Marcel Danesi's My son is an alien is a concise, informative guide for parents and teachers seeking to understand adolescent behavior. In what is largely a descriptive account of the teenage experience, the author touches on a range of topics from adolescent sex to gang involvement and drug abuse. Danesi and his research assistants interviewed 200 young people in nine North American cities between 1999 and 2002 to explore their attitudes toward sex, music, drugs, school, and a range of other subjects. The participants ranged in age from 12 to their early 20s and were evenly divided along gender lines and among early, middle, and late teens.

The author's central contention is reminiscent of the work of Philippe Ariès, who argues in Centuries of childhood (1962) that our modern conception of childhood is in fact just a recent invention. Here, Danesi asserts that our view of adolescence as a transitional period between childhood and adulthood characterized by emotional Sturm und Drang emerged only around 150 years ago, coinciding with the spread of education beyond the primary years. In fact, the term adolescent entered common usage only in the 1880s, to refer to those who stayed in school beyond puberty. The result – according to Danesi – has been that adolescents have increasingly come to be viewed as “older children” rather than adults, despite the fact that biologically, they have already reached sexual maturity.

The author goes on to describe adolescence as a “failed experiment” that has had dire social consequences. The construct of adolescence effectively alienates young people from the adult world and drives them to a host of risky, antisocial behaviors, from drug abuse to reckless sex. Accordingly, a host of psychological theories emerged in the work of G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), seeking to justify the existence of adolescence and to explain its attendant pathologies.

Danesi blames the “failed experiment” of adolescence for the increasing “juvenilization” of adult behavior. The mass marketing to the current generation of “tweenies” (7–12-year-olds), teens (13–19), and “middlescents” (20–30) has permeated the culture at large and pushed adolescent tastes on the wider population. Perhaps equally disturbing is the trend to view people as old as 34 as part of the adolescent generation, a trend noted for groups such as the Society for Adolescent Medicine and the MacArthur Foundation.

In Danesi's opinion, the remedy for adolescent social problems such as gang membership, rebelliousness, drug and alcohol abuse, unsafe sex, bulimia, anorexia, lack of interest in school, and suicide is to treat these young people as adults rather than “adults in waiting.” Pampering teens, targeting them primarily as consumers, and allowing them to defer the responsibilities of social adulthood until after the high-school years has created the social conditions that favor the undesirable emotional behaviors we associate with adolescence. We should, in short, abandon the failed experiment and adopt what the author calls a “Gramscian” view of human life. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), the Italian political theorist, described the human life cycle as consisting of just two periods: pre-puberty (childhood) and post-puberty (adulthood).

The book is organized into 10 chapters. Each starts with a short quote from one of the interviewees, followed by a brief overview of the topic and an “insight” or discussion section driven by short quotes from young people interviewed for the study. The first chapter explores the historical emergence of adolescence during the Industrial Revolution, its recognition by many psychologists in the early 20th century as a distinct period of development in the human life cycle, and its more recent identification as a mass market by the ad industry in the 1950s and 1960s.

Chaps. 2 and 3 look at sex and body image. Given that young people are sexually mature after puberty, it is arguably futile to try to limit their interest in sex. As sexual taboos have disappeared, the rate of sexual activity among teens has increased so that now it is not uncommon for 12-year-olds to have had sexual encounters. Similarly, the obsession with body image and the awkwardness many teens feel is, in the author's view, a result of the artificial nature of adolescence itself. Treat adolescents like adults, talk to them about sex and the changes that are going on in their bodies, and presumably they will act responsibly and no longer feel so self-conscious.

From a linguist's perspective, chap. 4 on adolescent language is largely descriptive. Danesi's point about the importance of recognizing youth language as a social dialect rather than what most laypersons call “slang” is certainly valid. The remainder of the chapter consists of a lengthy discussion of the vocabulary used by young people, including hip-hop expressions like dog ‘buddy’, ill ‘to be obnoxious’, and player (glossed as ‘promiscuous male’ although it has a few other meanings as well). Danesi also offers a brief analysis of adolescent discourse strategies, which he classifies as “emotivity” and “figuration.” The former refers to the tendency among teens to structure their verbal messages so as to draw attention to their feelings and the mood they are in. This is achieved through the use of rising terminals (what Danesi calls “tagging”), vocalism or the use of highly charged expressions like Awesome!, hesitancy or the use of hedges and fillers, and profanity. “Figuration” refers to the fact that teenagers use words to “draw pictures of” people and events in “graphic fashion.” Expressions like MLA (an acronym for Massive Lip Action, i.e. passionate kissing), grille ‘face’, and stain ‘useless person’ are, according to Danesi, comparable to one-word or one-phrase poems that characterize the adolescent predilection for irony and satire. This is indicative of the realization at puberty that language can be used as more than a tool to understand the world; it can also be deployed in defensive and aggressive ways. The chapter ends with a warning to parents about “verbal danger signs” such as an increase in the use of profane language, aggressive discourse, macabre content, and hate expressions. These could be a sign of gang participation or serious personal difficulties. There is little in the way of analysis of how class, gender, ethnicity, and orientation to the mainstream school culture affect language use patterns among young people. Thankfully, the author does not try to connect his observations about adolescent language to the book's main premise. This would place him as a semiotician in the methodologically awkward position of having to treat youth language as one more unfortunate outcome of the failed social experiment of adolescence rather than as an object worthy of analysis in its own right.

Chaps. 5–9 examine teenage musical preferences, cliques, gangs and cults, drug and alcohol use, school experiences, and the juvenilization of the media. The insights offered in these chapters are certainly useful to baby-boomer parents and to those who may be disconnected from teen culture past and present. But the tone is at times wistful, betraying a rather naive desire that subcultures like hip-hop would simply go away. Furthermore, the discussion of hip-hop leaves out any reference to its progressive message and potential for encouraging youth activism and awareness. The discussion of gangs as a “sociopathic outgrowth of adolescence” that would disappear if adolescence were eliminated seems simplistic (108). Finally, characterizing a television program like South Park as nothing but a “comedy of vulgarity” misses the subversive, biting social criticism it contains (151). Given the absence of truly honest social and political critique in the popular media in the United States, programs like this come as a breath of fresh air to many young people and adults alike. The final chapter exposes several myths about adolescence and proposes that we end the “experiment” by strengthening the family institution and treating adolescents as mature citizens.

Danesi's main claim – that adolescence is an artificial construct – is intuitively appealing. The connected argument that the innovation of adolescence itself is to blame for the pathologies we associate with it is more tenuous. After all, as Danesi tells us, the Greek historian Herodotus mentioned the insolent, indifferent, and defiant behavior of youth more than two thousand years ago (x). Perhaps these behaviors are not a product of the modern experiment but rather of some demonstrable physiological changes that young people have been experiencing for a long time. The fact that the turmoil of adolescence is absent from many cultures does not mean that it is not a difficult transition for all. Furthermore, there is no treatment of the role of ethnicity, class, or any other social factors in the analysis, and the overriding impression is that one is reading primarily about the white middle-class experience. It seems very likely that different ethnic groups within this society have somewhat different ways of experiencing the transition to adulthood. That said, the value of this book to the general reader lies in its frank, nonjudgmental discussions of adolescent behavior and the tempered advice it offers to parents. Its value to social scientists is in challenging us to examine what merit, if any, can be found in hanging onto the concept of adolescence, whom if anyone it continues to benefit, and how much longer it will remain a defining part of our culture.