CHAPTER IVADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY
THE period of adolescence is truly one of storm and stress, caused by the wrecking of boy-nature to rebuild it into man-nature; it is a cataclysmic bursting of the bonds of infancy in preparation for the larger stature of manhood. In early adolescence the boy is neither child nor man. He is in the chrysalis stage of metamorphosis, which is shedding the characteristics of childhood and putting on the maturity of the adult. Neither one nor the other, he is a part of both. Adolescence covers the period of the boy’s life between puberty and maturity. Puberty is the earliest age at which the individual is capable of reproducingthe species and it usually begins at the age of thirteen or fourteen, subject to the influence of the factors stated in the preceding chapter. The growth and development of the sex organs during adolescence produce changes which are revolutionary rather than evolutionary in their nature. Marked physical alterations are always attended by still more marked psychic disturbances.
The physical indicia of puberty are the lengthening of the vocal cords, which causes the voice to change from the treble of boyhood to the bass of manhood and manifests itself in sudden and uncontrollable breaks in the voice in speaking and singing; the growth of the organs of reproduction and the filling of the seminal glands; the growth of hair on the pubes and face; the coarsening of the skin; broadening of the shoulders, deepening of the chest, and general changefrom the slenderness of childhood to the compactness of maturity.
This is the period of rapid physical growth wherein he shoots upwards like a cornstalk under the impulse of a July sun. Elongated arms and legs are now as conspicuous as they are unwieldy, and efforts to discipline them are futile. The demand for “long pants,” heretofore quiescent or erupting intermittently, now becomes insistent and finally bursts forth with a fury produced by accumulated repression and fortified by the assertion that “Johnny Jones wears ’em and I’m bigger’n him”—the last word in argumentative conclusiveness. Physical awkwardness and ungainliness, illustrated in his inability to manage his hands and feet easily or gracefully, is due both to the extraordinary and rapid growth of the body and nervous system which takes place at this time, and to his instability of mind,wholly apart from his knowledge of social usages.
The psychic disturbances produced by adolescence are still more pronounced. The adolescent is in the throes of discarding the mental concepts of the child and adopting those of the adult. His viewpoint is lifted until his mental and moral horizon broadens to distances heretofore undreamed of and discloses new and strange moral and ethical problems. Old concepts melt away in the light of a newer and stronger vision. Sex-consciousness overwhelms him with its complexity and unrecognized import. The mental concepts of maturity clash with those of childhood. His barque is sailing on uncharted waters, without compass or rudder, while a fierce storm of uncertainty and instability beats about him as he experiences the travail of the birth of a new soul. It is truly the age “when a feller needs a friend”—onewho can pilot him safely through the storm of adolescence to the calm of manhood.
Truancy reaches its flood tide during adolescence. The instinct of wanderlust appears in response to the promptings of his savage nature, his unease of mind, and his desire to know the unknown in the world about him, and culminates in runaways as a revolt against the exercise of parental authority which he believes to be unnecessarily restrictive or severe. He is now in the formative, fermenting period when he is reaching out to find himself, with indifferent success.
There is at this time a noticeable want of continuity of purpose or action. He jumps from one interest to another, evincing little stability of mind. There is want of psychophysical coördination. The transmission between mind and body is faulty; andthe imperfect gear of intellect and will frequently fails to engage the cogwheels of morals. The machine works poorly because it is neither complete nor fully equipped. Workmen are still engaged on the unfinished job.
William now evinces a disposition to find fault with his home, his clothing, his food, and restrictions on his conduct and routine. He betrays a mental uneasiness unknown to prepubertal days, and a willingness to argue with his parents in a self-assertive or combative mood quite unlike his former self. Incongruities of character are shown in petulance, irritability, disobedience, stubbornness, and rebellion, sometimes even taking the form of cruelty to persons or animals. This latter manifestation has been ascribed to atavism which manifests itself in the recurrence of the savage traits of his primeval ancestors. Dr. G. StanleyHall thus comments on this tendency in his exhaustive work on adolescence: “Assuming the bionomic law, infant growth means being loaded with paleoatavistic qualities in a manner more conformable to Weismannism, embryonic growth being yet purer, while the pubescent increment is relatively neoatavistic.”
His proximity to the savage state is shown in his appreciation of primitive humor. The unexpected which causes discomfiture or pain is excruciatingly ludicrous. It is the crude, slap-stick comedy which excites his disposition to risibility. The knockabout comedian who falls down stairs or beats his partner over the head with an inflated bladder produces the same degree of laughter in a boy as the felling of one savage by another with a war club produces in the onlooking members of their tribe. The rapier wit of keen intellectuality and the subtle humor offine distinctions observed in a play on words all pass over his unscathed head.
