The Same but Different: the culture in which our adolescents live

Adolescents engage in and interpret the cultural world they share with adults with different cognitive and emotional capacities than most of the adults around them. Those differences in capacity make the same world a different place. Drawing from a sample of major studies, this article reviews elements of findings on the dynamic interaction between adolescent development and contemporary culture and compiles these into four related stressors that adolescents in the United States encounter. Those stressors are:1. The poly-vocal nature of the contemporary world;2. The over-scheduled lives of children and families;3. The isolation felt by adolescents, parents, and families overall; and4. The marketplace's effort to target children and adolescents.The stressors, it is argued, raise concerns for adolescents' efforts to navigate and to find a personal sense of identity and purpose. The article then moves to examine in what particular ways this is problematic for adolescents and suggests how our religious communities might assist adolescents in growing to adulthood with a sense of self able to function in a challenging world.