“Extended Childhood Disorder”: An Alternative Way of Understanding Teen Suffering
Gray, Peter. 2026-04-18.
URL: https://petergray.substack.com/p/110-extended-childhood-disorder-an
Vinklinger
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Psykisk helse: Ungdommers psykiske plager kan komme av at vi har gjort det vanskeligere for dem å finne en naturlig vei inn i voksenlivet.
Recently I came across a 2025 article by Robert Epstein and his colleagues proposing a new diagnostic category to help explain teenagers’ suffering. They call it “extended childhood disorder” (ECD).
As time went on and the recapitulation theory lost favor, attention turned to hormones. Raging hormones cause raging teens. It’s biologically inevitable. All we can do is try to direct all that hormonal energy in more positive directions. More recently, of course, with the advent of neuroimaging technology, attention has turned to the brain. Adolescents are accused of having immature brains, lacking appropriate connections from frontal lobes to more primitive areas, which leads them to lack impulse control. In a recent incarnation of this argument, the immature brain has become a reason to deny teens access to social media; the teenage brain just can handle it the way the adult brain presumably can.
[I find the brain deficit view to be especially odious. It is the same argument that not long ago was used to contend that women and Africans lack the mental capacities of white males. Whenever someone wants to deny basic human rights to a category of human beings, a common route is to point to brain anatomy. I plan to write about this before long in a future letter.]
The strongest evidence against all biological explanations of teen problems is that the problems are culturally dependent. Anthropologists report no apparent moodiness or other psychological problems associated with the teen years in traditional, pre-industrial cultures. Moreover, the historical record suggests that even in Europe and America teens transitioned rather smoothly from childhood to adulthood prior to the industrial age.
Epstein and his colleagues suggest that the primary cultural shifts that led to teen problems are those that cut them out of adult society and meaningful adultlike activity. In farming communities, where teens take on ever more responsibility for the family farm, or in craft communities where teens become apprentices, working along with adults, there is little if any evidence that the teenage years are more problematic than any other years. The problem, according to Epstein, is that we continue to treat teens as children long past the time when they are ready to be treated more like adults and be integrated into the adult world. We hold them back.