Reactions should be about one page, typed, single-spaced, and must consist of the following:? 1) brief summaries of the week’s readings 2) connections or contradictions across the rea

Contextualizing the Social and Educational Journeys of Adolescents within

the Life Course

Robert Crosnoe University of Texas at Austin

What happens during adolescence emerges from early in life and sets the stage for later in life. This linking function of adolescence within the life course is grounded in social, psychological, and biological development and is fundamental to the intergenerational transmission of societal inequalities. This article explores this life course phenomenon by focus- ing on how the social ups and downs of secondary school shape adolescents’ educational trajectories, translating their backgrounds into their futures through the interplay of their personal agency with the constraints imposed by the strat- ified institutions they navigate. Illustrative examples include gender differences in risky behavior, racialized experi- ences of school discipline, immigrant youths’ family relations, LGBTQ students’ school safety, STEM education, adverse childhood experiences, and mindset interventions.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. . . We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most

workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

These oft-quoted words by novelist Joan Didion (1979) capture for me the reality that we—as humans—are compelled to extricate patterns and distill narratives from what seems like chaos because that is the only way that we can keep going. We do that as people, but we also do that as social and behavioral scientists. In our work, we are driven to explain some developmental phe- nomenon because that explanation imposes order on a world that is filled with disorder. How exactly do we come to that explanation? We look for the strongest pattern and then tell a story about it. The story should be empirically based, of course, but effective research is often research that compels and convinces with the narrative it builds on the data.

The research that I have conducted on adoles- cence has several threads that can be woven together into a larger tapestry. From statistical analyses, interviews, ethnographic observations, and experiments focused on adolescents that I have conducted and from the words, writings, and cre- ative expressions of the adolescents I have worked with has emerged a story about the interplay of adolescents’ social development and academic pro- gress with three basic parts:

This article is based on the presidential address prepared by the author for the canceled 2020 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence. The author acknowledges the sup- port of grants from the National Science Foundation (SES- 1424111, PI: Robert Crosnoe; 1519686, PIs: Elizabeth Gershoff and Robert Crosnoe; 1760481, PIs: Tama Leventhal and Robert Crosnoe), the National Institutes of Health (NICHD 1R01HD081022-01A1, PIs: Rachel Gordon and Robert Crosnoe; NICHD P2CHD042849, PI: Debra Umberson; NIDA 1R03DA046046-01A1, PI: Robert Crosnoe), and the National Institute of Justice (2014-IJ-CX-0025, PI: Robert Crosnoe) to the Population Research Center (PRC) at the University of Texas at Austin as well as a number of grants to the PRC supporting the development, management, and dissemination of the National Study of Learning Mindsets (e.g., National Science Foundation HRD 1761179, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation OPP 1197627 and INV-004519, Raikes Foundation 17-01177, William T. Grant Foundation 189706, and Optimus Foundation 47515; PIs: David Yeager, Chandra Muller, and Robert Crosnoe). The presidential address would have included sincere thanks to a large number of people, including former and current mentors, colleagues, and students. Acknowledgements for this article will be limited to those colleagues in the Society for Research on Adolescence who graciously reviewed this manuscript and provided helpful advice (Aprile Benner, Bo Cleveland, Rashmita Mistry, Velma McBride Murry, John Schulenberg, and Tama Leventhal), key early career mentors (formal advisors Glen Elder and the late Sandy Dornbusch as well as Aletha Huston and Barbara Schnei- der, who guided the William T. Grant project from which so much of the research featured here emerged), and the family members who were the most important supports and inspira- tions of all (Shannon Cavanagh and Caven, Sue, Joseph, and Caroline Crosnoe). Requests for reprints should be sent to Population Research

Center, University of Texas at Austin, 305 East 23rd Street G1800, Austin, TX 78712 E-mail: [email protected]

© 2021 Society for Research on Adolescence

DOI: 10.1111/jora.12689

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON ADOLESCENCE, 31(4), 1135–1151

(1) Adolescents struggle through a complex and stratified educational system that doubles as a vast social world governed by peer norms that are often opaque, frequently contradictory, and constantly evolving.

