Adolescenceâ€"beginning with the onset of puberty and ending in the mid-20sâ€"is a critical period of development during which key areas of the brain mature and develop. These changes in brain structure, function, and connectivity mark adolescence as a period of opportunity to discover new vistas, to form relationships with peers and adults, and to explore one's developing identity. It is also a period of resilience that can ameliorate childhood setbacks and set the stage for a thriving trajectory over the life course. Because adolescents comprise nearly one-fourth of the entire U.S. population, the nation needs policies and practices that will better leverage these developmental opportunities to harness the promise of adolescenceâ€"rather than focusing myopically on containing its risks. This report examines the neurobiological and socio-behavioral science of adolescent development and outlines how this knowledge can be applied, both to promote adolescent well-being, resilience, and development, and to rectify structural barriers and inequalities in opportunity, enabling all adolescents to flourish.

The study of and interest in adolescence in the field of psychology and related fields continues to grow, necessitating an expanded revision of this seminal work. This multidisciplinary handbook, edited by the premier scholars in the field, Richard Lerner and Laurence Steinberg, and with contributions from the leading researchers, reflects the latest empirical work and growth in the field.

Most of the studies addressing adolescent sexual behavior in America are asymmetrically focused on either one of boys and girls or one race, primarily African Americans. Studies also are small scale and ethnographic by nature. There is lack of cross-sectional studies addressing both adolescent boys and girls, and African Americans and whites making use of a wide range of variables in terms of their sexual behavior. The present study explores sexual behavior making use of a nationally representative cross-sectional (race and gender) dataset addressing both social structural and demographic variables of interest. The data analyzed by this study were collected by Add Health as the second wave of a longitudinal study of health and well being of American adolescents. This study analyzes data collected from a school based stratified sample of African American and white adolescents only (N = 2834). Eight major determinants of adolescent sexual behavior are explored. These are religiosity, self-esteem, family support, peer group involvement, school attachment, gender, race and age. Five of these variables are developed as additive scale. These scales had Cronbach's coefficient-alpha that ranged from school attachment (.994), religiosity (.993), family support (.796), and self-esteem (.714) to peer group (.309). The other three variables are race, gender, and age which are dichotomized. Dependent variable is sexual activity which is dichotomized as yes and no. Statistically significant relationships are found between school attachment and adolescent sexual behavior, peer group and sexual behavior, age and sexual behavior, family support and sexual behavior, and race and sexual behavior. But self-esteem, religiosity, and gender are found not to have significant relationship with sexual behavior. Results of logistic regression analysis reveals that only school attachment, peer group, race and age are significant predictors of sexual behavior among these adolescents. However, religiosity, self-esteem, family support, and gender are not significant predictors. Further research is recommended to take into account other contextual variables pertinent to social class, neighborhood factor, urbanicity, adolescents' attitudes towards sex, and their perception of parental attitude towards sex because the dataset did not contain them.

Stimulated by the publication of The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, Parenting and the Child's World was conceived around the notion that there are multiple sources of influence on children's development, including parenting behavior, family resources, genetic and other biological factors, as well as social influences from peers, teachers, and the community at large. The text's 39 contributors search for when, where, and how parenting matters and the major antecedents and moderators of effective parenting. The chapters focus on the major conceptual issues and empirical approaches that underlie our understanding of the importance of parenting for child development in academic, socio-emotional, and risk-taking domains. Additional goals are to show how culture and parenting are interwoven, to chart future research directions, and to help parents and professionals understand the implications of major research findings.

The publication of this volume at this time appears particularly auspi cious. Biological, psychological, and social change is greater during the pubertal years than at any other period since infancy. While the past two decades have witnessed a virtual explosion of productive research on the first years of life, until recently research on adolescence, and particularly on puberty and early adolescence, has lagged substantially behind. This book provides encouraging evidence that things are changing for the better. Considered separately, the individual chapters in this book include important contributions to our growing knowledge of the biological mechanisms involved in pubertal onset and subsequent changes, as well as of the psychological and social aspects of these changes, both as con sequences and determinants. In this regard, the book clearly benefits from the breadth of disciplines represented by the contributors, includ ing developmental endocrinology, adolescent medicine, pediatrics, psy chology, and sociology, among others.

Child Development

Romantic relationship formation and the engagement in sexual behaviors are normative and salient developmental tasks for adolescents and young adults. These developmental tasks are increasingly viewed from an ecological perspective, thus as strongly embedded in different social contexts, including the proximal social domains of parents, peers, and partners. This volume brings together seven recent empirical studies on adolescents’ and young adults’ romantic relationships and sexuality in the context of relationships with parents, peers, and partners. In this editorial introduction, we describe two important recent changes in the theoretical perspectives on emerging romantic relationships and sexual activity: from risky behaviors to normative tasks, and from individual to contextualized processes. We then discuss recent advances in empirical research on romantic relationships and sexuality of adolescents and young adults. After that, we review the seven studies in this volume, and discuss the contributions of these studies to the existing literature. Finally, we discuss directions for future research regarding how to further incorporate the interrelational perspective in empirical research on these topics, and how to bridge the gap between the research fields on romantic relationships and sexuality. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology.