HOW WE GROW UP

Exploring an anxious age.

Each year, now, seems to have its own identity: tots, tweens, teens, young adults. Each generation has rewritten codes of growing up: boomers, millennials, X, Y, Z, Alpha. Into this mix, adolescence has emerged as a distinctive category—a time not bounded by chronology but by sensibility. The adolescent is a rebel: No I won’t. The adolescent is a questioner: Who am I? The adolescent is a blamer: It’s all your fault. The latest book by New York Times journalist Richtel (A Deadly Wandering, An Elegant Defense) offers a cultural history of this stage through a series of short chapters focusing on problems, possibilities, and individuals. This is not a book of science or sociology. It’s a book of storytelling. We get vignettes of Napoleon reading Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, becoming, in effect, a case of arrested adolescent development; of the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who wrote the first real medical account of adolescence in 1905; of modern neurologists mapping the youthful brain; and of a clutch of today’s kids, each of whom has a tough life worth telling. In the end, adolescence is revealed to be “by evolutionary design a period of risk-taking, and of diversification….Diversity and exploration [are] essential for surviving in an unpredictable world.” Adolescence, then, becomes the key moment of personal growth, when we reject or accept social norms and adult expectations. These days, that moment involves confrontations with anxiety and depression, eating disorders and desires, and the judgments of social media. It’s a hero’s journey, both for child and parent. Written in a colorful, journalistic style, this book should be at the bedside of every parent who believes they are alone but really aren’t.

A vivid set of inquiries into the science, social history, and personal experience of adolescence.