His faculty for imitation renders him highly susceptible to the influences of his environment. He imitates what he sees and hears. Therefore the influence of companions for good or evil, as well as the persuasive control of his parents by example, is potent. To a somewhat lesser degree is he affected by the class of literature which he reads. In the absence of stories suited to his psychological needs, he acquires a taste for the dime novel, nickel library, and other blood-and-thunder stories, the reading of which, if continued through the heroic period, frequently results in truancy and leaving home to “see the world.”
Concurrent with all the psychic development of this period he shows himself to be a human dynamo of physical energy which manifests itself in ceaseless action. This period of motor activity should find its outlet, as well as its control, in play, athletics, and manual training. He is a bundle of twist, squirm, and wiggle which only time can convert into useful and productive activity.
CHAPTER IV
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY
THE period of adolescence is truly one of storm and stress, caused by the wrecking of boy-nature to rebuild it into man-nature; it is a cataclysmic bursting of the bonds of infancy in preparation for the larger stature of manhood. In early adolescence the boy is neither child nor man. He is in the chrysalis stage of metamorphosis, which is shedding the characteristics of childhood and putting on the maturity of the adult. Neither one nor the other, he is a part of both. Adolescence covers the period of the boy’s life between puberty and maturity. Puberty is the earliest age at which the individual is capable of reproducing the species and it usually begins at the age of thirteen or fourteen, subject to the influence of the factors stated in the preceding chapter. The growth and development of the sex organs during adolescence produce changes which are revolutionary rather than evolutionary in their nature. Marked physical alterations are always attended by still more marked psychic disturbances.
The physical indicia of puberty are the lengthening of the vocal cords, which causes the voice to change from the treble of boyhood to the bass of manhood and manifests itself in sudden and uncontrollable breaks in the voice in speaking and singing; the growth of the organs of reproduction and the filling of the seminal glands; the growth of hair on the pubes and face; the coarsening of the skin; broadening of the shoulders, deepening of the chest, and general change from the slenderness of childhood to the compactness of maturity.
This is the period of rapid physical growth wherein he shoots upwards like a cornstalk under the impulse of a July sun. Elongated arms and legs are now as conspicuous as they are unwieldy, and efforts to discipline them are futile. The demand for “long pants,” heretofore quiescent or erupting intermittently, now becomes insistent and finally bursts forth with a fury produced by accumulated repression and fortified by the assertion that “Johnny Jones wears ’em and I’m bigger’n him”—the last word in argumentative conclusiveness. Physical awkwardness and ungainliness, illustrated in his inability to manage his hands and feet easily or gracefully, is due both to the extraordinary and rapid growth of the body and nervous system which takes place at this time, and to his instability of mind, wholly apart from his knowledge of social usages.
The psychic disturbances produced by adolescence are still more pronounced. The adolescent is in the throes of discarding the mental concepts of the child and adopting those of the adult. His viewpoint is lifted until his mental and moral horizon broadens to distances heretofore undreamed of and discloses new and strange moral and ethical problems. Old concepts melt away in the light of a newer and stronger vision. Sex-consciousness overwhelms him with its complexity and unrecognized import. The mental concepts of maturity clash with those of childhood. His barque is sailing on uncharted waters, without compass or rudder, while a fierce storm of uncertainty and instability beats about him as he experiences the travail of the birth of a new soul. It is truly the age “when a feller needs a friend”—one who can pilot him safely through the storm of adolescence to the calm of manhood.
Truancy reaches its flood tide during adolescence. The instinct of wanderlust appears in response to the promptings of his savage nature, his unease of mind, and his desire to know the unknown in the world about him, and culminates in runaways as a revolt against the exercise of parental authority which he believes to be unnecessarily restrictive or severe. He is now in the formative, fermenting period when he is reaching out to find himself, with indifferent success.
There is at this time a noticeable want of continuity of purpose or action. He jumps from one interest to another, evincing little stability of mind. There is want of psychophysical coördination. The transmission between mind and body is faulty; and the imperfect gear of intellect and will frequently fails to engage the cogwheels of morals. The machine works poorly because it is neither complete nor fully equipped. Workmen are still engaged on the unfinished job.
William now evinces a disposition to find fault with his home, his clothing, his food, and restrictions on his conduct and routine. He betrays a mental uneasiness unknown to prepubertal days, and a willingness to argue with his parents in a self-assertive or combative mood quite unlike his former self. Incongruities of character are shown in petulance, irritability, disobedience, stubbornness, and rebellion, sometimes even taking the form of cruelty to persons or animals. This latter manifestation has been ascribed to atavism which manifests itself in the recurrence of the savage traits of his primeval ancestors. Dr. G. Stanley Hall thus comments on this tendency in his exhaustive work on adolescence: “Assuming the bionomic law, infant growth means being loaded with paleoatavistic qualities in a manner more conformable to Weismannism, embryonic growth being yet purer, while the pubescent increment is relatively neoatavistic.”