(2) Adolescents strive for success in this educa- tional and social system while dealing with its psychological challenges in ways that can seem rationally self-protective at first but have the potential to eventually lead them astray, turn- ing around on themselves so that academic and social success achieved becomes more difficult to translate into success maintained.

(3) Such adolescent experiences offer a story to understand adolescence as a critical stage of life and to see the implications of the growing diversity of the adolescent population in ways that might result in more guidance and support for adolescents and the adults trying to support and protect them from such “growing pains”. Linking adolescents’ social development and

academic progress, this story highlights the stor- mier side of adolescent life, the pressures of school- ing, and the widening of inequality. As such, it runs the risk of reifying the darker narrative of adolescence that has long held sway among adults and that, incidentally, I and many other scholars of adolescence have tried to counter. Yet, it is still an important story to consider because it is relevant to many adolescents and their schools and because it offers a valuable window into the ways that ado- lescence bridges childhood to adulthood. It just needs to be delivered with the reinforcement that positive youth development is generally the norm rather than the exception, resilience is real and achievable, and even some of the riskier and rock- ier aspects of adolescence often serve a develop- mental purpose (National Academies, 2019; Lerner, 2017; Beale-Spencer et al., 2006).

In describing this storyline in the larger dis- course about adolescent development, this article— while admittedly not exhaustive and too western- based—draws on a long tradition of multidisci- plinary research, including in life course sociology and developmental psychology, that has increas- ingly documented and interrogated the variability in adolescents’ experiences across diverse settings and groups1. Emphasizing the classic and the new,

its goal is to explain why this story about the ways that adolescents manage their sometimes compet- ing and sometimes synergistic roles as students and peers matters, where we can take it, and what we can do with it.

ADOLESCENCE IN LIFE COURSE PERSPECTIVE

If theory provides the underlying story structure for research, then life course theory can structure research on the interplay of adolescents’ social and academic lives. Broadly, life course theory focuses on the intersection of individual developmental pathways with larger social structures across time in ways that allow us to ask new questions and then systematically answer them (Elder, Shanahan, & Jennings, 2015; Elder, Johnson, & Crosnoe, 2003; for a thorough integration of life course theory with the larger family of relational developmental systems theories, see Lerner, Lewin-Bizan, & War- ren, 2010).

This perspective has five principles to guide such a process (see Table 1), but two of those prin- ciples are particularly important for elucidating novel insights into the adolescent experience (Cros- noe & Johnson, 2011; Johnson, Crosnoe, & Elder, 2011). First, the principle of lifelong development emphasizes that lives are lived the long way. As such, adolescence should be viewed—and studied —as one brief passage in a much longer journey. Thus, the meaningfulness of adolescence lies at least in part in how it emerges from childhood and sets the stage for adulthood but also how adoles- cence stands out from what comes before and what comes after. We can make better sense of adoles- cence, therefore, by embedding it within the full course of life. Second, the principle of agency and constraints is about the ways that people try to make their own lives and take charge of their own fortunes even as they are being acted on by outside forces attempting to bound them in and/or push them in certain directions. This principle is all about the environment, the person, and the compli- cated dance between two.

Putting these two principles of life course theory into conversation with each other can illuminate the uniqueness of adolescence as a critical period of the life course and, more specifically, reveal why the interplay of social and academic journeys across adolescence is important to study, under- stand, and address. To that end, we can derive a guiding story by iteratively considering adoles- cence on its own, as flowing out of and into other

1For diverse perspectives on the socializing role of peers in secondary school and their future implications, see: Kao, Joyner, & Balistreri, 2019; Graham & Echols, 2018; Camacho et al., 2018; Delgado et al., 2016; Way, 2015; Toomey, McGuire, & Russell, 2012; Hughes et al., 2011; Carter, 2006; Milner, 2004

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periods of life, and as the product of the interplay of agency and constraints.

