Understanding how cultural and environmental factors intersect and impact adolescent development is essential for fostering healthy, well-rounded individuals who can thrive within their unique contexts. Both culture and environment play vital roles in shaping the developmental trajectory of youth, influencing their cognitive abilities, social interactions, and overall well-being.

13.7.1 Family

Although peers take on greater importance during adolescence, family relationships remain important too. Families can promote different opportunities to engage in learning and leadership to help adolescents develop needed foresight and planning skills for school and into adulthood. One of the key changes during adolescence involves a renegotiation of parent-child parent–child relationships. As adolescents strive for more independence and autonomy during this time, different aspects of parenting become more salient. For example, parents’ distal supervision and monitoring become more important as adolescents spend more time away from parents and in the presence of peers. Parental monitoring encompasses a wide range of behaviors such as parents’ attempts to set rules and know their adolescents’ friends, activities, and whereabouts, in addition to adolescents’ willingness to disclose information to their parents (Stattin & Kerr, 2000). Psychological control, which involves manipulation and intrusion into adolescents’ emotional and cognitive world through invalidating adolescents’ feelings and pressuring them to think in particular ways, is another aspect of parenting that becomes more salient during adolescence and is related to more problematic adolescent adjustment (Barber, 1996).

13.7.2 Peers

Certainly, the beliefs and expectations about academic success supported by an adolescent’s family play a significant role in the student’s achievement and school engagement. However, research has also focused on the importance of peers in an adolescent’s school experience. Specifically, having friends who are high-achieving, academically motivated, and engaged promotes motivation and engagement in the adolescent, while those whose friends are unmotivated, disengaged, and low achieving promotes the same feelings (Shin & Ryan, 2014; Vaillancourt et al., 2019). As children become adolescents, they usually begin spending more time with their peers and less time with their families, and these peer interactions are increasingly unsupervised by adults.

13.7.3 Sex and Gender Bias (in Academic Performance)

It is interesting to note that even in today’s progressive social climate and with advances in gender equality, there are still considerable differences in the ways teenage boys and girls spend their time, as shown in 2019 research by the Pew Research Center. During the school year, teenage boys spend an average of 24 minutes a day helping around the house and 12 minutes preparing food, while teenage girls spend an average of 38 minutes a day helping around the house and 29 minutes preparing food. Both boys and girls spend more equal amounts of time on maintenance chores and lawn care. Girls also spend an average of 23 more minutes on grooming each day, which is perhaps explained by the fact that 35 percent of girls say they feel pressure to look good (compared with 23 percent of boys). Read the article “The Way U.S. Teens Spend Their Time is Changing, but Differences Between Boys and Girls Persist” to learn more.

Further gender biases and differences exist in academic performance as well. In one study, Crosnoe and Benner (2015) found that female students often earn better grades, try harder, and are more intrinsically motivated than male students. Further, Duchesne et al. (2019) described how female students were more oriented toward skill mastery, used a variety of learning strategies, and persevered more than males. However, more females exhibit worries and anxiety about school, including feeling that they must please teachers and parents. These worries can heighten their effort but lead to fears of disappointing others. In contrast, males are more confident and do not value adult feedback regarding their academic performance (Brass et al., 2019). There is a subset of female students who identify with sexualized gender stereotypes (SGS), however, and they tend to underperform academically. These female students endorse the beliefs that “girls” should be sexy and not smart. Nelson and Brown (2019) found that female students who support SGS, reported less desire to master skills and concepts, were more skeptical of the usefulness of an education, and downplayed their intelligence.

13.7.3.2 Cultural Differences

Adolescent development does not necessarily follow the same pathway for all individuals. Certain features of adolescence, particularly with respect to biological changes associated with puberty and cognitive changes associated with brain development, are relatively universal. But other features of adolescence depend largely on circumstances that are more environmentally variable. For example, adolescents growing up in one country might have different opportunities for risk-taking than adolescents in a different country, and supports and sanctions for different behaviors in adolescence depend on laws and values that might be specific to where adolescents live. Likewise, different cultural norms regarding family and peer relationships shape adolescents’ experiences in these domains. For example, in some countries, adolescents’ parents are expected to retain control over major decisions, whereas, in other countries, adolescents are expected to begin sharing in or taking control of decision-making.

Even within the same country, adolescents’ gender, ethnicity, immigrant status, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and personality can shape both how adolescents behave and how others respond to them, creating diverse developmental contexts for different adolescents. For example, early puberty (that occurs before most other peers have experienced puberty) appears to be associated with worse outcomes for girls than boys, likely in part because girls who enter puberty early tend to associate with older boys, which in turn is associated with early sexual behavior and substance use (Mucaria et al., 2021). For adolescents who are ethnic or sexual minorities, discrimination sometimes presents a set of challenges that nonminorities do not face.