In the early days of America, teenage life wasn’t too different from adulthood. In 1775, about half of the 2.5 million people living in the 13 Colonies were 16 or younger. Only teens (and mainly boys) born to wealthy families received formal education. Otherwise, from as young as age 5 they helped run their family farm or household, and from age 12 apprenticed in a trade or worked in someone else’s home. By 14, they were typically considered adults. When Americans rebelled against the British, teens were called to fight in large numbers.
The same lack of distinction between adults and teenagers still prevailed nearly a hundred years later during the Civil War, with teens fighting on both sides of the conflict. Historians estimate that up to 20 percent of both Union and Confederate forces were under 18.
As the nation industrialized in the decades following the war, teenagers were sent to work in factories to earn money for their families. While the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, many Black teens were still shut out of service or industrial jobs, and worked as sharecroppers on many of the same plantations where they had previously been enslaved.
It wasn’t until the early 20th century that people began to think about the period between childhood and adulthood as its own distinct life stage. In 1904, psychologist G. Stanley Hall was the first to define adolescence as a separate period, characterized by “storm and stress.”
A confluence of social and economic changes in the U.S. soon helped popularize an institution that would define the American teenager: high school. As immigrants, predominantly from Southern and Eastern Europe, entered the country in great numbers, educators and policymakers viewed high schools as tools for assimilation, Fass says, and immigrant families began to see the schools as important for economic advancement. During the 1920s, the middle class was also expanding, and parents became more likely to keep teens in school instead of relying on them to work and contribute financially.
Then, in 1929, the stock market crashed, the Great Depression hit, and unemployment skyrocketed, which made high school even more important.
“By the ’30s,” Fass says, “because there are no jobs, kids stay in school.”