ADOLESCENCE ON ITS OWN

To begin, adolescence warrants attention on its own, regardless of what comes earlier or later. Over the course of my career studying adolescence at the intersection of sociology, psychology, and educational science, I have been motivated by two objectives. The first is exploring the social side of secondary school in a modern world that is both socially connected and socially fractured, and the second is understanding what that social side of secondary school means for educational attainment in a global economy that has maximized the life- long financial, social, political, and health returns of higher education. The multi-year mixed- methods research I did for my 2011 book Fitting In, Standing Out: Navigating the Social Challenges of High School to Get an Education—which combined statisti- cal analyses of population data on U.S. adolescents with ethnographic research in a large, diverse, pub- lic U.S. high school—perhaps best encapsulates how these objectives came together.

Like many social and behavioral scientists who set out to study the social side of secondary school, I was influenced by James Coleman’s 1961 book, The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and its Impact on Society. Studying a set of Midwest- ern high schools in the 1950s, Coleman crafted a story about an almost uniform youth culture in U.S. schools in which adolescents created their own system of norms and values in opposition to conventional adult standards and then enforced conformity to that system. In the ensuing decades, this story has been problematized and complicated in many ways, especially by efforts to better recog- nize the diverse voices and experiences of young

people living in circumstances and traversing schools far removed from the affluent, White, sub- urban schools that Coleman studied (Carter, 2006; Flores-Gonzalez, 2005; Steinberg, Brown, & Dorn- busch, 1997; Way, 2014).

Yet, the vision of secondary school as a highly structured social hierarchy going well beyond aca- demic processes is a clear one that still holds weight. This hierarchy, however, is neither fixed nor uniform, and adolescents have to learn how to “work” that hierarchy to get ahead or, more impor- tantly, not fall behind academically or socially. Depending on which schools adolescents attend, the community and country that shapes the struc- ture of their schooling, and who they are as individ- uals, this nature of secondary schooling can create seemingly perverse incentives that are sometimes in line with the notion of an oppositional culture but also many times (and in most domains) are not. Of the many developmental domains in which such incentives play out, three are particularly illustra- tive. They concern risk-taking, sexual activity, and relationships with parents and other adults.

Risky Behavior as Strategy

Risk-taking is a hallmark of adolescence. In varying degrees, adolescents engage in risky and otherwise problem behaviors that adults wish they would avoid. We, as adults, see such behaviors as bad for adolescents, although they often are developmen- tally appropriate and help to support the transition into adulthood (Duell & Steinberg, 2021). For their part, adolescents may see such behaviors in terms of social status, or related to their position in peer hierarchies at school—how liked they are, how much they are respected or envied. As such, behaviors become social currency and, therefore, potentially good for them.

TABLE 1 Principles of Life Course Theory

Principle Description

Life span development Human development is a lifelong process. Agency & Constraints Individuals construct their own lives through the choices and actions they take within the

opportunities and constraints of history and social circumstance. Time & Place The life course of individuals is embedded and shaped by the historical times and places they

experience over their lifetime. Timing The developmental antecedents and consequences of life transitions, events, and behavioral

patterns vary according to their timing in a person’s life. Linked Lives Lives are lived interdependently and socio-historical influences are expressed through this network

of shared relationships.

See: Elder et al., 2015; Elder et al., 2003.

