Nurturing and Noxious Narratives: Prolonged Adolescence as a Storytelling Failure

it is common for those of us wise and full of years to regard the childhood and adolescence we lived through as differently paced than that of children and adolescents today. We tend to be convinced that our childhood innocence was prolonged far beyond that of present day kids but that we negotiated adolescence somewhat more quickly than they do (though not necessarily with less anguish). It seems reasonable to explain shortened childhood on technologi cal grounds, such as the media that leave kids almost nothing to be na?ve about. But what to make of prolonged adolescence is less clear. In this pa per I am going to propose what I take to be a formal account of prolonged adolescence?one that represents adolescence in terms of a passage into a mode of active awareness (distinct in certain formal characteristics) that we equate with maturity. By active awareness I mean simply our awareness of what we are doing when we do it. To disclose the formal characteristic of maturity in terms of active aware ness, it helps to trace some of the steps we pass through on our way to matu rity. In that context, I believe, we'll be better able to see the peculiar challenge adolescents face in projecting a way to understand their action maturely. Maturity as a person is maturity as an individual, so the active aware ness of a mature person would seem to require an awareness of acting as a single character of action, of being the same person in all that one does. The immature, in contrast, have not "gotten it together" in the same global way. They may have deep pockets of commitment, but in their projections they aren't always accountable to one another. To see how a mature person coordinates his action as a whole, we will follow the best clue we have to the active awareness of persons as they mature, namely, the storytelling they respond to. As we will see, the maturing agent