We are calling them ‘wicked,’ not because [they] are ethically deplorable. We usethe term ‘wicked’ in a meaning akin to than of ‘malignant’ (in contrast to ‘benign’)
or ‘vicious’ (like a circle) or ‘tricky’ (like a leprechaun) or aggressive (like a lion, in
contrast to the docility of a lamb). Horst Rittle and Melvin Webber
Azlyn Hobson, a student at Rich Middle School in Laketown, Utah, was happily anticipating the Valentine Dance coming up at school. “She was excited about this dance,” said her Mother. “She was telling me about it for two weeks. There was a boy she liked, she wanted to dance with him. She was going to have the best time ever.”
And then, for Azlyn, disaster on the dance floor: a boy she didn’t like, and one who she said made her feel uncomfortable, asked her to dance. So she said no. Then, according to a February 20, 2020, story in the Salt Lake Tribune, the principal rushed over and took charge. “He was like,” Azlyn recalled, “you guys go dance. There’s no saying no here.” He then shooed them onto the dance floor for what was for Azlyn a painful and awkward three minutes: “I just didn’t like it,” the 11-year-old said. “When they finally said it was done, I was like ‘Yes!'”
But it wasn’t done. When Azlyn told her Mother about her unpleasant time dancing with the wrong boy, her Mother emailed the principal: “She ALWAYS has the right to say no,” she wrote. “Boys don’t have the right to touch girls or make them dance with them. They shouldn’t. If girls are taught that they don’t have the right to say no to boys, or that saying no is meaningless, because they’ll be forced to do it anyway, we’ll have another generation who feels that the rape culture is completely normal.”
Kip Motta, the principal, offered the other perspective: “We want to protect every child’s right to be safe and comfortable at school,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune. “We believe in that 100%. We also believe that all children should be included in school activities. The reason for the policy as we have had it…[in the] past is to make sure no kids feel like they get left out.”
Azlyn’s mother had a point: Young girls should not be forced to dance with boys that they don’t feel comfortable with. And the principle had one as well: No student should be left out of school activities. It is an example of the most difficult kind of problem: Right vs.Right.
And Azlyn? She was caught in the middle. She found herself in “Mr. In-between land.” On the one hand her mother was adamant: Azlyn, or any young girl, should not be forced to dance with someone she didn’t want to. And yet, since the students in her school were required to include all student in the the school activities, she was not permitted to say no.
Azlyn, her Mother, Kip Motta and the unnamed boy who asked Azlyn to dance, and all the other students caught up in the middle school dance problem, found themselves grappling with a complex and difficult problem: It was right for Azlyn to say no when she didn’t want to dance with a particular boy. And it was right for the school to have a policy to ensure that all students were included in the school actives. Trying to navigate between two alternatives, both of which are “right” is tricky and complicated. Few teenagers, and parents or teachers as well, are prepared to mange it successfully.
The Mine Field That Is Adolescence
Stop the first 20 adults you see walking down the street and ask them what was they most difficult time in their lives. Eighteen of the 20 will say middle school, or junior high school.
This is just a guess, of course. We have no idea if it is accurate. And yet for many people, the adolescent years, seen in hindsight, were difficult and often unpleasant. Caught between wanting to be admired, most often by the members of the opposite sex, assailed by strange and unfamiliar feelings and desires, subject to infusions of hormones which relentlessly go about their tasks of changing bodies from children to adults with no accompanying instruction book on how they are supposed to work, rebelling against parents, and occasionally all authority, overcome at times by convictions of being worthless, or unattractive, or not having a “good personality,” and required to attend school for up to six or seven hours a day when much of what is taught neither makes much sense nor helps with the real problems they are grappling with. Add to all this a multitude of complex and often contradictory societal expectations and rules about how to dress, talk, and act, with essentially no helpful information as to why they are important or clear instructions about how to follow them, and it should come as no surprise that adolescence is for many a confusing, frustrating, and often unhappy time. It’s as if the forces of society and nature have conspired together to make sure that the years between 13 and 19 are as difficult as they could possible be.