ADOLESCENCE AND THE LIFE COURSE 1137

For example, Allen and colleagues (2005) con- ducted a study indicating that popularity in U.S. high schools encouraged low-level delinquency and drug use. Adolescents saw moderate engage- ment in such potentially dangerous behaviors as a source of status but more serious engagement as a source of stigma. Thus, gaining or maintaining popularity may require being a little bad but not too bad. These findings echoed my own research described in Fitting In, Standing Out, which sug- gested that academic success need not be the death knell for popularity that is often depicted in movies and television. In fact, popular kids tended to do well in school; they just did not do too well— perhaps A- and B+ grades rather than A+ but not a C or lower. Such an orientation toward risky behavior and academic progress allowed them to avoid disappointing the adults in their lives—as perfectly fine students—but not completely satisfy those adults either, as they occasionally got in wor- risome trouble. This behavioral calculation of status is about wanting to be liked but also about avoid- ing being disliked (P�al, Stadtfeld, Grow, & Tak�acs, 2016), wanting to belong but also wanting power or respect (Flores-Gonzalez, 2005; Gordon, Crosnoe, & Wang, 2013), and about the friends who sur- round an adolescent but also the friends that an adolescents’ friends have and the friends that an adolescent aspires to attract (Frank et al., 2008).

Contrary to common adult views of adolescents, therefore, ample evidence suggests that they are often hyper-rational about their social and aca- demic lives. Through a combination of social pro- cesses (e.g., the consequences of individuating from parents) and biological processes (e.g., the development of the brain from back to front, rapid hormone production), they are highly oriented toward peer approval, and peer approval some- times promotes risky behavior (Eckert, 1989; Mona- han, Steinberg, & Cauffman, 2009; Steinberg, 2008). Yet, adolescents engage in such behavior in more thoughtful and planful ways than they are gener- ally given credit for by adults. This tendency toward confounding but explainable behavioral decision-making is on display in the growing liter- ature on bullying and peer victimization, which suggests that bullying is less a psychopathology and more an adaptive and goal-directed behavior. For example, research by Faris and Felmlee (2011) showed that adolescent bullying was most often perpetrated in the middle of a school’s social hier- archy (as an adolescent enacted strategies to climb the social ladder) than at the top (as an adolescent had nowhere else to climb) or at the bottom (as an

adolescent saw no viable way to climb). Ellis, Volk, Gonzalez, and Embry (2016) used this refined understanding of bullying to redirect interventions targeting peer victimization in schools. Instead of changing the goal of bullying (i.e., gaining status and resources), the intervention offered alternative mechanisms for achieving that goal (e.g., jobs), with demonstration results pointing to a reduction in key outcomes such as school fights.

This body of research suggests that adults can identify paths of action to reduce risky behavior by getting inside the minds of adolescents and seeing a problem from their perspective.

Sexual Activity and Social Status

This delicate interplay between risky behavior and social status in secondary school does not work for all adolescents. That variability is evident in the growing literature on adolescent sexual behavior that pays special attention to the complexities of gender and race/ethnicity.

Ample quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that sexual activity in adolescence is gen- erally associated with popularity, which is a key marker of status in a social context like the school. As one example, an article by Helms et al. (2014) reported the interesting finding that, although ado- lescents in popular peer crowds did not necessarily engage in more sexual activity than other adoles- cents, their fellow students thought that they did. Yet, other evidence demonstrates that that the sta- tus of sexual activity in adolescence is not straight- forward for girls. As research by Kreager and colleagues has shown (2009, Kreager, Staff, Gau- thier, Lefkowitz, & Feinberg, 2016), the sexual dou- ble standard is alive and well in U.S. secondary schools, with girls not gaining a status boost and instead generally receiving a status penalty as they increased their sexual activity.

With such costs of sexual activity in the social context of school, what are adolescent girls’ reasons for engaging in sex? There is of course girls’ sexual desire, a subject too infrequently studied by adoles- cent scholars to the detriment of theoretical under- standing (Harden, 2014; Tolman & McClelland, 2011). There is also the role of associations with older peers, both male and female. Such peer asso- ciations, in turn, reflect both biological and social mechanisms related to early puberty, which remains a popular topic for scholars of adolescence (Harden, 2014). Expanding on the role of peers and social influence, there is also the broader conceptu- alization of social context captured by

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sexualization, which refers to cultural and media- driven messages encouraging adolescent girls to assess their own social and personal worth in terms of their sexual attractiveness (McKenney & Bigler, 2016).

