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Shifting the Frame to Change How We See Young People

2020; Elsevier BV; Volume: 66; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.jadohealth.2019.11.297

1879-1972

Nat Kendall‐Taylor,

Early Childhood Education and Development

The public narrative on adolescence frames young people as dangerous threats and adolescence as an unfortunate time of life. This narrative shapes how we see and think about young people. And, in turn, how we as a society choose to support them and their development. But we can change this narrative and shift the thinking it shapes. Words can unlock new ways of thinking and open up opportunities for change. We know this to be the case from change efforts on issues ranging from civil rights to gay marriage and tobacco to mental health. A concerted effort is required to put forward a new frame from which people can think more productively about adolescence and the cultural and social change necessary to better support their agency and well-being. And then we need discipline and innovation to repeat this new frame creatively from multiple channels over an extended period of time so that it can have an effect on our thinking and actions. We need to move our thinking from adolescence as a time when we close our eyes and just hope a young person gets through—without being arrested, addicted, or otherwise damaged—to a time of opportunity when lifelong skills and relationships are built and passions spark and ignite. We need to move from policies that prioritize protection to those than enable engagement and empower young people. We need to reframe adolescence from eye roll to opportunity. The title of the 2020 Annual Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine meetings—Adolescent Health: Transforming Risk to Wellness—is a great example of this frameshift. Changing how we communicate—the examples we use, the pronouns we choose, the tone we take, and the agency we ascribe—is a core feature in this culture change work. These choices in how we communicate are about framing, and this is why tapping into the science and practice of framing is part of shifting how we see and support young people. The practice of framing refers to the choices we make in how we communicate—the values we appeal to, the examples we choose, the way we explain how something works, the solutions we highlight, who we let speak—as well as who we do not—and what we leave unsaid [[1]Entman R.M. Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm.J Commun. 1993; 43: 51-58Crossref Scopus (7627) Google Scholar]. Researchers who study framing are concerned with the effects of these choices—what are called "frame effects" [[2]Dietram S. Framing as a theory of media effects.J Commun. 1999; 49: 103-122Crossref Scopus (1973) Google Scholar]. Frame effects are the ways that these choices in information presentation influence perceptions and behaviors. Framing matters because it shapes how we think, feel, and act. In a classic framing study, researchers presented respondents with information about a hate group attempting to hold a political protest [[3]Sniderman P.M. Theriault S.M. The structure of political argument and the logic of issue framing.in: Saris Studies in public opinion: Attitudes, non-attitudes, measurement error, and change. Princeton University Press, Princeton2004: 133-165Crossref Google Scholar]. All the research participants received the same information, except for one part that was manipulated to create "treatment" groups. Participants were randomly assigned to these groups. In one group, participants received information that framed the rally in terms of its potential danger. In the second, participants were presented with the same information but through a frame that appealed to the importance of free speech. The potential-of-danger frame resulted in low levels of support for the rally. The free speech frame resulted in more than twice as the support for the event. The only difference was several words that set the frame. These words changed the way that participants thought about the rally and affected their support for this political activity. Similar frame effects have been observed on issues as wide ranging as education, climate change, and aging [4Baekgaard M. Christensen J. Dahlmann C. et al.The role of evidence in politics: Motivated reasoning and persuasion among politicians.Br J Polit Sci. 2018; 49: 1-24Google Scholar, 5Zaval L. Markowitz E. Weber E. How will I be remembered? Conserving the environment for the sake of one's legacy.Psychol Sci. 2015; 26: 231-236Crossref PubMed Scopus (91) Google Scholar, 6Busso D. Volmert A. Kendall-Taylor N. Reframing aging: Effect of a short-term framing intervention on implicit measures of age bias.J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci. 2018; 74: 559-564Crossref Scopus (32) Google Scholar]. In the U.S., adolescence is most frequently framed as an unfortunate time of risk when young people are difficult, vulnerable, dangerous, and destructive [[7]Busso D. Gibbons C. Down L. O'Neil M. One half of the story: Media framing of adolescent development. FrameWorks Institute, Washington, DC2018Google Scholar]. But this is not the only frame available in our social discourse nor is it the only available cultural conception of adolescence. Adolescence is occasionally framed as a period of opportunity. In these cases, adolescents are seen as highly tuned super learners, proficient in developing skills, proclivities, and passions. Both these frames—the threat-to-be-weathered and the opportunity-to-be-realized—shape how we think, feel, and act toward young people. The first frame triggers fear and frames adolescence through the prism of risk and danger. Sheltering and protecting young people are the most important things to do. However, when adolescence is positioned as a period when sensitivity to experiences holds the key to opportunity, adolescents can be viewed with wonder, excitement, and respect. Scaffolded support, agency, and empowerment, rather than paternalistic protection, become the things that make sense for us to do. Translated into policy, this perspective suggests changes to how our social institutions—from