As Azlyn moves further into her adolescent years, she has no idea what problems lie in wait for her. She will soon discover, however, that the problems she will face day in and day out are much more challenging – and important – than trying to arrange dancing with one boy and avoiding another at a school dance. And there’s more: like all 11 – and 12- year olds, she is unprepared for what lies ahead. When she runs into new problems, she will quickly discover that she has no idea what she should do to make things better. Most teen agers avoid talking to their parents, but if they do, most learn that their parents’s advice is hopelessly out-of-date, or that they are as confused as are their children. Combine these issues and dilemmas into what turns out to be an impossible puzzle for your people to resolve, and the claim we make in this chapter, that adolescence is a wicked problem, becomes more persuasive.
The Raising Teens Project
We feel confident in making the categorical statement that Azlyn – and most all other teenagers as well – is both unaware of her coming problems and and unprepared to deal with them. We say this because we have consulted two sources of information: First, ourselves: though our memories may not be entirely dependable about many things in the past, we can remember clearly how the problems we struggled with as we passed through those years were huge, traumatic and unintelligible on the one hand, and how uncertain we were about what we should do with them on the other.
And second, at the end of the last century, scholars at MIT’s Work-Life Center and Harvard’s Center for Health Communication joined together in a research project designed to identify the nature of the problems that young people face as they struggle to make the transition from childhood to early adulthood. Their project, titled the Raising Teens Project, reviewed the findings of over 300 research studies and found a” surprising degree of consensus among experts” as to what the challenges of adolescents were. They distilled their findings into these “Ten Tasks of Adolescent Development:”
1. Adjust to sexually maturing bodies and feelings; 2. Develop and apply abstract thinking skills; 3. Develop and apply new perspectives on human relationships; 4. Develop and apply new coping skills in such areas as decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution; 5. Identify meaningful moral standards, values, and belief systems; 6. Understand and express more complex emotional experiences; 7. Form friendships that are mutually close and supportive; 8. Establish key aspects of identity; 9. Meet the demands of increasingly mature roles and responsibilities; 10. Renegotiate relationships with adults in parenting roles.For each of these developmental tasks, the researchers added a paragraph which described in more detail the specific things that teenagers had to learn learn in order to be successful with each task. For example, here is the paragraph for the first, “Adjust to sexually maturing bodies and feelings:”
“Teens are faced with adjusting to growing bodies and newly acquired sexual
characteristics. They must learn to manage sexual feelings and to engage
in healthy sexual behaviors. This task includes establishing a sexual identity
and developing the skills for romantic relationships.”
And here is what they wrote for #4, “Develop and apply new coping skills in areas such as decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution:”
“Teens begin to acquire new abilities to think about and plan for the future,
to engage in more sophisticated strategies for decision-making, problem-solving,
and conflict resolution, and to moderate their risk-taking to serve their
goals rather than jeopardize them.”
Other specific skills and behaviors from other categories are:
“Having learned to ‘put themselves into another person’s shoes,’ they [must] begin to take into account both their [own] perspective and another person’s at the same time.” (#3)
“…develop a more complex understanding of moral behavior and underlying principles
justice and caring for others.” (#5)
“…shift toward an ability to identify and communicate more complex emotions, [and] to
understand the emotions of others is more sophisticated ways…” (#6)
“…take on the roles that will be expected of them in adulthood…learn to acquire the
skills and manage the multiple demands that allow them to move into the labor market
as well as meet the expectations regarding commitment to family, community and
citizenship.” (#9)
The “Wickedness” of Adolescence
Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University, has argued that it is crucial for us to understand what wicked problems are so that we will be better prepared to deal with them. “We would be vastly better off if we understood what wicked problems are and learned to distinguish between them and regular (or ‘tame’) problems.” Everyone associated with the travails of adolescence – the young people themselves, their parents, teachers, and society itself – would appreciate and benefit from being “vastly better off” by understanding what wicked problems are. The reason for this is not complicated: Most of the most important problems that teenagers face are wicked ones. Learning about wicked problems, then, is an important first step in grappling with the challenges of “raising teens.” Among the characteristics of wicked problems that were identified by Horst Rittle and Melvin Webber and described in an earlier chapter, are three that are particularly relevant for a discussion of the wicked problems of adolescence: First, for wicked problems, there are no stopping rules. They are never completely resolved or finished and so are never “solved.” The development tasks identified by the scholars and researchers as crucial will continue far beyond the time when teenagers become adults. There is no moment when young people – or anyone for that matter – will be able to say, “I have now finished with the task of understanding complex moral behavior and the underlying principles of justice and caring for others.” It is also true that the struggle with learning to manage sexual feelings and engage in healthy sexual behavior never ends nor do the tasks of acquiring the coping skills of effective decision-making, problem solving and conflict resolution. Teenagers will spent the rest of their lives wrestling with these issues.