Research by Brown has helped to underscore the significance of sexualization in the social lives of adolescent girls. It has shown how sexualization and associated behaviors (such as sexual harass- ment and peer victimization) can organize high school networks in the United States but also more broadly how it is ingrained in social media. Nota- bly, this social media component does not just involve sexualization directed from outside in but also how girls actively curate their own social media presence through self-sexualization. This social and self-sexualization then has implications not only for adolescent girls’ sexual behavior but also for their academic progress. Indeed, it appears to discourages girls’ academic investment and their academic self-presentation; again, achieving aca- demically but striving to appear to others that she is not or that it is not intentional (Brown, 2021; Jewell, Brown, & Perry, 2015; Salomon & Brown, 2019). The complicating wrinkle to this gender story, though, is that Black girls tend to be sexual- ized more intensely, sexualized at younger ages, and subjected to more sexual harassment (Epstein, Blake, & Gonz�alez, 2017). This adultification is a developmental component of systematic racial/eth- nic and gender stratification; how such inequality is lived in daily life.

Thus, adolescent girls often follow seemingly rational decision-making processes about their sex- ual behavior—whether said behavior is risky or not —to position themselves in a status hierarchy in key social contexts. They do so, however, on an uneven playing field that privileges some and marginalizes others through an overlay of interper- sonal judgment that can change how they see themselves and their futures.

Family Bonds that Give and Take

The ecological perspective encourages the study of the adolescent world of secondary school as con- nected to the larger adult world, including how it

is shaped by adult actors like parents and teachers. A clear through-line of developmental research is that strong bonds with adults are hallmarks of adjustment and positive functioning and that this developmental support in part reflects the ability of adults to guide adolescents into more positive peer environments and then protect against the deleterious effects of negative peer environments. This pattern is particularly evident in studies of communities of color and especially immigrant cul- tures, which tend to show adolescents as more family oriented, more connected to their extended families and community networks, more respectful of adult authority, and readier to believe that adults have their best interests at heart (Zeiders, Updegraff, Uma~na-Taylor, McHale, & Padilla, 2016). In such communities, strong family connec- tions and extended family networks are both cul- tural and functional, valued traditions that provide personal meaning but also help family members survive and thrive in a stratified society that imposes social and economic barriers on them. Adolescents growing up in such communities internalize these norms and values, which shapes how they move through the world, including their peer worlds and the educational system.

One population that I have studied—Mexican- origin youth—illustrates this pattern. For example, a study in the special issue of this journal on devel- opmental neuroscience showed that close family bonds weakened the pathway from hostile peer environments at school to increased neural reactiv- ity reflecting social susceptibility and social pain and onto the problem behavior of Mexican-origin adolescents (Figure 1). This finding indicates that adolescents do not experience schools’ social dynamics in a vacuum beyond the protection of their families (Schriber et al., 2018). Other studies complicate this pattern. As an example, quantita- tive findings revealed that feelings of obligation that arose from family bonds narrowed the scope of options Mexican-origin adolescents considered in planning their futures, including higher educa- tion (Desmond & L�opez Turley, 2009). As another example, qualitative research revealed that the influence of well-meaning teachers on Mexican- origin adolescents could be socioemotionally

Hos�le Peer Environments at School

Increased Neural Reac�vity

(Social Suscep�bility & Social Pain)

Adolescent Deviant Behavior among

Mexican-Origin Youth

FIGURE 1 Neural pathways linking peer environments to behavior. Adapted from: Schriber et al., 2018

ADOLESCENCE AND THE LIFE COURSE 1139

protective but educationally restrictive. In counter- feit social capital, teachers simultaneously held positive views of Mexican-origin youth as “good” adolescents and biased views of them as “poor” students, which encouraged the teachers to provide social support and care to students but discour- aged them from adequately scaffolding students’ ambitions and aspirations (Ream, 2003).

