Adolescence
Quotes - Adolescence is an inside job
“I
don’t even pretend to understand it all. I was president of the Luther League,
the youth group of our church. I was a good kid and a bad kid at the same time.
I was looking for a very nice girl but also a very bad girl. Do all young men
have these conflicts? And, what about whores? Well, in my mind, prostitutes are
bad girls. Matter of fact, they are professional bad girls. As I said earlier
in this diary, you don’t make love to whores, you fuck them. There’s a
difference. They don’t require love and courtship, all they want is my money. I
go to the bedroom with them and do the deed with no affection. They take my
money and leave. All my life I have been told that girls who have sex outside
of marriage are bad girls... sluts. I’ve also been told by my dad, “Son, sex is
the most beautiful expression of love in a marriage.”
Although
I can appreciate the difference, that being, sex is meant for marriage only; my
psyche has some difficulty reconciling the two messages. Sexually active girls
are bad but sexually active wives are good. I’m afraid that someday if and when
I wed the Pollyanna I’m looking for and fulfill my husbandly duty with her, I’m
going to feel like I’m turning a good girl into a bad girl. In other words, I
change my wife into a slut. And here’s the weirdest part: if my wife becomes a
slut, the good boy in me will reject the bad girl I created in her. My angel
and devil will be in a clinch hold.”
―
Gerald Maclennon, God, Bombs & Viet Nam: Based on the Diary of a
20-Year-Old Navy Enlisted Man in the Vietnam Air War - 1967
“Adolescence
as the time when an individual ‘recapitulates’ the savage stage of the race’s
past.”
―
G. Stanley Hall
“Being
a 13 year old girl is simply the worst experience you can have in life,
including all cancers and bear attacks. It is a daily series of betrayal and
base humiliations that you must figure out a way to look cute during”
―
Karen Kilgariff & Georgia Hardstark
“Adolescence
is an inside job. In the 1990s, Suniya S. Luthar, Ph.D., studied adolescents
and found that ninth-graders with an internal locus of control - those who felt
they had some command over the forces shaping their lives - handled stress
better than kids with an external orientation - those who felt others had
control over forces shaping their lives...Locus of control is not an
all-or-nothing concept. None of us are entirely reliant on one or the
other...But more and more often, the teenagers I observe aren't even partially
internally motivated. They persistently turn outward toward coaches, teachers,
and parents...A startlingly large number of these teens are behaving like
younger children. They're stuck performing the chief psychosocial tasks of
childhood - being good and doing things right to please adults - instead of
taking on the developmental work of separation and independence that is
appropriate for their age. When faced with teenage-sized problems, they often
have nothing more than the skills of a child.”
―
Madeline Levine, Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and
Rapidly Changing World
“Too
many of the teenagers I encounter in my practice and across the country are
late in developing what it will take to function as an adult and create adult
relationships: agency, independence, intimacy, fortitude, and self-reliance.
Often it's because their community (not just parents but also peers, teachers,
and extended family) is focused exclusively on the high-school paper chase and
fails to encourage these qualities. I try desperately to convince these teens
and their parents that delaying the emotional work of adolescence is dangerous.
"We're
discovering that the brain during adolescence is very malleable, very
plastic," Steinberg says. "It has a heightened capacity to change in
response to experience. That cuts both ways: On the one hand it means that the
brain is especially susceptible to toxic experiences that can harm it, but it
also means that the brain is susceptible to positive influences that can
promote growth. That's an opportunity we're squandering.”
―
Madeline Levine, Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and
Rapidly Changing World
“I
was about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood”
―
Michael Ondaatje, Warlight
“...I
hate myself. I feel like an idiot saying it because, blah, blah, teen angst,
boo hoo, but I do. I hate myself. Almost all the time. I try not to tell anyone
because I don't want to burden them, but I feel like I'm falling farther and
farther away from them. Like the well's getting deeper and I'm running out of
energy to climb it and any minute now, any second, it's going to stop being
worth even trying.”
―
Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Don't
worry about any of this stuff, okay?
It's
all just adult junk that doesn't mean anything.”
―
Jillian Tamaki, This One Summer
“We
must turn all of our educational efforts to training our children for the
choices which will confront them... The child who is to choose wisely must be
healthy in mind and body. The children must be taught how to think, not what to
think.”
―
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth
for Western Civilisation
“Yet
GenX'er teens didn't slow down--they were just as likely to drive, drink
alcohol, and date as their Boomer peers and more likely to have sex and get
pregnant as teens. But then they waited longer to reach full adulthood with
careers and children. So GenX'ers managed to lengthen adolescence beyond all
previous limits: they started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming
adults later.”
―
Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less
Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for
Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us
“I
know this doesn't exactly make me unique, but I love the internet. I love it. I
think the way I feel about the internet is the way some people feel about the
ocean. It's so huge and unknowable, but also totally predictable. You type a
line of symbols and click enter, and everything you want to happen, happens.
Not
like real life, where all the wanting in the world can't make something exist”
―
Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited
“So
the best advice I could give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school
somewhere in Mexico, India or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much.
Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world.”
―
Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
“Lying
half-asleep in his embrace, I looked up and saw on his face the same expression
I saw on countless lonely faces every day. It was the homesick look of the
children who were lost in the chaos of warfare, witnessing death and disaster,
longing for a meaningful touch.”
―
Kien Nguyen, The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood
