The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the world in unexpected ways, impacting daily life and prompting a reevaluation of societal functions. For young people, it brought both significant challenges and new opportunities, especially in activism and civic engagement. A scoping review published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence in December 2024 explores how the pandemic influenced youth involvement in their communities. Here are the key findings from that review.

Sheriffa Mahama¹, Karina Weichold², Nora Fehmer², Eunice N. Mvungu ³ & Misaki N. Natsuaki^4
1University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana
²Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany
³Kenyatta University, Kenya
⁴University of California, Riverside, USA

Authors:  Murry, V. M., Stanton, C. A., & Gonçalves, C.

Teaching college students about adolescence can be a wild ride. Many college students are not that far removed from adolescence themselves which allows for a depth and breadth of conversation that can be fun and fascinating while also making me feel quite old! There can be drawbacks to such relatability between the subject topic and the students when discussions devolve into sharing stories of “well when I was a teenager…” While fun in moderation, these derailments do not further the scientific goals of a psychology classroom. To combat this, I tried to fill my Adolescent Development seminar-style course with structured activities to help my students make connections between their own lives and the literature on adolescent behavior.

My youngest offspring is, to the best of my knowledge based on conversations and open dialogue, a cisgendered White heterosexual male adolescent. When he started a new high school and I asked about reinventing himself, his immediate response was “The only thing I change about me is my hair.” A vibrant mix of hottie pink and radiant orchid at the moment, his dyed hair changes its hue on the regular. He takes pride in having fabulous shoulder length hair, enduring regular trims so bleaching does minimal damage. With porcelain skin, a square jawline, and a dash of freckles, he is, objectively, beautiful.  

Throughout the U.S. educational pipeline, immigrant students who are undocumented (i.e., immigrants who do not have citizenship, permanent-resident status, refugee status, or any of the temporary statuses provided by the U.S. government for long-term residence and work; Yoshikawa et al., 2016) are subject to institutional and interpersonal oppression (e.g., prohibited from speaking Spanish, treated as scapegoats, experience verbal abuse; Ayón & Philbin, 2017). These forms of interpersonal and systemic oppression limit the developmental opportunities for undocumented immigrant children and adolescents. Despite these adversities, immigrant students who are undocumented engage in everyday forms of resistance, which include covert actions that undermine power and enables them to persist in the educational system. Mentors and other adults may help undocumented students navigate the educational system and resist oppression. For example, prior research shows that mentors and other adults are integral in the college application process of undocumented students (Gonzalez, 2012; Gámez et al., 2017). We examined two research questions:

Throughout adolescence, teens show an increasing propensity for experimentation and an increasing vulnerability to peer influence. These developmental processes are not necessarily harmful in and of themselves; for example, a teen might experiment with different hair styles or fashion choices and his or her friends might encourage one style over another, or a teen might experiment with activism in response to a perceived wrong. However, in the context of negative risk-taking behaviors, increased experimentation and susceptibility to peer influence could be particularly problematic during this developmental period.

As young people return to school this year, educators are facing the challenge of how best to support the mental and emotional health of their students. Many studies on the benefits of meditation practices have spurred the use of mindfulness-based programs in schools as one approach to supporting students. Newer programs, however, are focusing on building skills around not just mindfulness, but also care and compassion for self and others. By orientating toward compassion, these programs become more than personal and therapeutic, but also social and aimed at systems-level change. Skills of compassion include mindful awareness of suffering, perspective-taking, the ability to sense and tolerate uncomfortable feelings arising from the perception of suffering, a sense of interconnectedness and mutuality with others, and a concomitant desire to alleviate suffering. This collection of skills can expand our natural caring capacities and be directed toward the self (e.g., not being so hard on oneself during moments of struggle) and toward others (e.g., not judging quickly/listening to others’ struggles with curiosity and perspective).

The racialized COVID-19 pandemic has fueled historically rooted anti-Asian racism and xenophobia in the United States, especially against Chinese Americans, as the virus was first identified in Wuhan, China. Experiences of racism adversely impact the socioemotional adjustment of ethnic minoritized individuals, and adolescents may be particularly vulnerable due to their increasing understanding and awareness of race/ethnicity and racial discrimination, but still limited coping skills. Thus, it is crucial to examine how Chinese American adolescents are affected by heightened racial discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic and potential risk and resilience factors.

