• Adolescence is the period between the onset of puberty and the point at which adult roles are assumed and involves rapid physical, psychological and social change.

• In adolescence, learning takes place as the brain establishes neural networks. These networks are constantly modified by new experiences.

• The adolescent brain develops in stages. One of the last areas to develop are the frontal lobes, the part of the brain responsible for decision-making and assessing risk.

• Just when the adolescent brain is at this delicate developmental phase, it is also most impulsive and drug use is most likely.

• Drug use in adolescence disrupts brain development, which can lead to long-term damage to brain function and increase the risk of further drug use.

• Many adolescents are surprisingly poorly informed about drugs, their effects and the harms they can cause.

• Adolescents tend to seek information about drugs from the internet or friends.

• Accurate information is available and should be highlighted to adolescents.

Laurence Steinberg describes the evolution of his career within the context of the rise of the study of adolescent development. At the time he began graduate school, in 1974, there was little research on normative adolescent development. Studies of this age group had focused mainly on problematic aspects of psychological functioning and were based largely on clinical populations. Now, however, research on normative adolescent development is central to the field of developmental psychology. Steinberg discusses his involvement in research on puberty and parent-adolescent relationships, the impact of after-school employment on teenagers’ behavior and well-being, nonschool influences on adolescent achievement and school engagement, age differences in judgment and decision-making, and in the application of the science of adolescent development science to the treatment of young people under the law. He also discusses how a series of unanticipated events had profound effects on the development of his career.

Petersen didn’t set out to be a researcher, much less a developmental scientist, but found that she loved it! Her journey was unusual but productive, adding to knowledge of adolescence, and especially correlates of puberty. She also contributed to gender issues in research as well as attention to rigorous statistical and psychometric methods. Her tendency to be attracted to interesting opportunities led her to additional roles, particularly leadership. This had the unfortunate effect of truncating her research career, though not her writing. Her experiences in research and especially with leadership roles were influenced by issues of sexism and other kids of exclusion, leading to her current emphases on global engagement and capacity building. The net result has been a satisfying life.

In adolescence, an important challenge for parents is to keep track of their adolescents’ behaviors and to create conditions in which adolescents disclose relevant information about themselves. According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), dynamics of autonomy play a central role in both the effectiveness of parental monitoring and adolescents’ willingness to disclose toward parents. This chapter provides a review of SDT-based studies on parental monitoring and adolescent disclosure. This research begins to show that, whereas autonomy-supportive communication increases the potential benefits associated with parental monitoring, controlling communication of monitoring is rather counterproductive. Further, adolescents disclose more often toward parents and do so more willingly when parents are perceived as autonomy supportive (rather than controlling). In conversations about unfamiliar topics, adolescents additionally benefit from parental support for competence (i.e. guidance). Studies also highlight adolescents’ agency in the dynamics of monitoring and disclosure. Implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.

Adolescents’ ability to access health care depends on sharing accurate information about concerns, needs, and conditions. Parents and other adults serve as both resources and gatekeepers in adolescents’ ability to access and manage care. Understanding information sharing between adolescents and parents, adolescents and providers, and parents and providers is thus critical. This chapter distinguishes between adolescents’ routine and self-disclosure of information. The former refers to sharing information required for the partner to perform their role. The latter refers to voluntarily sharing more information than required. Because the roles of parent and provider are distinct relative to the adolescent, disclosure decisions can conflict. These differences are discussed in the context of communication privacy management theory and the literature on legitimacy of authority. A framework for understanding information sharing processes is developed that considers stage of care, type of care, stigma/privacy associated with the condition, and the age of the adolescent.

This chapter focuses on adolescents’ use of strategies to conceal information about their whereabouts, behaviors, and activities from parents. The chapter describes the concealing strategies assessed by researchers, adolescents’ relative use of strategies, and adolescents’ reasons for concealing information from parents. Concealment strategies range from partial disclosure to secrecy to lying. Most adolescents use partial and passive concealment strategies (e.g. omitting details) more often than active concealment strategies (e.g. lying). Adolescents conceal activities they believe to be personal and to avoid punishment. The chapter also summarizes research on potential implications of concealment for both the parent–adolescent relationship and the adolescent’s adjustment. Research evidence links the use of concealing strategies with poorer quality parent–adolescent relationships and with poorer behavioral and psychological adjustment. Recommended future directions include integrating research on concealment with the literatures on self-disclosure, lying, and secrecy outside the parent–child relationship, and further tests of the hypothesized benefits of concealment.

Although lying is frequently associated with problem behaviors, recent research also suggests that lying to parents is part of a normative developmental process that serves important functions for the growth and maintenance of adolescent autonomy and reflects complex and mature moral reasoning. This chapter examines adolescent lie-telling as an information management strategy and a form of everyday resistance that adolescents engage in as they strive for autonomy and increased independence in their relationships with parents. Connections between adolescent lie-telling and the development of their autonomy and moral evaluations are considered in detail. The chapter examines adolescent lying as a concealment strategy and situates lying among other information management techniques discussed in this volume. Literature on the developmental trajectory of lying is discussed, with an eye toward the changing alchemy of the adolescent–-parent relationship as children enter and move through adolescence.

This chapter profiles a description of the paths that shaped research on parental monitoring and adolescents’ information management. As these areas developed, accounts of the interplay between parents’ attempts to regulate their adolescents’ behavior and adolescents’ responses grew in breadth and in detail. In this chapter, we introduce readers to the constructs and frameworks that have come to represent monitoring and information management research, including related topics that have been probed in diverse attempts to better understand parenting and adolescents’ behaviors. We track developments in the field from the initial challenges to research on parental monitoring, to the rapid shift emphasizing adolescents’ information management and challenging assumptions about monitoring specifically and parental control more generally. Finally, we not how these broad examinations of monitoring and parental control have led to theory development and offer suggestions for continuing these efforts.

Let us start with Sartre, whose creative appropriation of Being and Time’s phenomenology of death came to prominence first – in 1946’s Being and Nothingness – and probably remains the most widely known in its own right. If Sartre’s vision of existential death is rarely recognized as his alternative to Heidegger’s account, that is both because what Being and Time means by death is not widely understood and because Sartre’s alternative represents the furthest departure from Heidegger’s own view. In general, Sartre’s adoption of a subject/object dualism leads him to pervasively re-Cartesianize Being and Time, as if he were completely oblivious to Heidegger’s overarching efforts to undermine Cartesian dualism. (This obliviousness is already clear from Sartre’s oft-quoted but nonetheless false claim that the “existentialism” he shares with Heidegger can be defined by their shared insistence “that subjectivity must be the starting point.”) Sartre’s phenomenology of the objectifying “look of the other” transforms Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death so dramatically that Sartre can easily appear to be describing a different phenomenon altogether. Read carefully, however, it becomes clear that Sartre’s account of the “the look” allows him to articulate his own version of an existential phenomenon in which I experience “the death of my possibilities” – even though “I am my possibilities” – and yet I live through that experience to tell the tale phenomenologically.