Do you know there's now a Society of Adolescent Medicine of the Philippines (SAMPI), composed of physicians specializing in adolescence? The formation of this group - they just had their first annual convention this week - reflects how far we've come toward recognizing adolescence as a separate phase from childhood and adulthood.
I was asked to deliver a paper at that convention and while doing the research for my presentation, I realized adolescence is actually largely unexplored terrain, a phase that generally elicits fear and dread among adults.
If teenagers seem so terrifying it's because adolescence is a fairly new category in human history. In the Philippines, we even had to borrow the English term "teenager". We sometimes use terms like "kabataan" (youth), or "binata" for males and "dalaga" for females but all these terms actually refer to marital status rather than the specific age group of teenagers.
For most of history, and in most cultures, people simply jumped from childhood to adulthood, teenagers becoming farmers, fisherfolk, workers, soldiers, parents. Teenage sex, marriage and childbearing have always been the norm. The Virgin Mary was a teenage mother and, one could add facetiously, an unmarried one. Traditions, not modernity, were and still are responsible for most teenage pregnancies and marriages. In Bangladesh, for example, more than half of females are married off before the age of 20.
Some time back I found an old medical article reporting that the average age for menarche (first menstruation) among Filipinas was 15 during the 1920s. Marriage followed soon after for many of the girls. Remember that until 1989, the legal age of marriage in the Philippines was 14 for females and 16 for males.
Today, because of changes in nutrition, the average age for menarche has dropped to about 13 in the Philippines. At the same time, there have been social changes, such as higher educational requirements for the job market, which mean a longer waiting period between puberty and marriage, and a prolonged dependency on adults.
Which is just as well because we're learning that "adolescence" is a crucial and distinct developmental phase in human beings. As with other animals, human adolescence is a time for sexual development. But there's much more to being a human being than reproducing so it's not surprising that recent studies at the University of California have shown adolescence is also a period of intense brain development.
For a long time now, scientists have known that the brain reaches about 95 percent of its adult volume by the age of 5 but were unaware of this second surge of brain growth during adolescence. Specifically, this crucial brain development takes place mainly in the frontal lobes, which are responsible for "executive functions" such as judgment, control of emotions, organization and planning.
Knowing that the teenagers' frontal lobes are still developing helps us understand why they behave the way they do. For example, a study at the McLean Hospital in Boston found that teenagers have difficulties reading people's facial emotions, a skill that is crucial for making sound decisions. (I chuckled when I read about the Boston findings, suddenly understanding why our teenagers often have that infuriating "dedma" - devil may care -- look even when you confront them with their misbehavior.)
But here's another important catch - the development of the frontal lobes depends to a large extent on teenagers being able to exercise those "executive functions". It's a "use it or lose it" proposition. If frontal lobe functions are not exercised - learning to integrate visual and emotional information for example -- then those unused parts are pruned, withering into oblivion, when a person reach their 20s. Put another way, life's habits are, to a large extent, set during adolescence.
This means teenagers have to be given a chance to respond to life's many challenges and situations, with some guidance from adults but with enough freedom to make their own decisions. If they make mistakes then fine, adults need to assure them that's all right and that we're confident they'll get it right the second or third time around.
My feeling is that Filipino adults tend to be much more restrictive with our teenagers, and that this stunts human development - it might even explain why our leaders seem like they never left adolescence.
We also have this tendency to attempt to "teach" the young by using long sermons about moral values, which are absolutely useless because they're all words. Teenagers learn to orient their moral compasses through hands-on experiences dealing with real-life situations. (I'm not too happy either with teenagers spending so much time on the Internet and chat rooms because that's virtual reality, not the real-life world.)
The teen years - not too long ago for all of us, in case you've forgotten - are crucial for discovery and learning, but teenagers need a safe and supportive environment, and freedom, to be able to gain the most out of this exciting period.
Do you know there's now a Society of Adolescent Medicine of the Philippines (SAMPI), composed of physicians specializing in adolescence? The formation of this group - they just had their first annual convention this week - reflects how far we've come toward recognizing adolescence as a separate phase from childhood and adulthood.