The Beauty of the Adolescent Age Group

Often regarded as a time of chaos, views of this age bracket should be reevaluated as a time of potential and great energy.

I have been teaching and working with adolescents for over twenty years, and I am constantly amazed by how frequently people respond to my answer to "What do you do for a living?" with comments such as "Better you than me!" or "Oh my, that takes a special person!" I wholeheartedly disagree. I believe that this age group has such an amazing energy and is rich with interesting viewpoints, excitement, and change.

I do agree that there is often chaos and disorder accompanying this time period, but to me it is exciting to watch these individuals grow and to watch their unique talents and abilities come together in a polished package as they end their adolescent period. Teenage brains are undergoing amazing changes they will never undertake again, so it is understandable if things get a little messy in the process. I often liken this time period to cleaning out a closet and how, about halfway through, you may look around and wonder what you have done as everything is so much messier than when you started the process. But if you just keep working at it, the end result is an effective, organized, even-better-than-before product.

I think we need to afford these individuals, our teens, greater respect and spend more time understanding the biological underpinnings of their behavior and devote a more significant level of our own energies to their proper and healthy development.

“I often liken this time period to cleaning out a closet and how, about halfway through, you may look around and wonder what you have done as everything is so much messier than when you started the process.”

One of my absolute favorite and most influential writers specializing in this age group, Mary Pipher, referred to a friend of hers in her book Reviving Ophelia by saying,"My horticulturist friend says that the environment is the richest and most diverse at borders, where trees meet fields, desert meets mountains or rivers cross prairies." This quote has always stuck with me as such an effective way to describe and value what this age group has to offer. These individuals are not completely adults yet, nor are they completely children. They often have a foot in both worlds and vacillate between the behaviors of the two. In my experience, the result is often individuals who have the social connectedness of young children mixed with the humor, savviness, and edge of the adult years. This is a delightful combination in my opinion.

The Purpose of This Blog

This post, as well as future posts, will center around this very focus: respecting and honoring our teens. The goal is not to overwhelm or criticize any who teach, parent, or work with this age group who are already busy, possibly overwhelmed, and trying their best in a new and daunting period of development. The goal instead is to provide brief nuggets of tools, tactics, explanations, and resources in very brief, digestible forms to make life with our teens as fun and enjoyable as it has the potential to be.

Happy reading and thank you for taking part in this movement!

What's Happening Here? (Physically)

A lot of changes are happening to our teens, some visible and some invisible. This post gives a short breakdown of the physical changes that are happening to our teens that explain some of their behaviors and choices.

If you have spent any time around teenagers, you have seen the tremendous amount of change that happens in such a short period of development. These changes also begin at different times for different teens, which is why if you didn't know any better you may walk through the halls of any high school assuming there was a ten year span in student ages, as opposed to four or five. Below are some key physical changes that happen to our adolescents, along with things to keep in mind for their physical comfort and health.

The first physical changes our teens experiences are in their skeletal and muscular systems. Brown and Knowles (2014), in their brilliant text What Every Middle School Teacher Should Know, share that adolescents may grow as many as four inches in a single year. They share that growth is often two years of rapid growth and then a few years of more steady even growth. The authors share a study by Sheehy, et. al (1999) that suggests that bone growth in adolescents surpasses muscle growth and another by Van Hoose and Strahan (1988) that describes a fusing of the three tails bones of adolescents to their final form. The implications of these studies are important to the health and comfort of our teens. Firstly, coaches and parents should be aware that the physical demands of athletics, which are higher than ever before, can be difficult on the bodies of our teens. Single sport specializations and the intensity of training schedules can cause overuse injuries, which appear to be on the rise. Tailbone fusion can make sitting on hard seats and for long periods of time uncomfortable. Offer soft seating and moments to move without consequence. Allow teens to experience a variety of sports and chances to rest when their bodies express the need for it, without penalty.

