Adolescence and the tyranny of extremes.

Adolescence is not a moderate age. It is an all out effort to separate from childhood and begin the momentous transformation that will ultimately redefine the girl or boy into a young adult.

A coming of age experience, adolescence is not for the faint of heart. It often takes extreme measures to break the secure and familiar boundaries within which one has lived in order to brave the daunting challenges of new growth ahead. In the process, adolescents must struggle with the tyranny of extremes in many forms.

Thus they test limits. They disobey rules. They follow ideals. They want urgently. They feel intensely. They elevate standards. They break traditions. They object strenuously. They rebel strongly. They take dares. They fight hard. They dream dreams. They seek excitement. They risk adventure.

This is a time when young people can make dramatic personal changes. So the middle school student who had always been a carnivore like parents and siblings suddenly announces she is a vegetarian. Now an extreme alteration of values distinguishes the adolescent from the child, establishes her individuality in the family, and becomes a statement of independence.

This is also the age of ‘aversion conversions' where what the young person vows never to do often forecasts what he will probably do because he is tempted by the forbidden -- even what he forbids himself. So if your adolescent swears he will never do drugs, keep a weather eye out for the possibility of future drug use. The extreme nature of prohibition can create an irresistible invitation.

Furthermore, what adolescents are strictly forbidden in harshest terms they can end up doing to an extreme degree - like young people engaging in excessive drinking and other drugging in response to dire parental threats for any substance use,for example.

In a time of high change and much confusion, extreme definitions can offer comforting clarity to early adolescent thinking. For example, 'always' or 'never' are easier to accept than 'sometimes', 'black' or 'white' are easier to understand than 'shades of gray', 'yes' or 'no' are easier to tolerate than 'maybe', 'right' or 'wrong' are easier to believe than 'mixed.'

Parents can add their own agenda of extremes. Feeling more out of control come their child's adolescence, parents can advocate for extremes around matters of conduct when they want the young person to be extremely careful, to work extremely hard, to be extremely responsible, and to perform extremely well.

Susceptibility to extremes can be socially encouraged because adolescent is such an impressionable age. Differentiating from the child she used to be a young person begins the painful process of redefining herself as more individual, independent, and as more grown up, wondering how this is to be done.

For models she looks in two places. Near at hand, outstanding peers inspire imitation, particularly those who are extremely popular, powerful, cool, confidant, attractive, and successful.

Further removed but more influential are models found in the world of celebrity where popular icons of male and female identify how to act, how to look, what to value, and what to have. Just as popular entertainment uses extremely sensational content to compete for the adolescent audience, so the marketplace traffics in extreme images that embody youthful ideals to compete for young people's interest and allegiance. Adolescents will pay to listen to, look at, and look like their idols.

Because these idealized images are powerfully attractive, they can create a lot of pressure to live up to, while failing to meet them can cause young people to become self-critical, even self-punitive for not measuring up. Where ideals rule, to be ‘ordinary' or ‘average' can be an admission of inadequacy or inferiority.

So to look "too fat" for a young woman or to look "too weak" for a young man can be a painful departure from each sexual ideal, which is why some young women get into dieting and some young men get into body building. Ideals can be extremely dehumanizing.

Extremes also intensify the demands of expectations. Like the young woman who explained the pressures of getting ready for senior prom. "If I don't look great and have a great time then it's going to be disappointing. Just looking good and having a good time isn't going to be good enough."

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Or there are the highly achievement driven students who can never enjoy their academic success for fear they might fail to keep it up.

Finally, there is what happens when the tyranny of extremes leads adolescents to cycle between self-indulgence and self-deprivation, cycles mediated by the need for compensation.

Here young people get whipsawed back and forth in order to pursue the benefits and then escape the problems of opposing extremes. Eating, exercising, spending, working, socializing are common arenas where I have seen this cycle played out.

Too much begets the corrective of too little, too little begets the corrective of too much, and round and round the indulgence/deprivation cycle spins as resort to one extreme is sought to compensate for the ill effects of the other. The result is young people who think in extremes and learn to use extreme alternatives to regulate their lives, frantically struggling for control because they feel out of control.

As one young woman described it: "I can't get it right. First I starve after I binge and then I binge after I starve. I wish I could even my eating out!" When self-indulgence leads to an experience of excess she compensates with self-deprivation, but soon cravings lead her to compensate with an experience of self-indulgence to make up for the painful deficiencies of self-denial.

Living in an all or nothing world where extremes seem like the only solution to getting what they want and being how they want, young people can lose the middle way. What eludes them is the practice of moderation where some is enough, where sufficiency is okay, where consistency of effort brings welcome stability. I believe parents, by what they say and what they example, can have a helpful role in setting the young person on a steadier path.

They can explain how excess is easy, abstinence is hard, and moderation is hardest of all. And lest a young person think parents are only talking about an adolescent problem to be outgrown, they can point out that adults can struggle with these issues too.

They can even share about times in their own lives when striving to serve the tyranny of extremes got oppressive, like with perfectionism or compulsive worry or some other painful preoccupation. Or they could tell about times their conduct got really out of balance, perhaps around eating or drinking or spending or working, when they got hooked by, and finally managed to unhook from, some cycle of self-indulgence and self-deprivation.

Because extremes can be so hard on adolescents, when a parent can help moderate these influences and even teach the practice of moderation they can do their teenagers a great mercy.

For more about parenting adolescents, see my book, "SURVVING YOUR CHILD'S ADOLESCENCE" (Wiley, 2013.) Information at: www.carlpickhardt.com

Next week's entry: Parental denial about adolescence.