He is a living paradox who displays at times the gallantry, courtesy and chivalry of the knight-errant with the thoughtlessness, rudeness, and boisterousness of the harum-scarum rowdy.
Sex-consciousness now asserts itself in an increased but diffident interest in the opposite sex, accompanied by blushes, embarrassment, and self-consciousness when in their presence. The desire to appear attractive in the eyes of his girl friends prompts minute and painstaking attention to dress, and the brilliant plumage of the male bird is reflected in the bright colors of his attire. Formerly he regarded girl playmates from the same viewpoint from which he regarded boys and they were placed on the same plane and received the same consideration as that accorded to those of his own sex, exceptwhere the teaching of the sex-conscious parent required him to display a gentleness toward them which his own lack of sex-consciousness failed to prompt. Now, gentleness, courtesy, and gallantry are inspired by adolescence from within. The companionship of the adolescent with pure, high-minded girls of his own age is beneficial to both in the greatest degree. Such associations are of educational value in that they project high ideals of the feminine traits of gentleness, sweetness, and purity whose influence is reflected in his improved manners, dress, and conduct. It fosters the idealistic and spiritual phase of love and removes it from the coarseness and baseness engendered by the purely sexual appeal. These love affairs are numerous but transitory—their duration being dependent upon the time required to satisfy his idealism; and at the first suggestion that his idol has feet of clay his affectionis transferred to another pretty face and sweet nature. Not infrequently he bestows his affection upon a girl several years older than himself, to which he is actuated by two impulses—the half-formed sex-impulse of the man to seek a mate, and his adolescent need of “mothering,” both of which are measurably gratified by the reciprocal love of an older girl.
He begins his love-making slyly and shamefacedly. George waits after school, occupied with an ostensible engagement which will consume the time until Mary shall appear. His meeting with her, after all these elaborate plans, appears to be quite unexpected. A diffident greeting is followed by an inquiry as to whether she is going home. Her affirmative answer is seized upon as his excuse for walking in her direction. Then follows his request to be permitted to carry her books. They discussmatters of mutual interest in school or social life, while he, with furtive glances, notes the beauty of her face, the wealth of her hair, and the velvet of her cheek. Sunlight is playing hide-and-seek in her eyes, while the roses in her cheeks blush a deeper red, matching the ribbon which adorns her pigtails as she feels the flood of his unexpressed admiration surging over her. Never was there such a wondrous being in all the world! He idealizes her every attribute until she surmounts a pedestal far removed from things earthy. A smile of approval from this young goddess is treasured in his heart of hearts, sacred from the misunderstandings of a profane world. He is assailed by daydreams of knight-errantry in which he is performing some chivalrous act of heroism to which the maiden shall be a witness. Or better still, he imagines himself playing the part of a cavalier rescuing her own sweetself from distress or danger and then receiving as his reward her avowal of affection, while he protests that his heroism is nothing and that he would do a thousand times more for her.
Evidences of his tender regard for the girl of his choice are given in secret, as too holy for an unappreciative world to comprehend, and the twittings of his elders on the subject of puppy love (cruel in their unsound psychology) are met with prompt and positive denials. Such manifestations of incipient affection should be recognized as the intermediary elaboration of a high and spiritual love whose ultimate fruition will be matrimony. All the world loves a lover—provided he is not a boy. The adult who cannot see the psychology in such incidents must be blind indeed.
The exceptional plasticity of mind characteristic of this age renders him highly susceptibleto influences for good or evil. It is the great character-building period of his life in which are crystallized his moral and ethical concepts which attain their latter perfection in the succeeding period. Your boy is putty in your hands. He is a superlative impressionist. His impressionistic mind is molded as deeply by evil as by good. For this reason, it is necessary that his environment—which is the cumulative influence of the precept, example, and conditions which surround him—should be good and wholesome. As the drip-drip-drip of water wears away the stone, so the constant drip of environing influences wears its way into character.
The foundations of will-power are now laid in his efforts to propel himself into a choice between the good and the bad, between right and wrong. Judgment and discretion appear in embryonic form andslowly and laboriously develop into cautious discernment and the faculty of deciding justly and wisely, which reach their approximate maturity late in the reflective period.
It may be interesting to note that the law presumes that every person at the age of fourteen has common discretion and understanding, until the contrary is made out; but under that age there is no such presumption. It therefore follows that when a child under fourteen years of age is offered as a witness in a court of law, a preliminary examination conducted by the judge must be made to ascertain whether he has sufficient intelligence to relate the facts as they occurred and sufficient moral sense to comprehend the nature and obligation of an oath. But the law is conservative in its presumption, as such intelligence and moral comprehension are, in most instances, developedin the child at a much earlier age and numerous cases are cited in the law reports in which children as young as seven or eight have qualified, after examination, as witnesses competent to testify.