Second, every “solution” to a wicked problem is never true or false, but good or bad, better or best. Determining what is the “best” possible solution to a wicked problem is in itself, a wicked problem, one that requires a serious attempt to work through the complexities inherent in deciding what is the best thing to do, and then learning how to do it.
And third, people see wicked problems from own perspectives, and since there is no methodology available (as there is in science) that will provide a objective and agreed-upon definition for a problem, there can never be a single definition for it. All attempts to define the problem will be influenced by a person’s values, preferences, personal history, and biases, as well as their position in society. Is premarital sex a problem? To a religious advisor or a parent, perhaps it is, but to a therapist helping a young person navigate the difficult terrain of healthy sexual behavior, perhaps not.
In summary, the “wickedness” of adolescent problems is a consequence of the existence and interactions of five interrelated factors: First, the nature of the problems themselves. Setting aside for the moment who it is that is grappling with them – teens, adults or senior citizens – wicked problems present obstacles that are almost impossible to surmount. They are by definition wicked and not tame, and so have properties that make any attempt to grapple with them tenuous, complex, and incomplete.
Second, the inability of the adolescent mind to comprehend just what it is facing. Teens seem to be singularly unprepared to imagine either causes or consequences. Peering into the future and asking, “What difference will this make later on?” is as unusual as choosing to listen to Bing Crosby rather Eminem or Adele.
Third, there are few sources of accurate and helpful information which, put into the context of the lives that teenagers are living, would be helpful making decisions. As a result, their sources of information about the problems they are facing in life necessarily come from each other, the internet and the street. Making things worse, few if any adolescents have any idea that wicked problems even exist. If they happened to hear someone use the term, or read in somewhere, their conclusion would undoubtedly lead to ideas of bad or evil rather than complex and difficult.
Fourth, since many of their parents are still struggling with their own issues around sexuality, justice, decision making, conflict resolution, and the management of their own complex emotions such as anger, jealousy, and prejudice, they are frequently unable to to help their children.
And finally, society, including the media, education, politics, and the adults who are singled out for praise and honor, sends out an endless stream of confusing and contradictory “memes,” images, and scripts that often lead away from rather than toward the chances of successful work with wicked problems.
“We Fear and We Are Fearful”
Successful passage through the fraught years of adolescence requires facing up to problems that are “malignant” “vicious,” “tricky,” and “aggressive,” and, which, in turn, creates situations that are confusing, demanding, frightening and frustrating. In short, adolescents must contend with and confront a large and imposing number of wicked problems. With no rules for stopping work on them, and with no way to know if or when they have been successful, the contending and confronting goes on and on. Social scientists have been successful in identifying from the research literature the development tasks of adolescence. What they have not been able to offer are instructions as to how the young people should go about navigating their way through them. No one should be surprised at this. Beyond cliches and platitudes, no one is sure what to recommend. There are no correct answers or true solutions to any of the problems that are included on their lists. Adolescents are left with limited alternatives for making choices and taking action: trial and error, making mistakes and then trying to learn from them, figuring it out, muddling through, avoiding and denying, to mention only a few. In the midst of all this, there is a frightening number of young people who, lacking the coping skills which could help them manage the confusion, discouragement, and depression, make attempts to end their lives. The lucky ones may have a parent who is both present and skillful, or find a role model, mentor, teacher or even a peer, whose presence and support can make a huge difference. But no one can count on this.
As part of an introduction to Raising Teens, author A. Rae Simpson wrote:
“As a society, we both fear adolescents and fear for them. We fear their rashness, their rudeness and their rawness; and we fear for their safety, their future, and their very lives.”
Our fears are justified. After all, what these rash, rude and raw adolescents are struggling with are endless problems – mostly unknown and anticipated – that they don’t understand nor know what to do with, and, if handled badly, can seriously threaten their safety, their futures, and in some cases, their lives. For some, there is tragedy ahead. Most need help. Where will it come from and who will offer it remains for all involved a serious – and wicked – problem.