However, the developmental changes of adolescence, such as puberty (particularly in females) and the transition from primary to secondary school, typically begin around the preteens, while cognitive and physical maturation continue into the 20s.
Despite its commonality in everyday usage, teenager is a relatively modern introduction to the English language which debuted in print around the 1910s, and did not become popular until around the late 1940s and early 1950s as a marketing neologism.
The word continued to be spelled this way or hyphenated in print until around 1941, where the Popular Science magazine was credited for the first usage of teenager as a singular conjoined term.
[10] Thomas Hine expressed in a 1999 American Heritage article called The Rise and Decline of the Teenager that he thought of the term as little more than a lazy way of describing young people and has connotations of ageism and infantilization.
Hine wrote in the same article under The Teenage Mystique chapter that the word embodies extreme ambivalence about the people it describes with a ride range of stereotypes that contradict society's expectations for them.
[11] Rebecca Grant of The Guardian criticized the term for how many negative connotations it has for a word that is merely intended to describe the numeric order of an age group, bringing attention to the many prejudices older people exhibit to youth and stereotypes of irrational and dangerous behavior.
[12] Dr. Michael Platt wrote in issue #2 of Practical Homeschooling in a 1993 article called "Myth of the Teenager" that he thought of the term as a label that encourages young people to shun responsibility and delay their entry into adulthood.
[13] Richard Fisher wrote in a 2022 BBC Family Tree article that he thinks a new word describing young people between childhood and adulthood should be coined due to the outdated connotations associated with teenager and the evolution in youth culture from the last 100 years.
[14] The Psychology Today article 'A 20-Second Experiment in Racial Stereotypes' points out that attributes of delinquency, emotional volatility, sex and rebellion immediately come to mind when describing teenagers in general without knowing anything about them on a case-by-case basis.