I wrote this paper for my adolescent development in social contexts class, and decided to throw it up here.

The assignment was to write a response paper as a reflection on one of the class readings. The content of the response paper is pretty open ended: “they may be a critical response to or exploration of a portion of the readings, a comparison of the issues raised in two or more readings, or an analysis of reading in light of broader issues that have been discussed in class.”

The article to which I decided to respond is “We know some things: Parent-adolescent relationships in retrospect and prospect,” a 2001 work written by Laurence Steinberg, published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence. In his piece, he reviews the most important research done in the past 25 years in the realm of adolescent development in the family context – what’s considered a normal relationship, how variations in relationships affect the family, and how parents and other adolescent guardians can learn from this research.

One of the topics Steinberg covers is the changes of family relationships adolescents and their parents experience as a result of conflict. He states that many adolescents, and even professional adolescence researchers, believe these conflicts are trivial, and don’t have much of a lasting impact on their relationship. This appears to be true for adolescents, as they seem (on a long-term scale) unaffected and unbothered by these tiffs, but their parents seem to have a harder time moving on from these fights.

When looking closer at these types of fights, Steinberg concludes that the subject of these fights is perceived differently by the parent and the adolescent: “to a parent, maintaining a clean room is something that people do because it is the right thing to do … to the adolescent, how one keeps one’s room is one’s own business” (6). Thus, parents believe they are arguing about morals, while adolescents believe they are arguing about opinions and preferences.

After reading this, I was able to see a clear connection with another work, “How Not to Teach Morality,” from William Kilpatrick’s 1992 publication Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong. After explaining different strategies of moral instruction, Kilpatrick implies in his conclusion that the best way to teach morality is to take what’s right and essentially command children to follow by those guidelines. He also says that this is particularly important for parents because they care the most about their children, while others (including school teachers and the adolescents themselves) don’t necessarily agree with this method because teachers think it’s good for adolescents to engage in Socratic thinking, and adolescents perceive thought-provoking teachers as more fun than teachers who just tell them what to do.

Linking this back to Steinberg, it appears like the parents of adolescents he studied to come to the difference-in-perception conclusion are already employing Kilpatrick’s recom­mended method of moral instruction. However, the core of the problem seems to come from two different sources – first that adolescents refuse to agree that learning by simply obeying commands is beneficial to them, and second that adolescents do not yet understand that these concepts pertain morals and not preferences. Although the first source may be difficult to fix, we may find progress by attacking the second source and being explicit with the adolescents that these matters, no matter how strongly may believe otherwise, do not pertain to opinions, but are instead ways of the society in which they live.

Moving on, at the end of his article, Steinberg addresses the practical and real-world application of the content of his article in the section “Implications for Policy and Practice.” He shares his findings: “parents state that they want information on how to keep their teenagers healthy, but they often do not have access to the best and most scientifically grounded advice. … Misinformation and erroneous stereotypes about adolescence fill bookstores, flood the Internet, and dominate portrayals of teenagers and their parents in the [media]” (15). Although I agree that there is lots of deceptive and incorrect information available, I strongly disagree that parents “do not have access” to good information – instead, I believe the best information is in plain availability if parents know where to look.

Steinberg states that a solution to this would be to develop a “systematic, large-scale, multifaceted, and ongoing public health campaign to educate parents about adolescence that draw on the collective resources and expertise of health care professionals, scientists, governmental agencies, community organizations, schools, religious institutions, and the mass media” (16). However, I feel as if this education is already readily available, but parents are not taking advantage of it. For example, going to the non-fiction section of a library will net plenty of books written by well-known developmental psychologists; searching through local community college course listings will yield affordable parenting classes taught by those who have earned doctorate degrees in their respective fields.

As a result, I believe the better option to address this problem is to inform parents about how to use these already-available resources and why their use is important. For example, health professionals can offer parents lists of books, Internet articles, and videos that accurately outline adolescent development when the parents take their adolescent to the doctor’s office for a check-up. They could also attach some information letting parents know that their adolescent is undergoing natural biological and psychological changes, these changes will affect their relationship, and learning about these changes using the resources provided in the list will greatly improve the transition of adolescence. These two methods will address both parents who believe there is no good information available, and parents who believe adolescence is a myth.

In summary, Steinberg takes the most important recent research and compiles it into a cohesive article outlining changes in family relationships during adolescence. The two aspects I analyzed were how small arguments are indicative of perceptual differences in terms of morals and preferences, and how parents can be better equipped to deal with the troubles that arise during their child’s period of adolescence. Overall, the best solution seems to be clear communication – communicating with adolescents to let them know of their parents’ thought processes and intentions, and communicating with parents to let them know of their children’s change.