This is a summary of Adolescent Storm and Stress, Reconsidered
Author: Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, University of Maryland, College Park
Publication: American Psychologist, Publisher: American Psychological Association
Click here to check the original version.
This paper revisits G. Stanley Hall’s 1904 claim that adolescence is inherently a time of “storm and stress.” Arnett argues that while Hall’s original version, universal, biological, and inevitable, is clearly wrong, a modified version of the theory holds up well against a century of research. He examines three specific areas: conflict with parents, mood disruptions, and risk behavior, arguing that all three are genuinely more common during adolescence than at other ages, even though not every adolescent experiences them.
The storm-and-stress idea
The storm-and-stress idea predates Hall by centuries. Aristotle compared youth to drunk men, Socrates complained that young people contradict their parents and torment their teachers, and Rousseau warned parents to keep a firm hand on the helm as adolescence approached.
The term itself borrows from German “Sturm und Drang” literature, epitomized by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a young man who takes his own life over unrequited love. Hall adopted this label in 1904 for his foundational two-volume work on adolescence, though his actual theory drew on Lamarckian evolution: he believed adolescent turmoil was a recapitulation of some ancient, tumultuous period in human evolutionary history, passed down through inherited memory rather than genes.
Even so, Hall’s view wasn’t as rigid as later scholars often depicted it. He acknowledged individual differences and believed culture shaped how storm and stress expressed itself, seeing it as worse in the industrializing United States than in more traditional societies.
Two camps
Later theorists split into two camps. Anthropologists led by Margaret Mead pushed back hard, using cross-cultural evidence, particularly her Samoa research, to argue storm and stress wasn’t universal at all. Psychoanalysts, especially Anna Freud, went the opposite direction and argued it was not only universal but necessary; she considered an adolescent who showed no turmoil to be repressed and psychologically unhealthy.
Arnett organizes his case around three components he considers the real core of the storm-and-stress concept: conflict with parents, mood disruptions, and risk behavior, each peaking at a different point in adolescence.
Adolescence
Conflict with parents peaks in frequency during early adolescence and in intensity during midadolescence, then declines by late adolescence. One naturalistic study found adolescents and parents clashing roughly 20 times a month.
Despite this, most research finds these conflicts don’t reflect a real breakdown in the relationship; parents and teens typically still agree on core values like honesty and education, and the fights tend to center on mundane things like curfews, appearance, and dating. Arnett suggests these mundane arguments often function as stand-ins for harder conversations parents avoid having directly, particularly around sex, since American culture offers no clear consensus on what’s appropriate for teenagers at different ages.
Mood disruptions
Mood disruptions peak in mid-adolescence. Using the Experience Sampling Method, where subjects carry a pager and log their emotional state when beeped at random points during the day, researchers found adolescents report far more extreme and negative emotions than their parents, and their sense of happiness drops sharply compared to preadolescence. Larson and Richards, whose beeper research Arnett draws on heavily, attributed this less to puberty directly and more to adolescents’ growing capacity for abstract thought, which lets them recognize threats and complications in situations a younger child wouldn’t notice.
Risk behavior peaks latest, in late adolescence and emerging adulthood. Rates of crime, substance use, reckless driving, and risky sexual behavior all climb through the teen years and peak around ages 18 to 20 before dropping. Two-thirds of all sexually transmitted disease cases occur in people under 25. Arnett notes that adolescents generally experience risk behavior itself as enjoyable, even as the consequences, legal trouble, injury, disease, cause real difficulty.
Hormonal effects
On causes, Arnett finds limited but real evidence for a biological contribution, particularly hormonal effects on mood during early puberty, though the effect size is small and interacts heavily with other factors. He puts more weight on cultural explanations. Drawing on Schlegel and Barry’s study of 186 traditional societies, he shows that storm and stress is markedly less common outside Western, individualist cultures.
The key variable seems to be how much independence a culture expects adolescents to establish from their parents. Traditional cultures that don’t push adolescents toward early autonomy see less conflict, and similar patterns show up within American society itself: parent-adolescent conflict runs higher in White middle-class families than in Mexican American families, and among Asian American families, each additional generation in the U.S. brings adolescents closer to majority-culture patterns of storm and stress.
In conclusion
Arnett closes by pushing back on the common academic narrative that ordinary people hold an exaggerated “myth” of adolescent turmoil while researchers know better. He argues the gap is smaller than scholars claim. Most people don’t believe every single adolescent goes through storm and stress, they believe it’s more common during adolescence than other life stages, which is exactly what the research shows.
He argues expecting some degree of difficulty during adolescence isn’t necessarily harmful; it can help parents and teachers prepare, and it means calm, easy adolescents come as a pleasant surprise rather than the assumed default. He ends by echoing Hall’s own more optimistic side: adolescence can be simultaneously the hardest and the most alive, imaginative period in a person’s life.