Nancy Lesko: Act Your Age: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence

In Act Your Age: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence, Professor Lesko challenges the current socially constructed views of adolescence. She does so by providing a comparative analysis of contemporary teens to those from past generations. She includes assumptions from past eras that have assisted in the production of current constructs of adolescents, along with synthesized projections of how media, school, and policy have affected such views. Further, she provides a thorough examination of the social effects of political factors and sexuality, and their effects on society’s accepted views of today’s teens. As she presents prevailing interpretations of the time, she reveals general ideals of youth connected to the power relationships found in race, gender, and nation. With Act Your Age, Lesko justifiably presents her skepticism about some scientific approaches and understandings of psychological development, skepticisms that are not without warrant. As she does so, she furthers her main goal of uncovering why developmental psychology has acted as a canvas for painting a flawed masterpiece of adolescence, and why many inherently have integrated this erroneous masterpiece into their own constructed views of youth. …