ABSTRACT

Adolescence has been described as a period of life that starts in biology and ends in society (Kagan, 1975 ). This portrayal indicates that the onset of adolescence is denoted by the hormonal changes of puberty, whereas becoming an integral part of one’s social environment marks the conclusion of this period of life. For many youths, however, the description is unfi tting: while virtually all youths go through the biological transformations of sexual maturity, a signifi cant proportion of young people do not end up in society , rather, they become maladjusted and marginalized. Youths who become marginalized, that is, end up on the outskirts of society, are the very youths whom this book is about. They show maladaptive and dysfunctional behavior and they can teach us much about how to intervene and how to prevent such problems in future generations of adolescents. Socially, the family is still infl uential in adolescents’ lives, although the importance of peers and other important individuals in their social network increases. When teenagers’ tendency to seek excitement, novelty and risk is particularly strong in the company of peers, it is partly because they respond strongly to social rewards (Dobbs, 2011 ): “Teens prefer the company of those their age more than ever before or after” (p. 55). The reason why peers become the main show rather than a side show is that they usually offer far more novelty than the family does. But even if adolescents want to learn primarily from friends, they also turn to their parents for support and advice. If youths experience too little autonomy in their relationships with adults, they may turn to peers for contact and support. However, those who deviate too much from the norms and values of age-mates are likely to be rejected by peers too. Among those most at risk for being socially excluded are aggressive and uncooperative adolescents who lack self-control and withdrawn adolescents who lack a positive self-image and who do not know how to be assertive. In the next section of this

chapter we take a closer look at transactions between adolescents and their proximal contexts represented by the school, the family and peers.