In sum, Mexican-origin adolescents and other youth from communities of color—particularly immigrant communities—often enjoy a true source of adult-provided protection as they traverse the unique nature of adolescence unfolding within the social worlds of their schools, but there may be costs to that protection that counters at least some of its benefits. Youth from more historically advantaged segments of the population may face fewer risks and barriers as they traverse adolescence, diluting the potential value of the immediate protections of fam- ily but also clearing their paths overall. In this way, this literature on a specific population reveals the larger phenomenon by which adults both give and take in the lives of adolescents.

Lessons about Adolescent Society

With this picture of adolescent social life and edu- cational disparities in mind, we cannot argue that adolescent society is monolithically oppositional. Instead, it is internally contradictory and context- specific, an individually tailored maze. Adolescents chart their own path through that society in ways that serve their own interests, sometimes with help from others, sometimes with extra challenges, and sometimes with a mixture of the two. For many, this journey is in line with positive youth develop- ment. For others, it more closely resembles the common—if exaggerated—storm and stress view of adolescence. Adolescents’ navigation of the inevita- ble perils they face on this journey is clearly a fac- tor in which direction they go. The effort and thought that such navigation requires should inspire respect. Future research in this area needs to bridge social network techniques with more biopsychosocial approaches in longitudinal designs that allow for more densely repeated data collec- tions that track the ups and downs of going to school and how these ups and downs are experi- enced internally and externally.

ADOLESCENCE THE LONG WAY

Having first considered adolescence on its own, we can approach adolescence within the larger life

course. The driving idea of “the long way” is that adolescence is either a pit stop on the highway of life or, more likely, the major connector on this highway.

Adolescence Emerging from Childhood

Adolescence can play out the long way by flowing out of childhood. There are many aspects of child- hood that affect how young people transition into and through adolescence. To choose one example, adverse childhood experiences (ACES) refer to potentially traumatic events or circumstances early in the life course—such as family disruption, mal- treatment, or community violence—that have downstream consequences for development. Multi- ple studies link an array of ACES to such short- and long-term outcomes as maladjustment, behav- ioral and academic challenges, and poor health. They usually focus on stress as the focal mecha- nism; for instance, frequent exposure to parent’s verbal abuse can over-activate stress response in ways that eventually deteriorate physical health. Notably, the rigid stratification of many societies means that youth of color tend to be exposed to more ACES—including experiences of discrimina- tion—and have fewer resources that can buffer against their developmental impact (Duke, Pettin- gell, McMorris, & Borowsky, 2010; Felitti et al., 1998; Flaherty et al., 2013).

Focusing on adolescents, McLaughlin and Sheri- dan (2016) formulated an alternative learning per- spective. In this conceptualization (Figure 2), some ACES are threats (e.g., witnessing violence, physical abuse). Sustained exposure to threats can facilitate a fear learning process in which youth see nearly every experience as potentially dangerous, whether it is actually threatening or relatively safe. For example, children who suffer frequent discrimina- tion may become hypervigilant adolescents who encounter even trustworthy adults with suspicion. Other ACES are deprivation (e.g., poverty, parental neglect). Sustained exposure to deprivation can trigger a rewards learning process in which young people cannot distinguish between high- and low- reward situations. For example, children who do not have their basic needs met may become adoles- cents who cannot discern when the benefits of a new experience likely outweigh its risks. Young people with ACES then move through the educa- tional system employing these two forms of learn- ing, which can undermine academic progress socioemotionally (e.g., reducing challenge-seeking behavior) and cognitively (e.g., disrupting

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executive functioning). Their resulting academic disadvantage relative to peers without ACES can grow as they enter the more complex curricula of secondary school.

This unfolding developmental role of ACES underscores that some experience c

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