Adolescence and Death

Developmental tasks and transitions influence how adolescents face mortality, and experiences with mortality very likely influence how adolescents deal with the transitions and tasks that society expects them to complete. An early influence on developmental understandings of adolescence was provided by Peter Blos, whose notions of early, middle, and late adolescence phases of development revolve around identity formation and ego integrity. Although there is no uniformity on the age ranges that encompass early, middle, and late adolescence, it is understood that (a) adolescence involves more than the teenage years, (b) adolescence begins with puberty, and (c) a convenient U.S. marker for early, middle, and late adolescence is schooling: Early adolescents are junior high or middle school students (∼10–14 years old), middle adolescents are high school students (∼15–18 years old), and late adolescents are traditional-age college students (∼19–22 years old).

The developmental push for achieving identity integration focuses, in early adolescence, on separating emotionally from parents; in middle adolescence, on developing a sense of proficiency or mastery; and in late adolescence, on entering into and maintaining intimate interpersonal relationships. Consider, for instance, the complexity facing a 13-year-old early adolescent whose struggle to achieve emotional separation from her parents is embedded in the unexpected death of her father from a heart attack. Some empirical evidence, longitudinal and cross-sectional, suggests that adolescents facing life crises over deaths of family members or friends become more mature than same-aged, nonaffected peers. Cascading effects of bereavement on adolescents can be seen prominently in the [Page 14]impact on academic pursuits. High school and college students' grades in the first few months of bereavement suffer, and even retention in college can be affected.

There is widespread attention to changes in cognitive development that enable older children and adolescents to attain what is considered a mature understanding of death. People who grasp that death is (a) irreversible, (b) happens to all living organisms, (c) can result from internal or external causes, and (d) produces the end of bodily functions are said to possess a mature understanding of death. Remarks that death leads to a life after death are typically dismissed as indicative of an immature concept of death, despite the fact that the great majority of adults, at least in the United States, hold such a view. There is growing awareness, as well, that many adults struggle with a mature understanding of death when faced with the death of someone loved.

Ambiguity colors individual adolescents' acceptance that mortality applies to them. The source of this ambiguity is a twofold form of adolescent egocentrism, or what has been identified as mistaken inferences about individual uniqueness (a “personal fable”) and as narcissistic expectations about others' awareness of one's existence (an “imaginary audience”). This ambiguity about the universality of death is sometimes described as a belief in invulnerability, but recent research into developmental neuroscience raises serious doubt about adolescents' having delusions of invulnerability. It is doubtful that adolescents threatened with imminent death (e.g., realizing the car in which they are driving is going to hit another vehicle head on) dismiss the prospect that death applies to them; further, it is doubtful that adolescents from ethnic or racial groups at significant risk of homicide dismiss the likelihood that death can happen to them.

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