ABSTRACT
Today's adolescents are very different on the 'outside', but the 'inside' has probably changed very little. In public, it really seems as if teenagers exist most intensely in the interstices of the adult world. School, parents and the government impose a variety of regulations on teenagers. The adolescent challenge to the adult world is partly, though not entirely, a product of the arrangements post-industrial societies have made for their young. Several things happen simultaneously at puberty, and it is the pace and the extent of these changes that probably does more than anything else to produce the embarrassment and self-doubt of early adolescence. Two dynamic forces operate to help adolescents 'separate and individuate'. Most adolescents naturally desire independence, but negotiate it only gradually. However, the prospect of living away from their families flings some adolescents into outright panic, just as the commencement of sexual maturing coincides in others with a retreat into the behaviour typical of a younger child.
