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Adolescence
Sometimes referred to as teenage years, youth, or puberty, adolescence covers the period from roughly age 10 to 20 in a child's development.
Adolescence is a border between adulthood and childhood, and as such it has a richness and diversity unmatched by any other life stage....Adolescents are travelers, far from home with no native land, neither children nor adults. They are jet-setters who fly from one country to another with amazing speed. Sometimes they are four years old, an hour later they are twenty-five. They don't really fit anywhere. There's a yearning for place, a search for solid ground.
—A description of adolescents by Mary Pipher in her 1994 book, Reviving Ophelia.
In the study of child development, adolescence refers to the second decade of the life span, roughly from ages 10 to 20. The word adolescence is Latin in origin, derived from the verb adolescere, which means "to grow into adulthood." In all societies, adolescence is a time of growing up, of moving from the immaturity of childhood into the maturity of adulthood. Population projections indicate that the percent of the U.S. population between the ages of 14 and 17 will peak around the year 2005.
| Year | Population, ages 14-17 (1,000) | Percent of population ages 14-17 | |
| Source: U.S. Bureau of Census, Current Population Reports, P25-1130. | |||
| 2000 | 15,752 | 5.7% | |
| 2005 | 16,986 | 5.9% | |
| 2010 | 16,894 | 5.7% | |
| 2025 | 17,872 | 5.3% | |
| 2050 | 21,206 | 5.4% | |
There is no single event or boundary line that denotes the end of childhood or the beginning of adolescence. Rather, experts think of the passage from childhood into and through adolescence as composed of a set of transitions that unfold gradually and that touch upon many aspects of the individual's behavior, development, and relationships. These transitions are biological, cognitive, social, and emotional.
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Author Info: Laurence Steinberg Ph.D., Thomson Gale, Detroit, Gale Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence, 1998 |
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