ABSTRACT
During the International Year of the Youth, in 1985, the United Nations defined youth as those between 15 and 25 years of age (Brown, 1990). Thus, youth overlaps with the category of ‘childhood’, which is commonly defined as anyone under the age of eighteen (de Waal, 2002a). In its western usage, the category of youth is elastic. For example, Galambos and Kolaric (1994) distinguish between ‘young adolescents’ (10-14), ‘teens’ (15-19), and ‘young adults’ (20-24). Further, in common AngloAmerican usage, the term ‘teen’ is reserved to those 13-19 years of age. The term ‘adolescent’, previously used for a wider age category (15-24) is now used interchangeably with ‘teens’. And the term ‘tweens’ was introduced in the 1990s to refer to young people aged 10-12.
