Book Review

Abstract

Adolescent Vulnerabilities and Opportunities, an invaluable addition to the Jean Piaget Symposium Series, explores adolescence through the lens of developmental psychology. The book reinvigorates the constructivist view of human development, emphasizing learning as an active process in which individuals accommodate new information and assimilate that information into what they already know. The editors, Eric Amsel and Judith G. Smetana, reawaken Piagetian principles in understanding the adolescent’s developmental trajectory. Jean Piaget embraced adolescents as active agents in their learning and development, empowered to design their development as they acquire morality, rationality, and an autonomous sense of self. The editors recognize adolescence as a critical and distinctive period in human development, fraught with unique and rewarding opportunities but also vulnerable to developmental risks. As adolescents actively navigate their development, they make sense of the world through coordinating activities that, in turn, shape their own individual development. As adolescents coordinate their activities, they develop a sense of self and fit themselves into the broader, social structure that surrounds them. Adolescents’ adaptive accommodation will depend on the coordination of their activities through opportunities for positive developmental outcomes and vulnerabilities inflicted when such coordinations are unsuccessful, impacting adolescents’ well-being, mental health, risk taking behaviors, parental conflict, and academic achievement. Amsel and Smetana divide a compilation of works authored by leading experts in developmental psychology into two parts. The first tackles the biological and cognitive components of adolescent development, emphasizing neurological changes unique to adolescence that are sensitive, yet critical, to the adolescent’s progression toward adulthood. The second part of the compilation addresses psychosocial and socio-relational development, underlining the impact of coordinating activities engaged in between the adolescent and others, namely parents, peers, teachers, and significant others, as well as the adolescent himself. The divided structure disentangles biological underpinnings from environmental forces, while still acknowledging the critical interplay between nature and nurture in understanding adolescent development, an interplay increasingly examined in cutting-edge research focusing on youth development (see, Negriff et al. 2011; van Roekel et al. 2011). The first chapter of Adolescent Vulnerabilities and Opportunities provides the reader with a formal introduction to the book’s content, assisting the reader in navigating through the chapters. It opens with an illustration of the constructivist perspective, viewing adolescents as architects constructing normative mental structures and processes. The editors find support for the constructivist perspective through Piagetian principles on genetic epistemology, namely that the nature of the knowledge one acquires is inherently linked to the process of its acquisition. As humans have direct experience with the world, they continually organize, coordinate, and integrate the new information they acquire into the repertoire of what they already know, making adjustments accordingly. The editors acknowledge that, in recent decades, the ‘‘constructivist baby has been thrown out with the Piagetian bathwater’’ (Amsel and Smetana 2011, p. 6). They find there is a growing need to revive the constructivist view in its dynamic and integrative account of the intricacies of adolescence. The chapter then proceeds to sketch out a road map for the rest of the book, providing the reader with E. Starosta (&) Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: Estarost@indiana.edu