Beyond Childhood

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Teenage years - the age from which "we begin"! the most vivid memories of “who we were” begins from this period: the first experiences associated with friendship, the first strongly experienced conflicts that leave a long emotional mark, first love, the first real hobbies, the first “adult” tears are all that stands at the origins of our conscious, adult self. Having experienced it ourselves, we no longer remember what difficulties we faced, how intense and painful our experiences were at times. Working with adolescents, I observe the following features that are typical for children of this generation

Low self-esteem, self-doubt;

Low motivation to study, self-development, activity, limited interests, low level of aspirations;

Suppressed feelings: anger, guilt, resentment, with a tendency to somatization and auto-aggression;

Difficulty in relationships, rejection by peers.

Eight out of ten children have these problems. In order to answer the question why? what are we missing in the process of raising a child? - it is necessary to delve into the theory of developmental psychology, to understand and realize the importance of some aspects of the development of the child and the features of the crisis moments of his growing up and formation. Not only we all come from childhood, but our problems also come from there. This means that in order to solve problems, it is necessary to identify their origins in different age stages of development.

Let's go straight through the points

So, problem # 1 is low self-esteem:

The main task of adolescence is to bring together all knowledge about oneself and integrate these numerous images of oneself into a holistic view of oneself, one's personal identity, which allows one to rely on the past, plan the future and adequately realize the existing “here and now”. Teenagers live in a state of constant internal contradictions: “I am no longer small, but not yet an adult”, and at this moment an unstable, unformed, “weak” self is exposed to the blow.

Criticism of appearance, behavior, devaluation of certain aspects of the self of a teenager, humiliation, prohibitions, indifference, aggression from the environment can cause serious damage and "stop" the unfolding process of identity formation. An adult who has not survived the "adolescent crisis", does not have a "mature" identity, will also be vulnerable in the face of similar problems leading to the trauma of the unstable self.

Younger adolescence is 11-12 years old, this is the age of maximum vulnerability. From eleven to thirteen years old: they easily blush, cover their face with hair, make ridiculous movements, trying to hide their shyness, their feelings, which are often associated with a feeling of shame.

The adolescent is also very sensitive to the criticisms of adults, which play a role in children.

During adolescent crisis, the fragility of the newborn returns to the child, extremely sensitive to how they are looked at and what they say about him. A newborn, whose family regrets that he is exactly who he is, that he looks like this, and not that he has such a nose, and not another, and then begins to mourn his gender or hair color, risks remembering these words for a long time … Such a newborn realized that for some reason he was not suitable for the society in which he was born. At this age, any opinion is significant, including the opinions of people who should not be paid attention to. The child does not yet understand this, he hears that they say badly about him, and takes it for the truth, and in later life this can affect his relationship with society.

In order to understand what the vulnerability and vulnerability of a teenager are, imagine crayfish and lobsters changing their shell: they hide in the crevices of the rocks for the time necessary for the formation of a new shell that can protect them. But if at this moment, when they are so vulnerable, someone attacks them and wounds them, this wound will remain forever, and the shell will only hide the scars, but will not heal the wounds (by the way, these wounds are healed later by us, psychologists …)

During this period of extreme vulnerability, adolescents are protected from the whole world either by depression or negativism, which further increases their weakness.

In difficult periods, when a teenager is uncomfortable in the world of adults, when he lacks faith in himself, he finds support in an imaginary life, goes into fantasy, the virtual world, moving further and further from the real world. So - a child forms his own identity, an idea of himself throughout childhood, "reflected" as in a mirror from parents and other significant adults, including teachers. And if this is a “distorting mirror”, if the immediate environment broadcasts to the child that he “falls short” of the ideal, if he is compared with other, more successful, according to parents, children, brothers and sisters, they raise the bar of their own expectations from the child, criticism of his results and behavior is reduced to an assessment of his personality as a whole - the child is faced with a rejection of himself as he is, forming an inferiority complex, and in general a negatively colored self-concept.

As not only a psychologist, but also a mother of a teenage child, I can advise you to be more attentive to how you build your communication with the child, how much you show him his value, how adequately you “reflect” yourself to him, because your attitude towards him will depend on how he treats himself.

To be continued … (In the next article we will analyze point number 2)