Nancy Lesko: Act Your Age: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence

Abstract

In Act Your Age: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence, Professor Lesko challenges the current socially constructed views of adolescence. She does so by providing a comparative analysis of contemporary teens to those from past generations. She includes assumptions from past eras that have assisted in the production of current constructs of adolescents, along with synthesized projections of how media, school, and policy have affected such views. Further, she provides a thorough examination of the social effects of political factors and sexuality, and their effects on society’s accepted views of today’s teens. As she presents prevailing interpretations of the time, she reveals general ideals of youth connected to the power relationships found in race, gender, and nation. With Act Your Age, Lesko justifiably presents her skepticism about some scientific approaches and understandings of psychological development, skepticisms that are not without warrant. As she does so, she furthers her main goal of uncovering why developmental psychology has acted as a canvas for painting a flawed masterpiece of adolescence, and why many inherently have integrated this erroneous masterpiece into their own constructed views of youth. As Lesko examines these issues in light of research addressed by many scholars, her social construct begins with the ‘‘trouble with teenagers’’ (Lesko 2012, p. 1). While she aims at debunking common misconceptions formed over the years about adolescents, her own views of adults are developed in accordance as well. Lesko urges adults to take responsibility for the modern conception of troubled teens due to scientific fault in biology and evidence of sociohistorical scrutiny in reasoning, using the image of the middle class white male as the ideal make of dominance. Later, Lesko also addresses minorities when describing the criminalization of African American and Latino male adolescents. Lesko provides substantial evidence to demonstrate how interwoven the growth of time and adolescence truly is and why the developmental construct is so resistant to change and critique. In addition, Lesko’s original motive for writing Act Your Age was to inspire other scholars to analyze and seek explanations to modern social constructs that have lacked attention and concern, like that of adolescence. Through Act Your Age, Lesko has accomplished her goal of urging adolescents and adults to peer deeper into the rationales behind their socially constructed appearances. In the first chapter, Lesko provides a historical context of the late nineteenth century in regards to adolescence, race, and nation. She offers extensive background information in support of her social construction of adolescence with regards to three revolutions: commercial, transportation, and industrial. With this background, this chapter becomes the basis of her argument stating that race, gender, and nationalism were at the heart of popular views of youth. The Great Chain of Being begins to describe just how Lesko believes the first psychological conception of youth began subconsciously. This theory provides support for a sociological hierarchy between animals or savages and the civilized, with the civilized at the top and the savages, encompassing women and barbarians at the bottom. Progress in this sense is evolutionarily based, with those capable of possessing reason at the top and degeneracy at the bottom. It is important to note that this initial subconscious view of race-based inferiority paved the way for scientific study of medicine, psychology, and biology. At this point, the reader may well seek a clear connection to adolescents. Finally, the reader finds that man began to J. Painter (&) Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: jipainte@indiana.edu