Name: The case against adolescence
ISBN: 9781884956706

The case against adolescence

This groundbreaking book argues that adolescence is an unnecessary period of life that people are better off without. Robert Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, shows that teen turmoil is caused by outmoded systems put into place a century ago which destroyed the continuum between childhood and adulthood. Where this continuum still exists in other countries, there is no adolescence. Isolated from adults, American teens learn everything they know from their media-dominated peers?! @the last people on earth they should be learning from,? says Epstein. Epstein explains that our teens are highly capable?in some ways more capable than adults?and argues strongly against?infantilizing? young people. We must rediscover?the adult in every teen,? he says, by giving young people adult authority and responsibility as soon as they can demonstrate readiness. This landmark book will change the thinking about teens for decades to come.

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exhilarationJan 2022

There's a book about this: https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Adolescence-Rediscoverin...

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snuxollJul 2018

Robert Epstein has written two fantastic books on this exact topic, "The Case Against Adolescence" and "Teen 2.0" - the heart of both revolves around the artificial extension of childhood modern society has developed into this period we call "adolescence".

I'm a 90's kid, by the time I was 10 years old I stayed at home by myself and my 18 month younger sister after school and during the summer. We would stop by the store after school, visit friends, take the bus to the pool, etc, we just called our mother at work and left a message so she knew where we were. Hell, I had unfiltered access to the internet - and it's not like online predators were some foreign concept in the early 00's.

I can't say my daughter is going to have completely unmonitored internet access at 10 years old like I did, she's five years old right now and I've got network-wide content filtering deployed to give myself a little safety net in case she stumbles off the beaten path while playing a game or something. I intend to keep this deployed until she's old enough to properly police her own activity, but at a certain point I'll need to trust her to do the right thing and teach instead of restrict. I hope more parents can learn to do the same, and this extends into the physical world as well as the virtual one - we absolutely cannot treat teenagers like children that need to be coddled, they are adults in training and deserve an appropriate level of trust and respect.

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jseligerJul 2011

Indeed. That's part of the argument in Robert Epstein's book _The Case Against Adolescence_ (more here: http://jseliger.com/2011/04/11/the-case-against-adolescence-... ).

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