How Adolescence Transformed the Adult World
By: The Excerpt Cornell University Press
Tags: Teenagers, Adulthood, TV Shows, Culture Change

Age, it is often said, is just a state of mind. You’re only as old as you think you are.

Nowadays, it seems that many have taken this reassuring adage to heart. Individuals ages twenty to eighty seem little concerned about adhering to traditional adult norms, favoring instead the free and easy ways of youth. If Dick Clark was once dubbed the “world’s oldest teenager,” many of us these days appear to be vying for that title, hoping to remain forever young even as we move forward through the latter stages of life.

In some cases, this may reflect a deliberate effort to adopt a youthful frame of mind in an attempt to stave off the inescapable reality of growing older. But often an adolescent way of thinking and acting seems to come very naturally to people. Instead of consciously seeking to recapture their youth, they are simply doing and expressing what feels instinctively right, reflecting the fact that in some important sense they have never really fully grown up.

This, at least, is the way the phenomenon is often presented in popular culture. A case in point is the Adam Sandler movie Grown Ups, about a group of men who are clearly anything but, along with countless other forgettable films in which Sandler plays the stunted man-child to perfect effect. TV shows like Arrested Development and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia follow a similar script, depicting characters who fall short of the adult mark in various ways with their erratic and self-absorbed behavior. Talk radio features outlandish hosts, such as shock jock Howard Stern, whose boorish broadcasts suggest an adolescent mentality hard at work, while reality TV includes shows like Carpool Karaoke where celebrities channel their teenage selves as they drive around town singing favorite pop songs at top volume.

If examples of adults acting like adolescents appear in many corners of the entertainment world, there are also signs of this same trend emerging in different avenues of real life. In our work, leisure, and personal pursuits, we some-times act in a surprisingly impetuous manner, letting our impulses and emotions get the better of us rather than displaying adult qualities of balance and self-control. Some of us actively resist the trappings and responsibilities of adulthood throughout our twenties, our thirties, and even later, giving rise to widespread diagnoses of the so-called Peter Pan syndrome. For rest and relaxation, many adults these days prefer amusements — video games, superhero movies, comic books — designed first and foremost with teenagers in mind.

Clearly, these descriptions, and others like them, do not apply to everyone all of the time; but they encompass enough of us enough of the time to sup-port the conclusion that a youthful spirit now holds considerable sway and has reshaped important elements of modern adulthood. We have entered what might be termed the age of adolescence, an era where there is an adolescent aura to much that adults think and do. It is, without doubt, an important social and cultural development that warrants closer investigation.

…

One way to gain insight into these changes is to look closely at teenagers them-selves and their shared social setting — the subject matter of a classic sociological work from more than fifty years ago. In the late 1950s, James Coleman carried out a close study of ten American high schools, seeking to learn more about adolescents and their orientation toward schooling. He published the results several years later in The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education. What Coleman discovered through his research was that the social, not the educational, dimension of the high school experience was paramount. When gathered together in the high school setting, teenagers occupied a separate and distinct social space largely immune from adult influence, and with this came a tendency to “develop standards that lead away from those goals established by the larger society.” This adolescent society, as Coleman named it, was an inevitable by-product of the high school education system with the potential to decisively reshape the perspective and priorities of teenagers.

More than a half century later, the book continues to be a reference point for those who believe that herding teenagers together for several years in splendid isolation wasn’t necessarily the wisest social experiment we’ve ever undertaken. “The child of high-school age,” Coleman warned, “is ‘cut off ’ from the rest of society, forced inward toward his own age group, made to carry out his whole social life with others his own age. With his fellows, he comes to constitute a small society, one that has its most important interactions within itself and maintains only a few threads of connection with the outside adult world.” In this insular world of the adolescent society, teenage traits and behaviors were free to flourish largely unchecked and unchallenged.

Coleman was mainly worried about the effects of this social cocooning on teenagers themselves. His principal concern, in other words, was with the impact of the modern adolescent experience on adolescents. My work focuses on another important impact of teen segregation. Spending critical formative years in a social setting dominated by like-minded peers not only shapes who we are as adolescents; it also promotes a more permanent etching of adolescent habits and characteristics, leading to their continued influence into the adult years. Some of our teenage ways may be cast aside as we move forward to adulthood, but an important residue remains, deeply ingrained in our personal inventory of embedded instincts, norms, and values. And so Coleman’s phrase “adolescent society” no longer applies only to the realm of teenagers; it is also a fitting description of the larger society’s gradual absorption of deep-seated adolescent qualities. Fifty years on, a new understanding of adolescent society is in order, along with a new book to explain its origins and significance.

We can glimpse the connection between these different conceptions of adolescent society in two classic television sitcoms. Happy Days was a show popular when I was young that depicted the lives of a group of typical American teens in the 1950s, offering a stylized portrayal of adolescent society around the time that Coleman was writing on the subject. Seinfeld, for the one or two of you who haven’t heard, was set in the adult world of the late twentieth century, following the daily activities and diversions of four thirty-something adults living in New York City. The parallels between the shows are telling. In both cases, the action revolves around four fast friends who spend a lot of time hanging out in diners — Arnold’s burger joint in the case of Richie Cunningham and his pals on Happy Days, Tom’s diner for Jerry Seinfeld and friends. There is a rough alignment of characters: each features a rebel who bucks convention (Fonzie and Kramer), a nerd who wants nothing more than to be accepted and well liked (Potsie and George), a smart aleck who delights in giving the nerd a hard time (Ralph Malph and Elaine), and an amiable lead character at the center of the action (Richie and Jerry). Their banter focuses on similar themes and preoccupations: relationships, social status, what they’re going to do that weekend. They share a vague sense of being at an unsettled stage, trying to figure out who they really are and where they’re going in life, though no one seems in any great rush to sort it all out. The overwhelming sense in both cases is of a group of people mainly preoccupied with themselves and the present. If TV shows provide a window of sorts into the spirit of the times, the affinities between Happy Days and Seinfeld hint at the way that adolescent ways of thinking, acting, and being have seeped upward into adult life.