Rebellion and Anti-Social Behavior

Are all adolescents anti-social by nature? What is normal adolescent rebellion and what is delinquent acting-out? It is my contention that before understanding the sick, we need to know what to expect in the normal. Therefore, I will first present data from a “healthy” population of high school students with its own ways of reacting to the problems of the teenage years.¹ This will be followed

by an example of delinquent group actions within a hospital setting. These hospitalized teenagers formed a group which reacted anti-socially when hospital-patient communications deteriorated.

During the past five years I have conducted a longitudinal research project on typical or normal teenagers in two middle-class midwestern suburbs. My co-workers and I wanted to discover how these adolescents coped successfully during the adolescent years. I will not go into the details of the project but let it suffice to say that we have studied eighty-four teenage boys and their parents over the past nine years. In this presentation I will concentrate upon the rebellion and anti-social behavior observed among these normal teenagers. Such an overview might help you, at times, distinquish between an adolescent who manifests the normal pains of growth and a seriously disturbed one.

One of the most important tasks of the adolescent is to learn how to curb his aggression, how to control it in a meaningful and socially acceptable way. When we first interviewed our high school subjects, they were in their freshman year. Almost all of them indicated that they had a strong urge to act in a manner that society would label as rebellious.* In our subjects, rebellion had manifested itself most clearly in early adolescence, at ages twelve and thirteen. They described themselves as “getting into fights with our parents” for seemingly small and insignificant issues. The young teenagers broke the rules of the house constantly. For example, they refused to take the garbage out, dressed differently, came ho