Richard Lerner: The Good Teen: Rescuing Adolescence from the Myths of the Storm and Stress Years

Richard Lerner seeks to challenge the societal consensus that adolescents are necessarily troubled. He most recently does so in The Good Teen, by using research results, anecdotes, statistics, and his thirty plus years’ experience of studying adolescence. Lerner presents the perspective that ‘‘Most teens – and there are about forty million of them between the ages of ten and nineteen – have an undeserved bad rap’’ (Lerner 2007, p. 11). Even though academics can benefit from reading The Good Teen, it was written for parents with the hope of initiating a widespread societal transformation in the way adolescence is viewed and the manner in which adolescents are treated. Lerner presents and uses what he calls ‘‘the five Cs’’ and ‘‘the big three’’ throughout his book. He does so to do more than simply disseminate study results; he seeks to instruct parents how to put research into practice in what he refers to as Positive Youth Development. Lerner named the five Cs competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring (with an additional C of contribution if the other five are present). The big three involve how to aid teens in developing the five (or six) Cs by (1) fostering constructive and enduring interactions with adults, (2) designing activities to cultivate life skills, and (3) fulfilling leadership functions within the community. Lerner uses fascinating examples to exemplify the aims, even including anecdotes involving his three children. The book is a must-read for all parents of adolescents or pre-adolescents because, without it, the ‘‘bad rap’’ may well endure and parents, teens, and society at large will not thrive. Lerner begins Chap. 1 with an example he deems a metaphor for our times: Mark Twain’s depictions of the characters Tom and Huck. Tom’s Aunt Polly represents the manner in which today’s society thinks of adolescents: incorrigible, stubborn, willful, and disobedient. The fact that Twain depicted the boys as being far more than that— courageous, full of character, concerned with justice, ingenious, committed, and persistent—should become the new metaphor for our times; and it can once society realizes that just looking at a small piece of adolescence deprives everyone of the chance to help teens develop in a positive way. Lerner’s book amply shows that the belief that teens are incorrigible did not emerge in a vacuum. For example, it is no coincidence that it is far more common to hear of teenage rebellion, school shootings, run-a-ways, suicides, drug problems, and further deviant or deficient behavior than to hear about teens who go to school, do volunteer work, and lead contributive lives. Bad news perpetually makes news with greater frequency than good news. This tendency has developed into an almost unanimous belief that the norm is for adolescence to be problematic. In Chap. 2, Lerner emphasizes that, while academics have been disproving this negative belief for decades, the knowledge has not, perhaps until recently, begun to trickle into mainstream society. Daniel Offer showed that there were multiple paths through the adolescent years; Jack Block found that adolescent development was not rigid; but characterized by plasticity, and Albert Bandura concluded that aggressive behaviors did not result only from adolescence, but before (p. 31). Despite these more positive understandings of adolescence, parents generally continue to act as though teens are necessarily flawed, media continues to portray them as troubled, and society continues to act as though teenagers are ‘‘broken’’ and in need of being ‘‘fixed.’’ Lerner’s book seeks to change the negative perceptions through small steps that can make big differences. J. S. Jackson-McLain (&) Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: jacksojs@indiana.edu