Young people took over the responsibilities of adulthood early and were accepted in adult roles by the society When urbanization, developed to the point where the adolescent had no place in the work world problems consequent to delayed maturity brought to focus the adolescent problem. The youth problem emerged much later; in fact, it was not recognized as such in the United States in any real sense until the depression decade of the thirties. (Landis, 1945, p. 26) It therefore follows that a large number of modern adolescent problems in modern society can be linked to the way in which contemporary culture affects young people in their transition to adulthood. There is a wide array of social forces that impact on the personality development of the individual and are also a central cause of the tension and conflict in the adolescent search for identity.

Peter Blos also makes the crucial observation that adolescence is a period in which the youth revive very little actual support. He states that the central trauma in personality development that is commonly experienced in the sense of having no direction and being 'lost'. In effect the period of adolescence has been equated with an existential problem of meaning and identity

In Western society there are no such cultural recognitions given neither to the gradual process of growing up nor to the significance of puberty as a stage of maturation. The adolescent lives in a cultural no-man's-land between a protected, socially irresponsible childhood and an independent adulthood in which he is suddenly to take on the full responsibilities of maturity. The culture is so departmentalized that a special institution outside the family, namely the school, is set apart to prepare children to acquire the powers, mainly the intellectual powers, necessary for eventual adult life. (Blos, P. 1941. p 262)

This in turn leads to a number of psychological and personality...

These are mostly related to issues of self-esteem and identity and include eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia as well as drug abuse and other related symptoms of the adolescent in search of meaning and identity.
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