These skeletal changes often leave our early adolescents looking like baby deer, gangly and slender, before the changes even out and typical adolescent weight gain fills in their frames. These changes also happen in an "out-side-in" manner that is important to know (BBC Science, 2014). Hands and feet grow first, giving teens a case of the the "falls" and "drops." My own daughter misjudged her height gain and physical changes while leaning on the open refrigerator door, resulting in tipping the entire structure forward and emptying its contents violently through the kitchen, dining room, and hall. A student of mine (by no means the only one to experience this) hit a significant growth spurt and could barely stay on his feet. These situations can cause embarrassment and self-consciousness, just when teens are only wanting to be noticed when they feel in control of the situation. Humor can help teens manage these challenges. For my frequent-faller student, we decided to make a wager to see if he could make it through the day, start-to-finish, on his feet. His best success during that high-growth-spurt period was the day he made to just a few minutes before carpool time before hitting the deck behind a couch. Making it a game added a sense of control and humor to what could be a very embarrassing and regular occurrence for him.

The next physical changes to occur during this time are hormonal. This is not news to anyone who spends time with teenagers, but often too many adolescent behaviors are attributed to hormonal changes, which leaves the teens and those who work with them with a sense of helplessness. Hormonal changes are seen as being inevitable and a roller coaster to simply be managed until the ride comes to a screeching halt. This is not necessarily the case, which we will dig into in a later post on the changes to the adolescent brain during the teen years. The main three take-aways for me in understanding hormones and the adolescent are these: 1) refrain from being dismissive of the thoughts and feelings of teens and attributing them solely to hormonal changes, 2) understand that even if some changes are hormonal, they may also be a part of typical brain development and there are healthy ways to address them (see future post), and 3) educating our teens in detail on what these changes are, what function they serve, and how to manage their feelings about them is critical. As a parent, it is important to look around for educational programs offered by area hospitals and mental health facilities. These can be enlightening for teens and parents and provide support for this invisible and challenging phase that has such important biological purposes.

As a parting note, there are two additional implications of the adolescent years in terms of physical development. The first is the importance of good nutrition at a time when their rapidly changing bodies need the proper fuel to do this work. Framing it to teens in that way may help them to see the importance and impact of their food choices. These suggestions should be managed carefully so as not to cause judgement and shame resulting from the parts of their body changes they cannot control. Good puberty education programs, like the ones mentioned previously, can help families develop the common language with their teens to impart suggestions without judgements.

The second parting implication is that quality and ample sleep is absolutely critical for teens. Sadly, the schedules of our society do not match the alterations to our teen sleep cycles that happen in adolescence. Just at a time when sleep hormones may be released later and our teens need the same or more sleep than they did in the toddler years, we pack their schedules and wake them up before dawn to send them off to school. Some innovative schools have begun their school days later and hold practices for athletics and clubs before school, easing teens into their days and saving their most awake times for their educational content. With that option being outside of reality for most of us, we are left to help our teens develop routines and rhythms that help them fall asleep, teach and require them to put away electronics that can wake them up through the night, and let them rest whenever we see the effects of sleep challenges appear.

For the next post, we will discuss the latest research on adolescent brain development and what that means for us all in practice. Thank you for reading and taking part in this movement to better understand and respect our adolescents!

Resources:

BBC - Science & Nature - Human Body and Mind - Teenagers. (2014). BBC Science: Human Body and Mind. https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/articles/lifecycle/teenagers/growth.shtml#:%7E:text=Hands%20and%20feet%20are%20the,forearm%20before%20the%20upper%20arm

Brown, D. F., & Knowles, T. (2014). What Every Middle School Teacher Should Know, Third Edition (3rd ed.). Heinemann.

Sheehy, A., Gasser, T., Molinari, L., & Largo, R.H. (1999). "An Analysis of Variance of the Pubertal and Midgrowth Spurts for Length and Width." Annals of Human Biology 26: 309-331.

Van Hoose, J. , & Strahan, D. (1988). Young Adolescent Development and School Practices: Promoting Harmony. Columbus, OH: National Middle School Association.