NCJ Number
225625
Journal
Journal of Adolescent Research Volume: 24 Issue: 1 Dated: January 2009 Pages: 3-20
Date Published
January 2009
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This article argues that this new biodeterminist "science of adolescence" now cascading through American media and political forums incorporates major violations of scholarly ethics, research fundamentals, critical scientific debate, and the right of young people to objective and accurate treatment; applying a science historian's skepticism is likely to find ample reasons for alarm in the way brain research has proven "vulnerable to over-simplification, over-interpretation, and the confirmation of prior prejudices."
Abstract
Theories affirming innate adolescent risk-taking benefit adults by emphasizing the irrationality and disturbance of young people which further affirm adult rationality, peacefulness, conformity, and decency. Biodeterminist claims about adolescents shift attention away from social inequalities that form the genuine bases for the risky behaviors now mislabeled "adolescent risk," including the large and widening gap between the economic fortunes of young versus middle-aged Americans. They allow the dismissal of unsettling youthful complaints against adults as merely the products of faulty teenage thinking. They obscure the troubling eruptions in drug abuse, criminal arrest, imprisonment, HIV, family breakup, and related difficulties among middle-aged Americans over the last 25 to 35 years. That young people's brains are different because the experience of young people is different than that of older adults confers distinct advantages in a changing diversifying society. Unfortunately, both young people's well-being and the adaptive value to a changing society of integrating the diverse capacities of older and younger thinking are threatened by today's resurgence of biological determination that, like its discredited predecessors, reveals more popular prejudice than scientific rigor. References