy is 35, there is an incentive for 13 year old girls to get married and 13 year old boys to do manual labor. But that does not mean that 13 year old girls are suited to childbirth or that 13 year old boys are suited to coal mining. That means that those things will not get done if the 13 year olds aren't brought into the work and birthing force. Thirteen year olds throughout history have NEVER really been mentally or physically best suited for those tasks that we consider adult, and that's why they don't do them unless there is a need. (Also why I said that girls often got married and were treated as baby machines earlier more typically in certain classes; an urban middle class Victorian teenage girl has no incentive to get married and have babies immediately. But if she is an aristocrat, she needs to start gunning for a male heir as soon as possible, and if she is living on a farm, it may be of her family's benefit to have more children around to help on the farm)

I don't buy into the idea that adolescence is a social construct. The "rise" of adolescence as a widespread cultural phenomenon does not mean it was invented.

We have to keep in mind that up until this past century the majority of human beings on the planet lived and worked in agricultural communities and many of those communities were at subsistence or near-subsistence levels. So, of course adolescence isn't going to have a big role in a society where the average life span is 30 or 40 years and where children are needed as workers so that their family can eke out enough food to survive.

Yet, in nearly every society (that I can think of, at least) that accumulates enough wealth to afford doing so, adolescence emerges as a stage of life that youth are allowed to partake in. That indicates to me that there is something universal or intrinsic about adolescence as it relates to human development.

Of course, the problem with this debate is the ambiguity of the word "adolescence." I just read the Dr. Epstein article linked to above and it is specifically addressing one form that adolescence can take - cultural rebellion and anti-social attitudes. That seems like a very Western-centric perspective, I'm not sure that's how the rest of the world, even today, sees adolescence. I'm also not sure that his references to the litany of laws restricting the behavior of minors applies outside of U.S. borders. The U.S. has a very unique legal atmosphere and the highest incarceration rate on the planet - the situation here does not necessarily reflect the situation globally. More importantly though, this is ultimately a critique of a particular form that adolescence can take - not an argument that "adolescence" as a whole is a social construct.

I also see a contradiction in his argument. He argues that teens should have greater freedoms. Yet, one of his supporting arguments is that there are many non-Western cultures where teens go through adolescence without taking on anti-social or unproductive, rebellious attitudes. The problem is that, as he points out, youth in these non-Western cultures are often under the direct supervision of adults and they spend their time in primarily adult environments. "Independence" is of course a subjective term but it could be argued that the Western model, where teens get to spend their time in a peer group of their own age and of their own choosing and where they're not perpetually engaged in direct supervision by an elder, have far more independence in this comparison.

In American society, it's possible the concept of "adolescence" is new. But the Ancient Romans had a similar category, in which men (as far as I know, only men) were given much greater leeway when it came to misbehavior in this stage. Technically, it was a legal defense, so one could claim "boys will be boys" and get off with lighter punishment. The stage lasted well into the 20s and Cicero was involved with a case where he claimed this defense for a 30-year-old. And I think that AlgebraAB has a good point, that society at subsistence levels is different from America today. The ancient Romans who used this concept could employ a concept of adolescence because they were generally well-off and these young men had spare time and money.

I'm fuzzy on the details, and I might be over-simplifying, so anyone who knows better please step up to the plate. My point, though, is that the concept of adolescence might be experiencing a resurgence, but it is not a new concept.

Major pet peeve:

What on earth is the y-axis in that graph? Percent WHAT?

That's a very pretty graph with a very distinct change that is rather useless without knowing what the axis is. It would also be nice to see some statistics for significance, considering those are VERY small numbers.

This is very indicative of our own racialized and class-based focus on history, as well as an apparent inability to discern between any time period between 1300 and 1960.

Again, I don't have any sources except my memory of history class, but the age of marriage went up quite high at certain points in pre-industrial/early-industrial European history. In one period, I think in the late 17th century, the average age at marriage for both genders was in the early-to-mid-twenties, because due to economic conditions it was so difficult to save up enough money to start a household.

Actually, now I'm starting to wonder why we're so attached to the "adolescence/childhood is a modern [and implicitly false/problematic] invention" narrative. Why exactly are we so eager to hurry people into the workforce by arguing that it's lazy/frivolous/an artifact of capitalism to keep them in school? (Everything is an artifact of capitalism.) Why are we so anxious to say "women have it so easy now, since they aren't their parents' property and don't have to produce babies as soon as they hit puberty"? Whose interest do these narratives serve?

It's pretty ridiculous to assert that adolescence was 'invented.' Just because something wasn't acknowledged doesn't mean it wasn't there, and all psychiatric research points to the fact that adolescence is a unique time developmentally. Adolescence is socially constructed just like everything else, but that doesn't mean it wasn't also 'discovered' as opposed to made-up.

"What I don’t understand is what society gets out of reinforcing the dependence of people for ten or even twenty years beyond when they ought to be capable of functioning as fully contributing members of society"

Easy: lower wages. Only "adults" are assumed to need "adults" wages. Everyone just thinks a 20 year old with money will spend it on booze as opposed to, say, rent, bills and family. The longer we take to become adults, the longer we'll work for "pocket money". Nowadays, virtually everyone between 15 and 30 years old works just to get some money to spend on the weekend. The result? People can't afford to leave the parental home, be responsible for themselves, that sort of thing, which in turn stops them from developing properly.
Also, yes, a smaller workforce. If you are a "student" you don't count as "unemployed".
And "adolescents" are the biggest consumers of needless stuff, which modern economies are predicated on. There would be far less people in Starbucks and Mc Donalds if everyone became an adult at, say, 15.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the fact that adolescence as a life stage is socially constructed, the google n-gram corpus is not evidence one way or the other. Just compare the rate of "adolescence" to "adulthood."

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=adolescence,adulthood&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Adulthood actually starts rising later than adolescence does! Does this mean that the concept of being an adult was non-existant before 1920 or so? Of course not.