Culture and adolescent development

Abstract

For some years now I have become increasingly convinced of the need to reassess the basis of adolescent health promotion particularly as it emanates from international agencies and organizations. In this document I have reviewed what I believe to be prevailing implicit assumptions, the harmful consequences of those assumptions for both ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries, why this is happening, and what we might do to improve the situation. I believe we are right to recognize that adolescent health is heavily dependent on behavior and that behavior is heavily dependent on the stage of human development which the young person has reached. But we are wrong to base health promotion in all societies on a Western framework for human development which implicitly values intellectual and economic achievement at the expense of other human qualities. As a result of this we also err in implicitly assuming that societies which are economically successful and which emphasize the value of academic and scientific achievement, are necessarily culturally superior and therefore better able to promote both adolescent health and adolescent development. The effect of these assumptions leads to two distinct negative consequences. First, by placing emphasis on certain kinds of achievements we unconsciously denigrate the cultures in societies that place emphasis on others. This risks diminishing the respect young people have for the primary source of their cultural heritage—their families. This, in turn, can drive a wedge between younger and older people and result in a loss of self-esteem in both groups—the older because they are made to feel inadequate, and the younger because they feel they are inherently disadvantaged. Next, by ignoring or implicitly devaluing other aspects of human development that are inherently valuable to the individual and society, we diminish their chances of flourishing. This can be damaging not only to the cultures that traditionally value them, but to those societies, particularly in the West, which are badly in need of them.