How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence

by Matt Richtel Narrated by Joe Knezevich

Overview

""This is essential reading for parents."" - Dr. Vivek Murthy, former U.S. Surgeon General

Greatly expanding his award-winning New York Times series on the contemporary teen mental-health crisis, Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter Matt Richtel delivers a groundbreaking investigation into adolescence, the pivotal life stage undergoing profound-and often confounding-transformation.

One of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025

The transition from childhood to adulthood is a natural, evolution-honed cycle that now faces radical change and challenge. The adolescent brain, sculpted for this transition over eons of evolution, confronts a modern world that creates so much social pressure as to regularly exceed the capacities of the evolving mind. The problem comes as a bombardment of screen-based information pelts the brain just as adolescence is undergoing a second key change: puberty is hitting earlier. The result is a neurological mismatch between an ultra-potent environment and a still-maturing brain that can lead to anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. It is a crisis that is part of modern life but can only be truly grasped through a broad, grounded lens of the biology of adolescence itself. Through this lens, Richtel shows us how adolescents can understand themselves, and parents and educators can better help.

For decades, this transition to adulthood has been defined by hormonal shifts that trigger the onset of puberty. But Richtel takes us where science now understands so much of the action is: the brain. A growing body of research that looks for the first time into budding adult neurobiology explains with untold clarity the emergence of the “social brain,” a craving for peer connection, and how the behaviors that follow pave the way for economic and social survival. This period necessarily involves testing-as the adolescent brain is programmed from birth to take risks and explore themselves and their environment-so that they may be able to thrive as they leave the insulated care of childhood.

Richtel, diving deeply into new research and gripping personal stories, offers accessible, scientifically grounded answers to the most pressing questions about generational change. What explains adolescent behaviors, risk-taking, reward-seeking, and the ongoing mental health crisis? How does adolescence shape the future of the species? What is the nature of adolescence itself?

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Matt Richtel takes us on a powerful journey to understand the forces shaping the lives of adolescents. As we navigate a profound youth mental health crisis, this book could not be more important or timely. This is essential reading for parents, policymakers, educators and anyone who cares about helping our kids live their best lives."  — Dr. Vivek Hallegere Murthy, 19th and 21st Surgeon General of the United States

"In today's rapidly changing world, we've created fearful children instead of resilient ones. With this powerful new book, Matt Richtel addresses the mounting challenges that adolescents face, offering a path to transform anxiety into resourcefulness and opportunity. His insights give parents and educators practical tools to help young people navigate their complex reality and build the strength they will need for tomorrow. If you care about young people, this is one of the best books you’ll ever read."  — James P. Steyer, Founder and CEO, Common Sense Media

"This book should be at the bedside of every parent who believes they are alone but really aren’t. A vivid set of inquiries into the science, social history, and personal experience of adolescence." — Kirkus Reviews

"A timely and essential consideration of the science of adolescence...The compassion of Richtel's book equals the rigor of his research....Should be on all library shelves alongside Jonathan Haidt's bestselling The Anxious Generation." — Library Journal (starred review)

"A new understanding of what it takes to raise resilient, emotionally grounded kids." — Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper

"Richtel approaches his experience as well as that of parents with sensitivity. Rather than casting kids as zombies or aliens, How We Grow Up insists on the continuity between young people and the adults around them, while acknowledging that the relationships involved aren’t always easy. The book’s warmth and sympathy distinguish it on the crowded shelf it occupies." — Molly Fischer, The New Yorker

“Insightfully explored … [an] intriguing exploration of a pressing topic.” — Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

2025-04-04
Exploring an anxious age.

Each year, now, seems to have its own identity: tots, tweens, teens, young adults. Each generation has rewritten codes of growing up: boomers, millennials, X, Y, Z, Alpha. Into this mix, adolescence has emerged as a distinctive category—a time not bounded by chronology but by sensibility. The adolescent is a rebel:No I won’t. The adolescent is a questioner:Who am I? The adolescent is a blamer:It’s all your fault. The latest book byNew York Times journalist Richtel (A Deadly Wandering,An Elegant Defense) offers a cultural history of this stage through a series of short chapters focusing on problems, possibilities, and individuals. This is not a book of science or sociology. It’s a book of storytelling. We get vignettes of Napoleon reading Goethe’sSorrows of Young Werther, becoming, in effect, a case of arrested adolescent development; of the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who wrote the first real medical account of adolescence in 1905; of modern neurologists mapping the youthful brain; and of a clutch of today’s kids, each of whom has a tough life worth telling. In the end, adolescence is revealed to be “by evolutionary design a period of risk-taking, and of diversification….Diversity and exploration [are] essential for surviving in an unpredictable world.” Adolescence, then, becomes the key moment of personal growth, when we reject or accept social norms and adult expectations. These days, that moment involves confrontations with anxiety and depression, eating disorders and desires, and the judgments of social media. It’s a hero’s journey, both for child and parent. Written in a colorful, journalistic style, this book should be at the bedside of every parent who believes they are alone but really aren’t.

A vivid set of inquiries into the science, social history, and personal experience of adolescence.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192249017
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/08/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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