How we grow up Understanding adolescence

Pulitzer-winning journalist Richtel (Inspired) provides an uneven investigation of modern adolescence. Building on his New York Times series on the adolescent mental health crisis, the author makes two major arguments: first, that adolescence helps to diversify humanity and culture because adolescents challenge "the way thing have always been done" in ways that staid adults no longer can. The second is that today's adolescents are hitting puberty at an earlier age, rendering them especially vulnerable to the influx of information unleashed by their smartphones and leading to an unprecedented spike in mental health problems. Among other topics, Richtel delves into dialectical behavioral therapy and other interventions that might help struggling adolescents, and how the "desire to explore" that traditionally fueled risk-taking in the physical world has been turned inward as today's teenagers explore a virtual landscape. Those individual points are insightfully explored with the aid of valuable research from neurologists and child psychologists, but they can get lost amid the book's patchwork structure and well-worn discussions of the ways addictive technology harms developing brains. The result is an intermittently intriguing exploration of a pressing topic. (July)

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 byNew 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'sSorrows 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.