medicine, criminal justice, and education—orient toward and support adolescents. For those working to support positive adolescent development, the way the issue is framed is of utmost importance, and reframing is core work. We understand and make assumptions about our world because of the steady diet of experiences and information we are fed. These stimuli are packed full of frames. These frames, over time, shape cognitive routes and mental associations between categories—if we are exposed over and over again to messages replete with the idea that adolescents are dangerous risk takers who must be protected from themselves, we develop deep and solid associations between "young people" and "risk and danger." Over time and with repetition, these associations strengthen to the point that when we see or hear about an adolescent, we feel uncomfortable or threatened. We see a group of young people, and we cross the street. We hear about adolescents using social media, and we roll our eyes. Frames shape our understanding and action. But the connection between exposures and beliefs is also the silver lining of this story—a source of hope. By changing the stories we tell, and the way adolescence is framed, and doing so with discipline and persistence, we can wear different paths in the cognitive landscape, changing the way we understand and choose to support young people. Beginning in 2016, FrameWorks Institute, the organization that I lead, has been studying public thinking about adolescent development. Our goal is to offer a new narrative that can be used to create new paths and associations for the public to traverse when considering a range of topics of relevance to adolescents. A core tactic in this work is to reroute thinking around the cognitively comfortable and well-worn paths created by continued exposure to negative ideas about young people. These new paths will build associations between adolescence and opportunity, healthy development, the importance of scaffolded support, resilience, and other topics those working on adolescent development are pursuing. This work starts with a detailed analysis of the current state of public thinking. We've found a set of implicit understandings—what anthropologists call "cultural models"—that shape how Americans think about young people [[8]Quinn N. Holland D. Culture and cognition.in: Holland D. Quinn N. Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England1987: 3-40Crossref Google Scholar,[9]Busso D. Volmert A. Kendall-Taylor N. Building opportunity into adolescence: Mapping the gaps between expert and public understandings of adolescent development. FrameWorks Institute, Washington, DC2018Google Scholar]. Most dominant among these is the deeply engrained assumption that adolescence is an inherently dangerous time. This model shapes how people think and talk about young people and defines the actions, supports, types of relationships, and solutions that Americans see as appropriate and effective. This understanding is comprised of three more specific assumptions are strung together into a tight and predictable cultural script. First, people understand the world that adolescents inhabit to be chock full of violence, drugs and alcohol, risky sexual behaviors, accidents, negative peer pressure, and threats to physical safety and mental health. Second, people assume that adolescents are open and vulnerable to these risks and dangers; that whatever surrounds them gets directly soaked up. Finally, Americans assume that adolescents as poor decision-makers. This script is concerning for a number of reasons. Most importantly, if adolescents are surrounded by threats, are inherently vulnerable to them and are fundamentally unable to make good decisions to protect themselves, then we should seek, above all else, to insulate and protect them, to coddle and dictate, and to take over the decision-making process and direct actions. Developmental science strongly suggests that this is not how we should engage young people to fully support development [[10]National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and MedicineThe promise of adolescence: Realizing opportunity for all youth. The National Academies Press, 2019Google Scholar,[11]Patton G.C. Sawyer S.M. Santelli J.S. et al.Our future: A Lancet commission on adolescent health and wellbeing.Lancet. 2016; 387: 2423-2478Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (1521) Google Scholar]. This string of assumptions holds young people back, limits the quality of our relationships with them, and sacrifices the talent and potential that they offer to our communities and society both now and in the future. We must change the frame and provide people with new ways to see and interact with young people. This will not be a quick or dramatic shift. Our current understandings have formed over years of exposure to messages that frame adolescence as a time of danger. Reframing will require a comparable dose. It will require concerted and sustained change in the information diet that people are being fed when it comes to young people. Changing the picture in our minds of adolescence as a period of risk to one of opportunity will take a framing wave that crests for many years. It will take frames that come from many messengers, delivered through many channels, to many audiences. This is culture change work. And the only way to change culture is together, with discipline, and commitment. This research is sponsored by the Funders for Adolescent Science Translation (FAST), a consortium that includes The Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Bezos Family Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Ford Foundation, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Raikes Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Public Education Support Fund. Previous FrameWorks research on adolescence has been funded by the WT Grant Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota Department of Education, the Minnesota Department of Human Services, and the University of Minnesota. The author also acknowledges the full FrameWorks team who worked on this research and his colleague, Dr. Mackenzie Price who reviewed a previous version of this article.