ABSTRACT
In the course of my career many people have asked me why I study adolescence. Adolescence is without doubt the Cinderella subject within developmental psychology. It gets less attention than other topics in the textbooks, in the curriculum and on research agendas. So why would someone want to spend their life studying this rather unpopular stage of the life cycle? Colleagues might suggest that the choice has something to do with my own experiences of the teenage years. Perhaps I am trying to understand my own “storm and stress.” Or am I someone who simply never grew up? My own memories of adolescence are not unhappy ones, and I suspect that the reasons I study this topic are more to do with formative experiences in my early twenties than with any unresolved teenage trauma.
