Teenage cliques can offer protection – or enforce exclusion
Virginia Woods-Jack/Millennium Images, UK
Coming of Age
Lucy Foulkes (Bodley Head (UK); Vintage Digital (US))
In the teen movie Mean Girls, protagonist Cady Heron arrives at a US high school having grown up in Africa. Baffled by her peers and the social hierarchies of school, she approaches things as her zoologist parents would – documenting the people around her as if they were animals living on the savannah.
In her new book, Coming of Age: How adolescence shapes us, psychologist Lucy Foulkes takes a similar approach to decoding the rulebook of adolescence,…