Adolescent Development

Most adolescents believe that they are mature and capable of making serious decisions and feel that they are able to handle their emotions under severe and stressful situations. However, this thinking is a normal part of the adolescent stage. Research provides evidence of major brain development in teenagers and emphasizes the inability of these young adults to understand all of their irrational and emotional actions. The maturing adolescent brain is biologically and therefore psychologically unable to comprehend the long-term consequences of committing serious crimes.

Though the basic concept of decision making may appear simple to most, several factors affect how the brain processes emotions into rational actions. First, environment affects a young adult’s view on what is acceptable in society to handle difficult and controversial situations. Rolf E. Muuss explains in his work Theories of Adolescence that “environmental influence stimulates, modifies, and supports growth” (113) in order to emphasize that the atmosphere one is in has a direct correlation with decision making capabilities. The surroundings and family structure one lives in and observes throughout the stages of development have permanent effects on personality, decisions, and futures of that individual. Although many adults may try to understand the thoughts behind a teenager’s irrational actions, few comprehend that the biological age rarely matches the mental age in the adolescent stage of maturity. John E. Horrocks explains that “mental age is an index of the developmental level in intellectual function that a child has reached at a given time” (443). The judicial system should take into consideration the rate of the brain development to see if the guilty pe...

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...upbringing have a tremendous effect on separating the gap between biological age and mental age. In summary, Offer, Rabshin, and Offer describe how the work of “[i]nvestigators who have spent most of their professional lives studying disturbed adolescents stress[es] the importance of a period of turmoil through which all teen-agers must pass in order to grow up into mature adults” (181). Research has been done to distinguish the difference between legal age and the age of the mind; society’s job is to take this knowledge into legal situations to give adolescents fair trials.

Works Cited

Horrocks, John E. The Psychology of Adolescence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951.

Muuss, Rolf E. Theories of Adolescence. New York: Random House, 1962.

Offer, Daniel, Melvin Sabshin, and Judith L. Offer. The Psychological World of the Teen-Ager. New York: Basic Books, 1969.