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Originally Posted by ardeegee
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Warning - thread hijack for this one post.....sorry
Interesting article. What I find most interesting is that the problem was seen as a "youth on the streets running wild" problem. Emphasis on "youth".
In tribal society children became fully functioning adult members of the tribe, generally, upon reaching puberty. They were expected to do the work of an adult and were afforded all the rights and responsibilities the same as any other adult and, generally speaking, they coped without any real problem. This is because there was no disconnect between childhood and adulthood. There was no "adolescence" to speak of. That's just how life worked. To a lesser extent this is how life was right up to the industrial revolution. As survival became more a matter of farming than hunting/gathering things started to change a bit but even still, in most societies a person was treated as an adult and were doing the work of an adult by 14-15 at the oldest and often earlier.
It is only really since the industrial revolution that the idea of adolescence has really taken hold. Why is that? Predominantly because the work required for survival changed from growing/hunting food with which to feed your family and local community and to trade to working in a factory producing crap for people to buy and thereby getting money to buy food.
In this new world there weren't enough jobs for all these "children" and so they ran wild on the streets. They weren't old enough to do an "adults" job but they weren't young enough to be kept at home hanging onto mum's skirt. They were caught in between and hence this disconnect. Being caught in between they started being treated differently, neither as an adult or a child and this is when and how the idea of adolescence really took hold.
Cheers,
PKFFW