Our culture has come to believe that adolescence is naturally a tumultuous time and thus has blurred the lines between behavior that is normal and exploratory and behavior that is dangerous. All of these myths compound and validate parent's fears about their adolescent children. Parents who believe that they just barely survived their own adolescence may be frightened to death that their teenager will not. And no matter how big of a risk-taker a parent was, he or she is scared by the new risk behaviors available to today's teens. It is during adolescents that young people experiment with many aspects of life, taking on new challenges, testing out how things fit together, and using this process to define and shape both their identities and their knowledge of the world.
Adolescence is a time when, quite literally, young people are learning how to think and how to act.
Their increasing cognitive skills play a significant role as they take risks and learn to understand and appreciate the consequences of their behavior. In turn, experimenting with new behaviors and feelings can promote more complex thinking, increase confidence, and help to develop a young person's ability to assess and undertake risks in the future. This experimentation greatly affects adolescents' relationships with parents and other important adults in their lives. As they struggle to define themselves as separate individuals, they want to be recognized by adults for the unique people they are and will become. Their struggle is not all adolescent rebellion, then, but a much more complicated and fascinating process.