What Changes During Adolescence?

Find a therapist to support kids and teens

A study found that reading banned books predicted civic engagement more strongly than personality traits.

Reading banned books showed zero correlation with grades, violent crime, or nonviolent crime in adolescents.

Reactance theory explains why censorship backfires: Restricted freedoms activate curiosity and thinking.

Books kids choose for pleasure predicted higher GPAs while assigned school reading showed no such effect.

We talk about a lot of strange things in my Psychology 417: Science of Well-Being class. Several years ago, a student told me why she signed up even though she’s an engineering major.

She was 13 when she discovered most adults were full of crap. Now, most teenagers figure this out through the absurdity of 9pm curfews (because older kids have a different circadian rhythm) or arguments in which “Because I said so” is considered authoritative. Standing in front of a middle-school librarian, trying and failing to check out The Catcher in the Rye (most of all because it was not a book for girls), her self-talk repeated this is shite. As she waited for a decent explanation, all the librarian did was stand there, fingers drumming on the circulation desk.

She then found the book on a cart labeled “To Be Rearranged” in the back corner of the library. Someone’s parent had complained. The district had responded with enthusiastic efficiency.

Don’t get the character of this woman wrong: She is not a political activist with pink hair. She knows plenty of kids get told no every day and survive just fine. She merely relayed the moment when adults making decisions about what she could handle had no idea what she could handle. You would have thought they had an idea what she was dealing with in terms of bullying, big emotions, and all the rest. But they had no idea that protecting her from Holden Caulfield’s profanity-laced despair was absurd when her own........

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