Affect dysregulation has been identified as a key underlying mechanism across a variety of mental health problems. In their 2022 paper, Psychometric evaluation of the Affect Regulation Checklist: Clinical and community samples, parent-reports and youth self-reports, Dr. Natalie Goulter and co-authors test the psychometric properties of the Affect Regulation Checklist—a measure designed to assess affect dysregulation, suppression, and reflection—across clinical and community samples.

On May 14^th, 2022, 10 Black adults were murdered at a community grocery store, located in the predominately Black neighborhood of East Side, Buffalo, New York by a white supremacist. The majority of these victims were 60 and above and were parents and grandparents to multiple children and adolescents. On May 24^th, 2022, 19 elementary school students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School were murdered in Uvalde, Texas, a predominately Latino city in south Texas, 60 miles from the United States-Mexico border. In both instances of domestic terrorism, the shooters were identified as 18-year-old males with automatic weapons; both targeted low-income communities of color and took the lives of vulnerable groups in traditionally secure community spaces. As a result, calls for solutions to the epidemic of mass shootings have reverberated across the U.S.

As I write this blog post, I feel a small but mighty foot (or is it an elbow?) jabbing at my ribs. I’m currently expecting my first child in just over a month. I’m also a tenure-track assistant professor whose pregnancy timeline has almost perfectly mirrored the academic year—I found out I was pregnant on the first day of Fall classes and my due date is 10 days after Winter semester ends.

Many of the current studies examining White parents’ messages to their children about race and racism have focused on children 12 years old or younger. In their recent article, Dr. Jamie L. Abaied and co-authors sought to extend our current knowledge of White parents’ and children’s discussions surrounding racism by instead examining such discussions among parents and teens (i.e., 14- to 17-year-olds).

During the teenage years, as youth become more independent from their parents and choose how and with whom to spend their time, peers take on a prominent and important role[SHV2] . This increasing immersion in the peer group can have some beneficial effects[SHV4]  (e.g., improving social skills) but a desire to conform to the interests, behaviors, and activities of peers in order to fit in can also lead to risky behaviors[SHV6] , raising concerns from parents, teachers, administrators, and researchers alike. While all girls possess some desire to form and maintain meaningful relationships with their peer groups, as well as motivation to gain peer approval, girls vary in how strongly they feel these needs. This has led researchers to wonder—what contributes to some girls relying heavily on social approval or possessing a strong need to belong while others do not?

Numerous anti-immigration policies have been instituted in the United States over the past several years, exacerbating stressors felt by Latinx adolescents and families nationwide. Dr. Stephanie Torres and co-authors Susana Sosa, Roxanna Flores Toussaint, Sarah Jolie, and Yvita Bustos examined an integrated conceptual model [the Multitiered Model of Oppression and Discrimination among Latinx Immigrant Adolescents (MMOD)] to advance the understanding of the varying levels of discrimination experienced by Latinx immigrant adolescents.

In their March 2022 article titled Adolescent emotion regulation and future psychopathology: A prospective transdiagnostic analysis, Dr. Robert Klein, Nhi Nguyen, and co-authors examined associations between emotion regulation and subsequent pathological anxiety, depression, and substance dependence symptoms among 1,262 adolescents. Data for this study were collected at ten time points across seven years.

Latinx youth living in the United States have long encountered discrimination (e.g., anti-immigration sentiment) in a variety of contexts. In their recent article, A retrospective analysis of racial of racial discrimination experiences for Latinx adolescents and young adults, Dr. Michelle Pasco and co-authors centered the voices of U.S.-born Latinx youths by exploring their experiences of discrimination through retrospective accounts.

Few existing studies have examined the impacts of racism on adolescent development specifically with regard to Indigenous youths. Dr. Bep Uink and colleagues conducted a review of present literature to gain greater insight into the state of current research on this topic and to identify associations between racism and adolescent development among Indigenous adolescents. They present their findings in an article titled “Racism and Indigenous Adolescent Development: A Scoping Review” and featured in JRA’s Special Series: Dismantling Systems of Racism and Oppression during Adolescence.

We received our first respective peer-reviews in what seems like last century, shedding copious tears when reviewers asked basic questions like if we knew the difference between mg and ug. When invited to be associate editors, we loftily imagined dismantling systemic inequalities of peer review[i][ii][iii], offering sage advice to budding scientists, contributing to the communication and promotion of excellent science in our disciplines, and illuminating enlightening insights to lightly castigate reviewer 2. Broken down by the challenges of keeping up with manuscript submissions and reviewer recruitment, our sights are perhaps more realistic. Below, we offer catchy idioms and 15 hypothetical retorts we’d say to those wondering how to help editors as they decide whether to click "accept" or "decline" in that invitation to review.