Just when you think everything is going along fine - you're finally making friends who aren't dweebs, you got that cool skateboard you wanted for Christmas, you made it to the last level of Quake - your body starts doing all these weird things, growing hair WHERE?!, the other sex starts becoming disquietingly interesting (despite your best efforts to alienate them), your parents completely lose their minds and become the dumbest people you have ever met, music and clothing are natural symbols of independence and peer identification that are suddenly way more important than which Pokeman is your favorite - in other words, you hit Puberty!

Adolescence is a very confusing time even for well-adjusted kids, because of the conflicting demands placed on them by peers, school, parents and society, as well as because of the rapid changes happening in the form and chemistry of their bodies. Add to the mix a little family conflict, some depression, a learning problem, etc., and you have a volatile mixture that is bound to give rise to at least minor explosions on the way to adulthood.

The challenges of adolescence stem from the extreme ambivalence kids feel about the whole process of growing up. On the one hand, they get to do more things and be more independent; on the other hand, they must leave the relative safety of their parents' protection to take responsibility for their decisions, which they feel impelled to make on their own with limited experience or knowledge of the world and a not-completely developed brain (the brain stops growing between 16 and 18 years of age).

Consequently, we hear teens expressing their desire for independence (they wish for the privileges of adults) without understanding or accepting the huge set of obligations and responsibilities which adults take on in exchange for the "freedom" to set their own curfew and buy alcohol legally.

Because a teenager's brain really has just recently developed the ability to do abstract thinking, comparison is the name of the game, and every teen measures him- or herself mercilessly (as they measure each other) against the yardstick of popular teen culture and their peers. They also have a hair trigger for hypocrisy, and find any inconsistency in adult values to be particularly abhorrent. They don't seem to be able to understand compromise, and they will usually opt to "crash and burn" if necessary in order to prove a point, such as "you can't force me to learn anything."

Erik Erikson, a well-known psychologist who developed a social-learning based theory of the development of personality, believed that adolescents have as their primary task the development of "identity," which is a set of attitudes and beliefs about ourselves which lie underneath every interaction we have with other people, and which determines how we plot the course of our lives. Our parents have much to do with the development of identity up until we hit puberty, but at that point we begin very actively to seek other input and we become much more self-determining in regard to the identity we forge for ourselves.

The development of identity involves the discovery and "trying-on" of various alternative attitudes, beliefs, and personae (social identities). This accounts for the frequently observed, sudden shifts in teens' entire lifestyle and orientation ("NO, you cannot get a tattoo of the devil smoking a joint!"). Traditionally, hobbies and activities are a source of this alternative input, as are musical groups.