Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally... powerful wish to get on with the future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescents are the bearers of cultural renewal, those cycles of generation and regeneration that link our limited individual dest...inies with the destiny of the species.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For parents the grown-up child's leave-taking from the family nest is a time for reexamining their own lives. . . . They reminisce... about the birth of this marvelous child, her first smile, her first words, her first steps. . . . They look back . . . to their mothers and fathers as they seemed then--so strong, so marvelous--to the schoolyard games, to the springtime of youth when the energies of growth propelled them into the future and everything still seemed possible.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Another reason for the increased self-centeredness of an adolescent is her susceptibility to humiliation. This brazen, defiant cre...ature is also something tender, raw, thin-skinned, poignantly vulnerable. Her entire sense of personal worth can be shattered by a frown. An innocuous clarification of facts can be heard as a monumental criticism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Another potentiality of our irrepressible juvenility is a capacity to maintain until the onset of senility an active creative inte...raction with our environment. We persist in exploring, investigating, inventing, discovering. In these respects humans of all eras, in all societies, all ages of life, are more like baby chimps and not at all like the sedate and rigidly conforming adult chimpanzee, who hasn't changed much since she was five or six years old.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Schoolchildren make up their own rules and enforce their own conformities. They feel safest when leisure time is rationed and dose...d. They like to wear uniforms, and they frown on personal idiosyncrasies. Deviance is the mark of an outsider.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In all times and in all places--in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France, ...Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden--the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue--that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From the beginning moments of life, the urges for each of us to become a self in the world are there--in the liveliness of our inn...ate growth energies, in the vitality of our stiffening-away muscles, in our looking eyes, our listening ears, our reaching-out hands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By directing our sentiments, passions, and reason toward the common human plight, imagination grants us the advantages of a moral ...existence. What we surrender of innocent love of self is exchanged for the safeties and pleasures of belonging to a larger whole. We are born dependent, but only imagination can bind our passions to other human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We humans undergo two major growth spurts: one during infancy and another from eleven to twelve until fifteen or sixteen--pubescen...ce. Between the two is a relatively quiescent growth period in which most of the body takes a rest from growing while the brain continues to mature. This period of life is general referred to as childhood or, sometimes, latency.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »