Thursday, April 12, 2007

Should Adolescence be Abolished?

Dr. Helen has a podcast with Robert Epstein. Dr. Helen starts her post with:

Are we infantilizing teens to the point that we are raising a nation of wimps? Is adolescence extended so long that people have grey hair by the time they become adults? Robert Epstein, Director Emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts and author of The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, will discuss these questions and more on today's podcast.

You can listen to the podcast by going here.

Dr. Epstein's claim is that we are damaging teenagers by letting them wallow in adolescence. His book sounds interesting. I've asked the local library to get it.


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, it doesn't stop at high school. This kind of thing continues right into college, in my personal experience, probably due to parents being so worried that their kids are doing stupid things. And they probably are, but one can hope they might learn something from experience for a change.

I hated being treated like a kid when I felt it was about time to be treated like an adult, so I dropped out to get some life experience under my belt. You know what? I consider it one of the best decisions I've ever made. College will still be there tomorrow (and five years from now) and I love where I am in life right now.

Henry Cate said...

Things were hectic yesterday and I only listened to the first twenty minutes or so of the podcast.

One of the claims Dr. Epstein made was that teenagers have more restrictions on them than people in prison. And that the trend over the last fifty years has been to keep adding restrictions on teenagers.

I did hear a couple things on the podcast that I didn't believe, but I think he made some good observations. As children grow up we should give them more responsibility.