What does your reminiscence bump look like? If this sounds like a blow to the head with a touch of amnesia, it isn’t – but it might be just as painful. No, as Lucy Foulkes explains in her eye-opening guide to the psychology of adolescence, it’s the period of life during which people report the greatest number of important autobiographical memories. For most of us it starts around 10 and peaks at 20, taking in a plethora of firsts: first kiss, first love, first time drinking alcohol or taking drugs, first time away from home. Not to mention exams, bullying, breakups and bereavement. Thinking about it, maybe a concussion would be preferable. But then, as Foulkes shows, it’s these enduringly vivid years that define the adults we become.
Chloe’s reminiscence bump gets off to an accelerated start, thanks to her wild friend Natalie: “When I was 14, I broke my ankle, so was off school. Natalie knew where my spare key was so she let herself in, and she woke me up with a spliff and a bottle of alcopop. The school rang me but I said I hadn’t seen her.” Once the ankle had healed, they headed to Skegness to get tattoos, and then spent much of the coming years “having sex with lots of people, taking lots of drugs, truanting from school, going out in cars with much older men”.
For Vicky, who had just started high school, things were very different: “I remember overnight it was boys, overnight it was makeup, in a way that was jarring to me and just so unfamiliar.” It took her a while to find her tribe, which turned out to be other members of the school band. “It was so nice because they were hilarious and goofy and they were just themselves. And they accepted me. I think I was seeking a calmness, you know. My life at home was happy, but it was chaos.”
Foulkes, a research fellow in psychology at the University of Oxford, conducted 23 in-depth interviews for Coming of Age and they are by turns funny, hair-raising and desperately sad. Occasionally, like Naomi’s account of her first love, Peter, they have a sort of novelistic potency. In any case, the majority of readers will find someone they can identify with among her diverse cast of teenagers. Most are now in their 30s or older and are looking back wistfully, with regret, or with something like equanimity. Their accounts allow Foulkes to bring out her central point: that we narrate our lives into being, and that adolescence is so important partly because it is where this narration begins in earnest. The stories we tell ourselves shape who we are, and we can get stuck in these stories, or change them to our advantage.
The book isn’t just anecdote, though, and clearly explained research delivers many counterintuitive insights. There are, for example, two ways to be popular. “Perceived popularity” is the province of jocks and cheerleaders, the boys and girls who, if you’re lucky, might laugh at one of your jokes or let you hang out with them at break. The consensus is that they’re popular, but when you ask individuals, it turns out pretty much everyone hates them. That’s in contrast to “sociometric popularity”, which involves actually being liked; these are the considerate, supportive friends, the ones you actually enjoy hanging out with. Surprisingly – or not – the quickest route to perceived popularity is to conform especially well to the “stereotypical appearance and behaviours associated with [your] gender”. Those who don’t, particularly straight boys judged to be feminine, have a tougher time.
This phenomenon – sporty lads and girly girls rule the roost – is thought partly to reflect biological imperatives. Mentally, adolescence may be about figuring out who you are, but physically, it’s geared towards mate selection. “Gender prototypical teens” are the ones “assumed to attract more sexual partners”. In other words, Foulkes writes drily, “teenagers give social status to teenagers who are most likely to be fancied”. Comfortingly, perhaps, the reign of the perceived popular doesn’t necessarily extend into adulthood. The qualities demanded of teens at the top of the social hierarchy, such as ruthlessness, don’t always serve them well later in life, whereas the soft skills and support networks nurtured by the sociometrically popular stand them in good stead. For some “peaking in high school” is all too real.
Foulkes’s chapter on risk-taking is especially interesting, debunking the idea that teenagers have an illusion of invincibility making them more likely to step into harm’s way. She says there’s little evidence they’re unaware of the potential dangers of so-called “pseudomature” behaviours like smoking, taking drugs or having unprotected sex. In fact, they tend to overestimate the likelihood of bad stuff happening, but do it anyway. Why? Well, apart from the undeniable rewards – some of those things just feel good – it’s often because they’re more scared of the social risk of not taking part. Adolescents are in one sense highly conservative – they’ll do anything to preserve their good standing in the group.
The temptation is to wrap them in cotton wool but, as Foulkes shows, this can have its own damaging consequences. If young people aren’t able to learn through experience that worst-case scenarios rarely occur, their anxiety, rather than being extinguished, may grow. This is of a piece with arguments she’s made elsewhere about the impulse to protect a generation apparently suffering from unprecedented levels of psychological distress, with technology singled out as the culprit. Adolescence is by its nature an intensely stressful time, she argues, and for some this triggers mental illness. But if teenagers are busy writing their lives, do we want to insert a chapter titled “too fragile to cope”, unless absolutely necessary?
Coming of Age ends movingly. Foulkes showed each of her subjects what she’d written to make sure they were happy with how they’d been portrayed. These were stories of joy, pain and loss that had reverberated through their lives. For many, seeing them presented as part of the broader story of adolescence prompted a re-evaluation. One said their “shoulders had finally dropped” after 20 years, another that they now felt ready to talk to others about what they had been through. Adolescence may be the first draft of personhood, but it doesn’t have to be the last, as this wise and revelatory book shows.
• Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us by Lucy Foulkes is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
