In an age when the human capacity for rationality is seriously under question and when individualism is being tempered with social responsibility, theories of adolescence promote the view that adolescents can, through the use of reason, come to an ordered and principled conception of reality. This theoretical posture shows disdain for scholarly analyses of society, demonstrates the consequences of abstracting adolescents out of society, or both. Perhaps these charges are too harsh. Perhaps psychological theorists do not mean that adolescents liberate themselves from the parent-child bond through recourse to self-reflective reasoning. But, a close reading of the literature on identity, morality, and ego development implies otherwise. Indeed, the generalization that cuts across theories is that to remain within the parental viewpoint and to conform to it is less than mature. To go beyond it because reasoning dictates is to enter the postconventional realm of maturity.
The work described in this volume constitutes a first step away from the position that has become a standard for psychological theories. The authors recognize that the parent-child bond can endure through the adolescent period. Development may consist not so much in breaking the bond as in transforming it and the persons within it. The authors also recognize that adolescents may not be so trusting of their own rationality that they fail to seek validation for their ideas from their parents.