ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, we have walked a fine line between recognizing the genuine challenges faced by families dealing with adolescence, on the one hand, and buying into the stereotype of adolescence as a time of storm and stress, on the other. In choosing to study a sample of families containing “troubled youth,” of course, we ran the risk of implicitly strengthening the storm and stress proposition. Recall that the youth in our sample of families do manifest a great deal of such storm and stress. But recall also that their level of difficulty places them at the extreme end of the normal continuum: the average score for our adolescents puts them at about the eighty-fifth percentile on the national norms for the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist. As we saw in Chapter 1, about one in five adolescents does exhibit a pattern of “tumultuous growth,” psychosocial disruption, and maladaptive behavior that befits the storm and stress label. Our concern is with the families in which these troubled youth are embedded, however, for it is this family context that is the key in determining whether high-risk adolescents will make a success of their lives.
