Coping with Crises in Youth

According to unanimous scientific findings, youth can be regarded as a “key phase”—a decisive phase that shapes the further course of people’s lives. The reasons for this lie in the defining significance of youth in the human biography: its importance for the development of identity, its own unique quality, and its difference from preceding and subsequent stages of life. Accordingly, adolescence is not merely one of many transitional phases, but the central phase of life that shapes the subsequent life paths and biographies of adolescents. However, the developmental processes that take place during this time are not free of conflict. The opposite is the case: adolescence is always characterized by crises, by irritations of life-world routines accompanied by a mostly temporary overload caused by the intensification of conflicts brought to the young person from inside and outside.