 Most cultures begin the training of teens in infancy and continue until the teenage years, till the point when the teenager goes into the more of an adult role. Even primitive cultures have this pattern as common; they organize an initiation ceremony to denote the conversion from childhood to adulthood.
Today adult status appears many years after adolescence. At the same time as a teenager obtains physical maturity and wants social independences, he must stay in a position of dependence. He is constrained to carry on in the role of student and is not permitted to contend with adults in the job market. In fact, he is out of place in the friendship patterns of adults; he has no rightful outlet for his newly developed drives; he is not allowed to do the things that adults do for pleasure and relaxation.
Apparently, society has no role for him, for he is not a child nor is he an adult. So when a teenager leaves childhood in his early teenage years, he actually doesn’t enlist in adulthood until he is fully independent, sometimes as much as a decade later. Throughout this entire period, teenagers are in a cultural limbo, being neither obedient teens nor responsible adults.
Teenagers’ Needs
Due to their need to be something more than teens and to attain some independence, teens have created their own subculture. Their subculture is completed with its own values, norms, language, and symbols. It has become so well developed and organized that it spread through continents and oceans. The unusual styles of dress, folk heroes, and slang expressions seem more foreign to the parent who lives under the same roof than to another teenager thousands of miles away.
Teenage Peer Pressure
Adults try to socialize with teens but understand that they have less and less power, while the teen subculture seems to take an increasingly strong hold. With time the peer group all but replaces the influence of parents and other adults.
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