Adolescence — ‘storm and Stress’.

Adolescence and Social Change

By Xiyun Xu

1. Adolescence — ‘Storm and Stress’

Adolescence, a transitional period of growth and development between childhood and adulthood was once an ambiguous phrase and has been neglected until Stanley G. Hall (1904) first identified adolescence as a period of sturm und drang (“storm and stress”). His view that adolescence was a turbulent stage accompanied by conflicts between contradictory emotions like energy, curiosity and indifference continued to be addressed and challenged by psychologists. However, rarely has this storm-and-stress view been considered correctly and much researches have been conducted into revealing that not all adolescent experience storm and stress during this period. Arnett (1999) characterized adolescence with three key aspects: conflict with parents, risk behavior and mood disruptions. He partially approved of Hall’s view and argued that adolescent bore a degree of storm and stress in some aspects, but this process was not something inevitable or indelible, there were cultural differences in storm and stress as well as individual differences within cultures.

For the past few decades, globalization accelerates the process of rapidly social development, bringing about tremendous benefits in economy and technique. On the contrary, it also poses severe problems on the growth of youth. The average American adolescent are faced with the problems of economical independence, family conflicts, religion in addition to sex adjustment, a number of burden suddenly appear at the same time, making the adolescent stand in the peak of high pressure and difficulties, thus leads to a debate on whether social change brings about more pressure on adolescent and exacerbates the way they ‘storm and stress’. I argue here that social development indeed exerts more stress on adolescent but it is also culturally determined. Tracking back to the primitive societies of Samoa, adolescent there perhaps experience the pleasantest period of their lives, no taboo relating to puberty, no anxious nor shame of girls’ menstruation make adolescent become the least stressed group in the tribes. While looking into another primitive society called Manus, strict rules and severe punishment impose fear and obedience on the adolescent as well as stress. The existence of differences between these two primitive societies is resulted from culture diversity, which lies in their attitudes towards puberty, whether to stress it or not. Meanwhile, the unneglectable differences between modern society and primitive society emphasizes the role of social development. This paper will present specific case studies on Samoa, Manus and American societies accompanied with a research study in Fiji to illustrate the influences on adolescents brought by social changes.

1. Primitive Societies—Samoa and Manus

One distinguished and vital feature of adolescence seems to be physical puberty especially for girls who will have menstruation. Along with the development of societies, the attitudes towards puberty also develop from primitive societies to modern societies. In primitive societies, every tribe has its own settings and custom. Let’s first looking at a typical society—Samoa. In Samoa, a primitive society in the western of America, the adolescent girls there have perhaps the pleasantest period of life. Owning to the particular cultural background, there are no significant taboos relating to menstruation. Although Samoa use puberty as a demarcation on girls and women, they do not avoid, forbid or segregate women from the daily life. Women are not forbidden to prepare food while having menstruation, everyone can talk freely about their own states even girls can share their new states with boys. Outdoor activities are not limited to boys nor girls. Since girls have acquired and learned all the facts about physiology and procreation from early childhood, there are no fear, anxious or shame when girls have their first menstruation, and they never have to take on the weight of other people’s discrimination. Probably because of these, the transition from childhood to adulthood takes place smoothly and painlessly. In addition, the social structure of Samoa is simple and stable, there is little uncertainty and conflicts, Samoan have nothing to worry about besides subsistence. Therefore, we can reach that adolescent girls in Samoa are likely to have far less stress than the modern adolescent girls.

Another primitive society will be introduced is Manus, which has a totally different situation compared with Samoa. Manus is located in northern Papua New Guinea and is the largest of the Admiralty Islands. Due to the different cultural background, Manus has much more rules and limitation on girls. Here the attention of the whole community is centered about wealth, particularly the flow of property. In contrast with Samoa, Manus use the betrothal as a demarcation on girls and women instead of puberty. Children are often betrothed at an early age, accomplishing through the exchange of property between the kin of bride and the kin of groom. When a girl has an engagement, ceremony for this girl may occupy the entire community for days or even for weeks. Moreover, in Manus, they also treat puberty as normal things with no discrimination. However, girls in Manus may not have a pleasant time in adolescent period for the reason that Manus do not take personal feelings into account. Personal feelings and psychological importance to girls are ignored along with strict rules and limitations. Rather than meeting someone’s individual will, Manus forbids any unruly behavior including the romance between boys and girls. Furthermore, the informal, in other words—without permission, sex experiment will be punished by the tribe. It’s useless for a girl to consider its own willing, neither can she seize any moment in her life to realize her dream. After the marriage, Women need to be absolutely loyal to their husbands and any indiscreet behavior would be criticized and punished by the tribe. Both Samoa and Manus are societies with low level of civilization, adolescents in Manus are obviously under greater pressure than adolescents in Samoa. From all the descriptions above, it’s not difficult to tell that the primary cause is cultural differences between the societies. In brief, adolescents in different societies, due to the various cultural background, have to bear diverse degree of stress imposed to them.

1. Modern society — America

For the past few decades, we have seen great change took place across the world, which has been viewed as the greatest social transformations that have ever occurred on the global scale. One most crucial phenomenon during this social change seems to be the trend of globalization. Globalization is characterized by international trade and investment as well as technology progress, modern communications technology like computers, the internet, television has been widely popularized on account of globalization. Many European and Asian countries underwent and probably will continue to undergo the process of social change, while globalization benefited many states by the development of economic and technology, it also imposed some negative influences on the countries and their citizens. Adolescents, which are considered as the most emotional, vulnerable group, are most likely to become the victims of globalization. In the following paper, I will specific choose American as a typical country to illustrate how social changes are influencing adolescents' physical, cognitive, and emotional development.

Erickson (1964) describes adolescence as identity crisis, he argued that young people must independently search for their own identities to achieve maturity. However, adolescent may encounter with identity confusion and depression when searching for identities. In American, adolescent girls are always found running into distorted identities caused by media image. American customer culture and media have a powerful influence on the public, especially on adolescent girls, who especially searching for beauty and fashion products. The success of marketing to youth lies in creating a desire and illusion of a particular identity. For example, a weight-losing product may target some fatty girls and let them realize the ‘gap’ between themselves and the ideal, and then provide them with a solution, even some may never become a solution. Since media imposed profound effects on American youth, their consciousness towards identity has increasingly shifted from mind and character to visual appearance (Lasch, 1979). As a result, their become more vulnerable to the fantasy that they can change the inner selves by reconfiguring their bodies and appearances, which in the end, leads to disappointment and self-loathing (Becker and Hamburg, 1996). At the same time, adolescence being exposed under media is also implicated in the risk of developing eating problems. Girls’ illusion of slim, beautiful figures may cause them to diet and deteriorate into eating disorder. Actually, numerous researches and experiments have been conducted and demonstrated there exists an association between media and change in body image (Chen and Farruggia, 2002). Worse still, contemporary eating disorder might generate disease such as anorexia, which is the decreased sensation of appetite.