How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence

Pulitzer-winning journalist Richtel (Inspired) provides an uneven investigation of modern adolescence. Building on his New York Times series on the adolescent mental health crisis, the author makes two major arguments: first, that adolescence helps to diversify humanity and culture because adolescents challenge “the way thing have always been done” in ways that staid adults no longer can. The second is that today’s adolescents are hitting puberty at an earlier age, rendering them especially vulnerable to the influx of information unleashed by their smartphones and leading to an unprecedented spike in mental health problems. Among other topics, Richtel delves into dialectical behavioral therapy and other interventions that might help struggling adolescents, and how the “desire to explore” that traditionally fueled risk-taking in the physical world has been turned inward as today’s teenagers explore a virtual landscape. Those individual points are insightfully explored with the aid of valuable research from neurologists and child psychologists, but they can get lost amid the book’s patchwork structure and well-worn discussions of the ways addictive technology harms developing brains. The result is an intermittently intriguing exploration of a pressing topic. (July)