Adolescents and War

An excerpt from Brian K. Barber’s book entitled “Adolescents And War” vividly depicts the negative effects violence has on our youth and adolescents today, and how it can either facilitate, or more commonly impede, their transition from adolescence to adulthood. Barber illustrates how violence causes youth to “[have] a negative sense of the future” and “can thwart their ability to thrive in postconflict society” (p.178). He also notes instances where the youth, which covers the broad spectrum of individuals in their twenties to eight-year-olds, refer to themselves as children to avoid any possible correlation to adulthood. Barber basically addresses the problem of adolescents’ quaky transition into adulthood, and how the growing problem of violence in our society is partly to blame for this mishap. By drawing a direct correlation between the stress war and other violence-related events incur, Barber accounts for the youth who have been “significantly handicapped” as a result and ventures into what “the psychological and social mechanisms are that underlie this damage” (p.25). I like Barber’s approach to this issue because instead of solely blaming adolescents for their deplorable actions in a post-conflict society, he takes into consideration all the underlying factors that could’ve contributed to their downward slide into a deleterious lifestyle. In addition, he also ventures to explicate their inability to smoothly transition from adolescence to adulthood in terms that not only hold them accountable, but also blame the footprint society has left on them as well. This broad-spectrum way of thinking fully accounts for the transition problem from youth to adulthood many youths are facing today.