During this period occur three cycles of particular susceptibility to religious influence. The first appears about the age of twelve under the stimulus of witnessing the conversion or affiliation with the church of some adult whom he looks up to, and is chiefly due to the faculty of imitation—one of the characteristics carried over from the individualistic period; the next occurs at age of fourteen, when his emotionalism is dominant, under the excitement of a powerful emotional experience; the third cycle of religious conversion appears at sixteen when he is leaving the heroic period and entering the thoughtful or reflective stage of his adolescence and such a conversion isgrounded in the thoughtful promptings of the intellect, rather than the emotions.
This is also the age of experimentation in which his longing to know the unknown leads him to make short excursions into the fields of mechanics, physics, electricity, hydraulics, magic, and others which hide their secrets from the casual observer. This trend of his activities may be directed by suggestion, supplemented with the necessary equipment, toward manual training and handicraft—ideal employments for the early adolescent.
This is the age of hero-worship and every boy in this period, without exception, has a personal hero. He may not take the world into his confidence by divulging his secret, but whether admitted or not, he possesses a hero whom he looks up to, admires, and copies. I know a thirteen-year-old lad whose hero is his eighteen-year-old cousinfor whom his admiration manifests itself to the extent of trying to imitate his tone of voice, his walk, his gestures, and personal appearance, including the wearing of the same kind of ties which his cousin affects. He never ceases praising the football prowess of his relative and continually quotes him as an authority on athletics.
The boy of this age worships a physical hero. Power, strength, and authority make a powerful appeal. His hero may be the policeman on his beat who is the emblem of physical strength and vested with the authority of law to make arrests; the fireman who displays wonderful courage in the rescue of imperiled persons from burning buildings; the engineer who guides the locomotive dashing like a meteor through the blackness of night; the prize fighter who has won a championship in the squared ring; or the baseball or football athlete whosename is on every tongue. His hero must be a mighty man of action, for he worships at the shrine of athletic prowess. To test the truth of this statement, ask any boy you may meet, between the ages of twelve and sixteen, whether he would rather be the winner of the Nobel prize for scientific achievement or Ty Cobb (with a batting average of approximately .370), and the unanimous verdict will be in favor of the ballplayer. So strongly is hero-worship implanted in his nature and so completely does it dominate his viewpoint that it remains, with gradually diminishing intensity, for many years thereafter. Happy the boy whose father is his hero and happy the father who is a hero to his son!
The objective of hero-worship is always an older male—never a female. No instance of normal heroine-worship has ever been noted. The wealth of love which he maymanifest toward his mother, female friend or teacher is entirely disassociated from hero-worship. It lacks the sex-element necessary to inspire emulation. He wants to be a man—not a woman. For this reason, it is desirable that he should have opportunity for association, during adolescence, with men of strong character and personality. The differences between the psychologic processes of the male and the female adult are too well known to require discussion here. Widows who keenly appreciate the absence of the father’s guiding hand frequently attempt to be both father and mother to their sons, and in so doing the apron strings are knotted doubly hard and fast. Then ensues a conflict between the feminine and maternal policy and the adolescent longing and reaching out for ultimate masculinity. The mother is the last person to recognize adolescence in her son;she wants him to remain the infant she has always regarded him. His beginnings to emulate masculinity clash with her desire to keep him a child. I have in mind a mother who is rearing the most lady-like boy in my acquaintance. Her inherent delicacy and refinement of nature prompt her to develop these same qualities in her son as the ultimate end to be attained. With no qualifications for boy-training except mother-love, feminine ideals, and an ambition to rear her son to beautiful manhood, she refuses him participation in rough and tumble sports and games because they are “rude and ungentlemanly” and besides, they would soil his clothes. Many mothers of the neighborhood hold him up to their own unregenerate offspring as a model of neatness and a paragon of propriety, but the boys call him “Sissy.” The author has witnessed many examples of apron-string policywhose unpsychological and repressive tendencies cannot fail to be detrimental to the ideal development of adolescence.
Gratitude is a virtue displayed by few boys prior to the reflective period, because they fail to appreciate the motives which inspire the act which should call forth expressions of gratitude, especially if the act or service is of an altruistic nature. Of course, he will thank you for a gift of candy or a toy; but never for the time and thought expended in giving him instruction or moral training, or taking him in the woods for a day, or pointing out to him the constellations at night. He is not ungrateful. He merely accepts these things as a matter of course until he reaches the age which recognizes and appreciates the sacrifices incurred by the giver of altruistic service.
