We know more about adolescence than ever before, with a much deeper understanding of the neurological and cognitive changes that take place alongside biological development during the critical years between puberty and the termination of physical growth. During this critical stage, young people acquire the ability to think abstractly and multi-dimensionally, and progressive improvements take place in attention, memory, processing speed, organisation and metacognition.

Adolescence is associated not just with change, but with turbulence. An Observer article last Sunday outlined the symptoms: frustration at the lack of autonomy, preoccupation with friends and social circle, anger at the existing order of things, questioning of authority. These are linked to feelings of powerlessness, issues of confidence, intense sense of self, extremes of despair and joy.

Adolescence has a history. Barely recognised as a separate stage before the twentieth century, its definition reflected concern about the dislocations of traditional family life in industrialising, urbanising societies. The orthodox view not so long ago was that adolescence was invented in America. But like America itself, just because adolescence wasn’t discovered until recently doesn’t mean it wasn’t there before.

Adolescence is now recognised as a universally applicable life stage, but it has different markers, manifestations and meanings around the world; and is not inevitably bound up with alienation or rebellion. In modern western societies, it has been described as “a seething period of internal turmoil and external strife”. Yet the anthropologist Margaret Mead[1] famously showed that in traditional societies, Sturm und Drang wasn’t always a corollary of adolescence.

It was subsequently alleged that Mead had been hoaxed by her adolescent interlocutors in Samoa[2], but the anthropological controversy itself says something about the way conceptions of adolescence are influenced by a society’s own concerns. Each generation projects its own angst (and guilt?) backwards onto adolescence. Valentine observes that today’s adolescent angst is exacerbated by contemporary adults’ double-standard responses to troublesome teens - castigating/smothering, wooing/vilifying, patronising/exploiting.

Heightened current concern about adolescence owes something to the extension of the adolescent stage in western societies. Puberty now begins six years earlier than it did in 1850 (largely as a result of better diet and hygiene). At the other end of adolescence, legislation around employment and education has postponed the onset of adulthood and elongated the period of dependence. Young people are being detained for longer in the anteroom of adulthood.

Valentine argues that we should not seek to tame adolescent antagonism - “Frustration is the enemy of apathy” - and urges young people not to grow up or buckle down too quickly. For philosopher Susan Neiman[3], adolescence is marked by disappointment and exhilaration in discovering that the world is not the way it should be. But growing up, she says, should not be delayed: it’s a matter of facing up to the uncertainties that face us in life.

Neiman quotes Hannah Arendt: “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it”.

Growing up is preferable to giving up.