Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

generativity-versus-stagnation 
stage
According to Erikson, a period 
in middle adulthood during which we 
take stock of our contributions to 
family and society.
ego-integrity-versus-despair 
stage
According to Erikson, a period 
from late adulthood until death during 
which we review life’s accomplish-
ments and failures.
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418 Chapter 
12 
Development
These students are kneeling by a friend’s tombstone. The rate 
of suicide among teenagers has risen signifi cantly over the 
last few decades. Can you think of any reasons for this 
phenomenon?
through adolescence without appreciable turmoil in their lives, and that parents 
speak easily—and fairly often—with their children about a variety of topics (van Wel, 
Linssen, & Abma, 2000; Granic, Hollenstein, & Dishion, 2003).
Not that adolescence is completely calm! In most families with adolescents, the 
amount of arguing and bickering clearly rises. Most young teenagers, as part of their 
search for identity, experience tension between their attempts to become independent 
from their parents and their actual dependence on them. They may experiment with 
a range of behaviors and fl irt with a variety of activities that their parents, and even 
society as a whole, fi nd objectionable. Happily, though, for most families such ten-
sions stabilize during middle adolescence—around age 15 or 16—and eventually 
decline around age 18 (Smetana, Daddis, & Chuang, 2003; Smetana, 2005). 
One reason for the increase in discord during adolescence appears to be the pro-
tracted period in which children stay at home with their parents. In prior historical 
periods—and in some non-Western cultures today—children leave home immediately 
after puberty and are considered adults. Today, however, sexually mature adolescents 
may spend as many as seven or eight years with their parents. Current social trends 
even hint at an extension of the confl icts of adolescence beyond the teenage years 
because a signifi cant number of young adults—known as boomerang children —return 
to live with their parents, typically for economic reasons, after leaving home for some 
period. Although some parents welcome the return of their children, others are less 
sympathetic, which opens the way to confl ict (Bianchi & Casper, 2000; Lewin, 2003). 
Another source of strife with parents lies in the way adolescents think. Adolescence 
fosters adolescent egocentrism, a state of self-absorption in which a teenager views the 
world from his or her own point of view. Egocentrism leads adolescents to be highly 
critical of authority fi gures, unwilling to accept criticism, and quick to fault others. It 
also makes them believe that they are the center of everyone else’s attention, which 
leads to self-consciousness. Furthermore, they develop personal fables, the belief that their 
experience is unique, exceptional, and shared by no one else. Such personal fables may 
make adolescents feel vulnerable to the risks that threaten others (Tucker Blackwell, 
2006; Alberts, Elkind, & Ginsberg, 2007; Schwartz, Maynard, & Uzelac, 2008). 
Finally, parent-adolescent discord occurs because adolescents are much more apt 
to engage in risky behavior than later in life. In large part, their riskiness is due to 
the immaturity of brain systems that regulate impulse control, some of which do not 
fully develop until people are in their 20s (Steinberg, 2007).