Being Adolescent

A pioneering psychologist’s portrait of the sorrow, joy, and strife of being a teenager

“A hopeful book…[written with] wit and, often, great descriptive power.” —Washington Post

Of all stages of life, adolescence is the most difficult to describe. Teenagers are maddeningly self-centered, yet capable of striking acts of altruism. Their attention wanders, yet they can spend hours concentrating on seemingly pointless tasks. This unpredictability and changeability is what defines adolescence, as these are the years a developing person can experiment with contrasting lifestyles, and with different selves. For all that the field of psychology has recorded about the years between age twelve and nineteen, the subjective experience of being a teenager has remained elusive. In this groundbreaking book, psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson set out to determine what it’s actually like to be a teenager, what they think, and how they feel about their ever-changing lives.  
 
To write Being Adolescent, Csikszentmihalyi and Larson gave beepers to seventy-five adolescents, signaled them at random, and asked them to record their thoughts and feelings as they sat in classrooms, socialized with friends, and ate dinner with their families. The result is a unique and detailed portrait of the day-to-day world of the average American teenager—the obstacles, the joys, the pains, and above all the opportunities that confront adolescents on their way to forging an adult identity.