Joseph P. Allen and Claudia W. Allen: Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow up before They Grow Old

Joseph P. Allen and Claudia W. Allen seek to challenge the popular view that adolescence is inevitably a troubling part of the life span driven by raging hormones and immature brains. The authors do this in Escaping the Endless Adolescence by drawing on their combined forty-5 years of experience as adolescent psychologists and psychology professors. Although this book could be useful to individuals studying developmental psychology, it was written to help parents and educators understand how to prevent children from suffering the effects of the endless adolescence. Throughout the book, Allen and Allen draw on their experiences as expert psychologists focusing on the adolescent period and as parents. They provide real life examples to make the material and their arguments more relatable to the audience. The cited examples preface each chapter and are broad enough that they can be relatable to issues the general audience is facing with their own children. The authors also provide instruction on how to alleviate the issues with simple exercises designed to challenge the adolescent. This book is a must read for all parents of adolescents and high school teachers because it explains how to make our children more responsible members of society as well as how to help them avoid falling into the tumultuous cycle of an endless adolescence. In the first chapter, the Allens open with the story of an adolescent client named Perry. Perry was a straight ‘‘A’’ student with loving parents; yet he was miserable and anorexic. The authors cite Perry’s situation to provide a more serious example of what many teens encounter: high pressure, a need for more personal responsibility, and a decrease in the excessive amount of parental restraints. Their suggestions are well taken, in that research indicates quite well that parental support and warmth rather than control in adolescence is correlated with less involvement in deviant acts (Johnson et al. 2011) as well as numerous positive health outcomes (Lessard et al. 2010; Windle et al. 2010; Kakihara et al. 2010) and especially identity development (see Smits et al. 2010). Next, The Allen’s introduce Ellen, an eighth grade lacrosse player who was a decent student. Ellen was brought to the Allens after her parents discovered that she was having oral sex with her boyfriend and his friends for excitement. The authors soon turn to an introduction of the nature of endless adolescence where responsibility is taken away from teens and they are no longer contributing meaningfully to society. This change leads to young adults who appear to be succeeding, however, they often find themselves lacking the knowledge of how to obtain a job, manage their finances, and even live on their own. Parents believe that they are ‘‘nurturing’’ their adolescents by stripping necessary responsibilities from their routines. Ultimately, this infantilizes the adolescents and prevents them from acquiring basic skills necessary to be a functional adult. The Allens use these abstract examples to describe how teens no longer feel a ‘‘sense of accomplishment’’ because the goals they are working toward (mainly school) are abstract and the results are not instantaneous. In Chapter 2, the authors explore the nature of the teen brain. Allens’ colleague Tim Salthouse studies how people think and how their thinking changes with age. Salthouse’s research found that an individual’s ability to maintain information as well as the processing speed of memory decline after the teenage years. Next, a client named Sam is introduced to further help explore the findings reported by Salthouse. Sam was an adolescent who constantly moved K. Susik (&) Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: Ksusik@indiana.edu