The beginning of the reflective period witnesses the subsidence of the fierce stormsof earlier adolescence and is followed by comparative physical and emotional calm, although attended by intellectual agitations of lesser import. The boy now enters an era of mental development characterized by a thoughtful, reflective attitude toward the great problems of life. A serious viewpoint is developed which changes the previous aspect of the world. He devotes much thought to his life-work; to making choice of an occupation or profession and preparing for it. His future career looms large in the foreground of his problems, and prompts a close analysis of his inclinations, aptitudes, and qualifications for special lines of work. The realization that he must soon take his place among the men who are doing the world’s work overwhelms him, at times, with the immensity of his job. Introspection, as a part of his self-analysis, becomes a habit which induces him to makecontinual comparisons between his own natural endowments and those of others of his own age. He seeks, with all the faculties at his command, to find that niche in the business, professional, or industrial world which he can best fill and it is at this time that he needs the vocational guidance of his father.
Early in this period a morbid self-consciousness frequently appears as the result of a too minute introspection with eyes whose views of life are not correlated. He discovers defects in his personal appearance, faults of character and deficiencies of intellect which are magnified out of their true proportions. His sense of perspective is in its formative stage and this causes many molehills to loom high as mountains. He is now his own most severe critic and imagines that his immature conclusions as to his personality are shared by all others; andmany hours of humility and mental depression ensue from this condition. Egotism and an exalted appreciation of his own worth are also manifest, due to the same uncoordinated sense of values. He often exhibits alternate states of exaltation and depression produced by a trifling remark or a trivial incident which is given an importance it does not deserve. As he advances through this period, his perspective finds truer adjustment, his sense of values becomes settled, his judgment ripens and these anomalies disappear. But he may be saved many hours of soul-stress by the father who is able to diagnose his condition, or who is on sufficiently intimate terms of confidence with his son to inspire a frank avowal of his troubles. Here is the opportunity for the father to apply his common sense, ripe judgment and experience to the solution of these problems of the later adolescent.
Attention has already been called to his impressionability to religious influences during the early part of this period through an appeal based in intellectualism (as distinguished from the emotionalism of the preceding period), to which the ethical concepts now being formed are closely related.
Another distinguishing trait is the evolution of his sociological consciousness through which he recognizes himself as a unit in the social economy, with all its attendant rights and duties. He discards the selfishness and individualism of an earlier era and adopts the obligations of altruism. His desire to be of genuine service to his fellow man seeks expression first in visionary plans to reform the world, followed afterward by practical work in help for others, such as leadership in boys’ clubs, secretarial duties or teaching in Sunday schools, or similar employments of altruistic purport. Governmentunder processes of law takes on a newer, clearer and more personal meaning. And with it comes recognition of civic responsibility.
Intellectual storms gather when vague, unassorted, inchoate, and impossible theories of social and political reform—long since tried and discarded—loom big on his horizon and are eagerly seized upon and advocated as original discoveries. His opinions are expressed with a dogmatism which characterizes the cocksureness of youth. Verbal limitations inspired by sound judgment and broad experience, as well as the cautious phraseology of scientific conservatism have no place in his vocabulary. His theories are all promulgated with an arrogant assertiveness born of the optimism of inexperience. He is now fairly bursting with self-importance. But all these manifestations are important only as indicating his desire to solvethe great problems of life and are the precursors of a sounder judgment which will come with maturity of intellect and experience.
It is at or near the beginning of this period that the youth looks down on the younger boy, whom he characterizes as a “kid.” The dislike and even positive aversion of the older boy for companionship with the younger has its basis not so much in their differing physical and mental attainments as in their differing viewpoints caused by their unequal psychological development. Illustration of this may be observed in two boys, both of whom are sixteen years of age and of equal mentality and physique, one of whom has and the other has not entered the reflective period. Such boys are out of harmony with each other in every taste, desire, and predilection which is actuated by psychological impulse, and find a commonground of companionship only in athletics and classroom studies.
Will power, born during the heroic period, is now stimulated to rapid growth which culminates during the latter part of the reflective period. No longer is he a straw borne on every passing wind of influence, but a human being capable of exercising a moral choice between two courses of action.
His mental and moral stature has been reached by gradual and almost unnoticed gradations; and such growth, which had its beginning in blank chaos, has been even greater and more marvelous than his physical growth between birth and maturity.
Self-flattered, unexperienced, high in hope,When young, with sanguine cheer and streamers gay,We cut our cable, launch into the worldAnd fondly dream each wind and star our friend.—Young’sNight Thoughts.
Self-flattered, unexperienced, high in hope,When young, with sanguine cheer and streamers gay,We cut our cable, launch into the worldAnd fondly dream each wind and star our friend.—Young’sNight Thoughts.
Self-flattered, unexperienced, high in hope,When young, with sanguine cheer and streamers gay,We cut our cable, launch into the worldAnd fondly dream each wind and star our friend.
Self-flattered, unexperienced, high in hope,
When young, with sanguine cheer and streamers gay,
We cut our cable, launch into the world
And fondly dream each wind and star our friend.
—Young’sNight Thoughts.
—Young’sNight Thoughts.