Review of Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us by Lucy Foulkes – diving into the adolescent mind | Books on health, mind and body

I I was just out of my teens when I first read Joan Didion’s essay On Keeping a Notebook. Two sentences earned me a grade: “I think we have every reason to continue to have cordial relationships with the people we once were, whether we find them good company or not. Otherwise, they come unexpectedly and surprise us, knocking on the door of our minds at 4 a.m. on a bad night and asking who abandoned them, who betrayed them, who’s going to make amends.”

We distance ourselves from our young people at our peril. This warning is at the center of Lucy Foulkes' excellent and insightful new book, Coming of age: how adolescence shapes usMaking space for past pain, mistakes, and even trauma is essential to our sense of ourselves as adults, even though it may feel safer to erase them. You also risk missing out on the fun and enjoyment it brings.

While Foulkes' first book – What Mental Illness Really Is…(and What It Isn’t) – focused on how the brain can go wrong, Coming of age The book looks at the variety of normal stresses and pleasures of growing up, planning for both beneficial and harmful transitions into adulthood. This is not a book specifically aimed at teenagers, but rather adults who, years later, may still be coping with their adolescence, while perhaps helping their own children through the same troubled waters. As an academic psychologist at the University of Oxford who has studied adolescent cognition for over a decade, Foulkes is steeped in knowledge and respect for adolescent life. She brilliantly brings together clinical research, both classic texts and recent discoveries, interwoven with moving stories from people recruited via social networks who confide in their training years.

It is important to understand adolescence because it never goes away. Evidence shows that there is a “reminiscence surge” – adolescence being right in the middle – when memories are particularly vivid and, in retrospect, seem particularly meaningful. This holds true whether one is recalling the “landmines” of crisis or memories of intense joy, and is “driven by the intensive neurological and cognitive development triggered by puberty.” Foulkes explores how adolescence is a time of significant firsts – from first love, to experimenting with alcohol and drugs, to coping with grief – while also providing opportunities to try on identities in the quest for one’s true self.

Despite this period of intense transition, Foulkes is interested in how socially conservative teenagers are. They hold sex and gender norms dear, and adhering to stereotypes of femininity and masculinity is highly valued and closely monitored by a “peer society.” Athleticism and generic attractiveness confer high status; intelligence, introversion, and caution do not. The chapter on “The Paradox of Popularity,” which examines the dynamics of each school’s cool groups (in mine, they called themselves “the group,” envied and hated in equal measure), will make readers, regardless of their position in the social hierarchy, collectively tighten their grip. With the growing recognition of neurodiversity, fluid sexuality, and gender identities, the vice of high school is loosening, but only slightly and slowly. Failure to fit in, whether by choice or circumstance, comes at a high price.

Foulkes wants to rehabilitate adolescence and encourage society not to disdain adolescent traits, such as self-esteem, thrill-seeking, risk-taking, and laziness, which have evolutionary, physiological, and prosocial purposes. They are traits, not flaws, emphasized by reason rather than pure hedonism. Caring intensely about how we are seen allows us to “develop our independence while fitting in and being protected by a tribe,” she argues. Foulkes is also wary of adolescents’ supposed vulnerability to “peer pressure” and the idea that a handful of young people are a “bad influence,” however convenient these excuses may be for parents to exonerate their own children. In fact, most adolescents are aware of the people they associate with, choose them, and consent to the activities their friends prefer. Parents would do well to normalize their teens' attraction to the unknown, to testing boundaries and exploring their sexuality.

Coming of age The author concludes that adolescents “have always been totally underestimated” and focuses on the characteristics of adolescence that transcend our cultural era. But Foulkes may be underestimating how today's teens have a significantly different experience than previous generations. Historically, the recognized social phenomenon of adolescence is less than 150 years old. Today, social media and phone use are changing attention spans, access to extreme content and ideologies is readily available, and cameras in every pocket promote self-awareness. The photographic archives of today's adolescents will also fundamentally affect the way they remember.

As a millennial, I have only a box of photos from my life before my 20s and not a single selfie. Smartphone-using teenagers, on the other hand, will live under the oppressive weight of primary sources. Foulkes does not tie his analysis to current events, but it is impossible not to make the connection to our political and social moment. How will the years of Covid-19 lockdown be rewarded for today’s young people in their early 20s? Why isn’t there more interdisciplinary research on the adolescent experience? If adolescence is so important—and one can’t help but agree with her after reading this book—why is it so invisible in health care and society?

Foulkes remains off stage Coming of ageShe admits that she considered sharing stories from her own life, but instead chose to highlight the people she interviewed. I understand the clinical and research instinct for him to step back, but it seems important to me as a reader to know the younger person with whom Foulkes is trying to stay on good terms (a person who has struggled with mental health issues, which she talks about more in her first book). His example, his authority, perhaps showed in action the courageous and rewarding process of reflecting on and recounting one's own past.

Thinking about what happened to us as a story that we are the (more or less reliable) narrator gives meaning and autonomy to our lives. It is also a building block for long-term mental health. But it is not a story we tell just once. In notebooks, real ones or the sketchbook of our memory, we revise these stories, a process that can be supported and structured by therapy. A therapist can guide people toward invisible possibilities of redemption and closure. A gentler, more amused, and more curious attitude toward the people we used to be allows our minds to become healthier places to live. We will also have a better opinion of those young people whose adolescent notebooks are not yet unfinished drafts, who could benefit from the hope that everything will (probably) turn out okay.

Kate Womersley is a doctor and academic specializing in psychiatry. Her work at Imperial College London focuses on sex and gender equality in biomedical research