Teenage Development

"...I try to understand what their surface behaviour is telling me about their deep-structure issues. I try to ascertain when their behaviour is connected to their true selves and when it is a result of pressure to be a false self. Which thinking should I respect and nurture? Which thinking should I challenge?"
Mary Pipher Ph D

EMOTIONAL Selves
Teenagers are intense, changeable, internal, often cryptic or uncommunicative and, frequently dealing with a different reality.
The emotional system is immature.
Emotions are extreme and changeable.
Small events can trigger enormous reactions.
A negative comment about appearance or a bad mark on a test can hurl a teenager into despair.
Not only are feelings chaotic, but teens often lose perspective.
Despair and anger are the hardest emotions to deal with.
Other emotions can be equally intense.
Just as sorrow is unmodulated, so is joy.
The instability of feelings leads to unpredictable behaviour.
Emotional immaturity makes it hard for teens to hold on to their true selves.
They can be whipped about by their emotions and misled by them.
They deal with their intense emotions by being true or false to their "real self". Only by staying connected to their emotions and by slowly working through the turbulence can they emerge from adolescence strong and whole.

They can be helped to rage, cry, talk and write about their emotions.
They need to process them and gradually sort them out.
They hopefully emerge from adolescence somewhat tattered emotionally, but intact - authentic people owning all their emotional experiences.
They will possess "vibrancy".

PHYSICAL Selves
The preoccupation with bodies during adolescence cannot be overstated.
The body is a compelling mystery, a constant focus of attention.
During the teens they think more about their acne than about God or world peace…
Many spend more time in front of a mirror than they do on their studies.
Small flaws become obsessions.
Bad hair can ruin a day.
A broken fingernail can feel tragic.

SPIRITUAL Selves
This is a time when teens actively search for meaning and order in the universe.
Often this is a time of religious crisis and of exploring universal questions such as what happens after death and the purpose of suffering.
Some become deeply religious and will sacrifice everything for their beliefs.
Others have a crisis in faith.

SOCIAL Selves - FAMILY
Parents used to help their children fit into the culture.
Most parents today are rather the enemies of the cultural indoctrination that their teens face with puberty.
They battle to save their teens' true selves.
They want their teen to have more time to grow and develop, time without sex, drugs, alcohol and trauma.
They fight to preserve their teen's wholeness in a hostile environment.

SOCIAL Selves - PEERS
As teens pull away from parents, peers are everything.
This is a time of deep searching for the "self" in relationships.
There is a constant experimenting - What reaction will I get from others?
Talking to friends is a way of checking the important question - Am I okay?
Cutting teens off from their friends is incredibly punishing.
While peers can be satisfying and growth-producing, they can also be growth destroying.
Adolescents are exposed.
They want to be liked.
The price can be heartbreakingly high.
To be accepted by everyone means having to give up too much of themselves.
There are huge lessons to be learnt and enormous choices to be made.

THINKING Selves
Most early adolescents are unable to think abstractly.
The immaturity of their thinking makes it difficult to reason with them.
They read deep meaning into casual remarks and overanalyze glances.
"Others" are assigned to groups: Christian, evil, geeks, nerds, sluts, and, some few, as faultless.
Adolescents are extremists, seeing the world as black-and-white, missing the shades of grey.
Life is either marvelous or not worth living.
Others are either great or horrible.
They themselves are either wonderful or pathetic failures.

In an adult, this fluctuation would suggest severe disturbance, but in a teenager it is common.
Their thoughts are often chaotic and scrambled.
Compared to stable adults, they look crazy.
They overgeneralize.
Remarks of others can be taken as prophecy and the teen can set about self-fulfilling it.
They argue.
They think they are being watched by others who are preoccupied with the smallest details of their lives.
They are easily mortified by their parents 'inappropriate' behaviour.
They have a limited ability to sort facts from feelings.
Their thinking is still magical.
They are most often unable to focus on anyone's experience but their own.
They frequently feel "it can't happen to me".
Becoming conscious of the real, dangerous world can happen overnight or be a gradual process.
The temptation is to shut down, to oversimplify, to avoid the hard work of examining and integrating experiences.
Often the world is reduced to a more manageable place by distorting reality.
Some become anorexic or bulimic and reduce all the complexity in life to just one issue - weight.

Those who stay connected to their true selves are also confused and sometimes overwhelmed.
But they have made some personal commitment to understanding their lives.
They think about their experiences.
They do not give up on trying to resolve contradictions, they try to make connections between the events of their own and others' lives.
They may seek out a parent, teacher, leader or therapist to help them. They may read or write in a journal.
They will make many mistakes, and misinterpret much of reality.
Those who are connected with their true selves make a commitment to process and understand their experiences.
They will look within themselves to make decisions.
They will think through and decide what is best for them.
They will become immune to peer-pressure.
They will behave in ways that make sense to them.

ACADEMIC Selves
Boys are more likely to be praised for academic and intellectual work.
Girls are more likely to be praised for their clothing, behaving properly and obeying rules.
Boys are generally criticized for their behaviour.
Girls are criticized for intellectual inadequacy.
This can cause the individual teen to ditch their dreams which might not conform to the stereotypes imposed or imagined.
When some have a problem, they stay with it and work it out.
Others think they are stupid when they have a problem, and give up.
Grades can fall - because of not working, or because of loss of confidence that a student needs to tackle increasingly difficult material.

Hopefully they come to increasingly trust themselves, and work hard and smart, and succeed.
Good grades might not help a teen socially, but with a short-term part-sacrifice the good grades will help with long-term academic progress and career and life advantages.

This time of adolescence is ALL a developmental stage - not a character flaw.

Those teens who are happiest, manage against great odds to stay true to their best selves.

All teens feel pain and confusion. None can easily master the painful and truly complex and complicated and difficult problems of their time.

All are aware of the suffering of friends, of the pressure to be beautiful and successful and faultless from family and other sources, as well as the dangers of being alive in these, Our Days, Their Days.

All are pressured to sacrifice their wholeness in order to be loved.

All are in real and present danger of "drowning".

Help them.
Really assist them.
Bless their lives.
Learn how to encourage them as they make their journey through adolescence.
Refrain from adding to their (and your) failure, frustration, anguish and confusion.
Learn from your own mistakes of your own adolescence.
Learn from your past parenting.
Grow together in love.

May they be able to look to us as among their reliable protectors and guides.

Recommended Viewing BYUtv

Go to http://wwwbyutv.org/ and find
"Wind at my Back" 30 episodes
"Adventures from the Book of Virtues" 13 episodes
"Anne of Green Gables" is somewhere too - I haven't managed to see any of it yet.

Also
Look under the heading "Family"

and you might feel prompted to watch any of these very good conferences

"Families Under Fire"
"Family Expo"
"Living Essentials"

There is also "Real Families, Real Answers" available on BYUtv
but I don't see it easily found on the present home page which has just been upgraded.
You can access it directly from my Linked Blogs list on the side.
I am still learning how to find things.

The Lessons

"The lessons have started to ease out into the open. I couldn't force them out any sooner. They come in their own time, when they, and you, are good and ready."
Lisa Niemi (Patrick Swayze's wife)

It Is Possible

"You have to accept... It's possible to do all the right things and still get a bad result."
Law and Order Television programme

Stripped

"I cannot bear someone's dignity being stripped."
Estelle Neethling
(Don't do that to yourself! Don't do that to your spouse or children! Beware of stripping your parents, grandparents or siblings...)

Re -

"Re - think...
Re - design...
Re - build...
Parenting is not an exact science.
Parenting is like Irish music - jolly, lively, and sad.
Never give up being creative and caring - diligent."
Source unrecorded