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All Grown Up and No Place All Grown Up and No Place to Go: Teenagers in Crisisto Go: Teenagers in Crisis
Prepared by Keith WartaPrepared by Keith WartaCI 3920CI 3920
Dr. Tracy SmithDr. Tracy SmithSummer 2004Summer 2004
Family History
Golden age• Nuclear family
-two parent family
-romantic love
-maternal love
• Adolescents perceived as immature
• Protective environment
Postmodern age• Permeable family
-single parent, etc.-consensual love-shared parenting
• Adolescents perceived as socially sophisticated
• Exposure to many destructive images
Two pathways to identity formation
• Differentiation and integration-separating out concepts, feelings, and
emotions and putting those parts together into a higher ordered whole
• Substitution-replacing one set of concepts, feelings,
and emotions for another
Identity construction by:
• Differentiation
-strong sense of self
-inner directed
-future oriented
-ability to postpone gratification
• Substitution
-patchwork self
-other directed
-present oriented
-less able to postpone gratification
The New Morbidity
• Drug and alcohol abuse
• Teenage suicide
• Teenage gun violence
• High rates of teenage pregnancy
• High rates of STD’s
I am the center of the Universe!
“Starting at about the age of eleven or twelve, adolescents develop the ability to think at a higher, more abstract level than they did as children…These new mental abilities bring about a Copernican revolution in the way young people think and feel about themselves, others, and the world in general” (p. 25).
Some manifestations of these new intellectual abilities
• Idealism/ Criticalness
• Argumentativeness
• Self-Consciousness
• Speciality/ Invulnerability
Pubertyand the
Emotional Lightning Rod
• Adolescents tend to focus all of their developmental anxieties on one feature
• Interesting fact- Adolescent girls are most satisfied with their body image when they are slightly underweight
• It is estimated that 75% of girls have at least one symptom of an eating disorder, most often, fad dieting
As if that wasn’t enough!
• The stresses on adolescents are compounded by stresses that derive from the postmodern society.
• The new perception of adolescents as sophisticated has added demands for maturity without giving them the time to attain this maturity
Vanishing Markers
• Clothing
• Activity
• Information-the average child or teenager views 1000 murders, rapes and assaults per year on television alone
• Authority
No Place to Go
• Vanishing markers leave adolescents with no special place of their own in society
• Vanishing markers also confront teens with stressful new freedoms
The Chore of Teaching
• When teachers lose their excitement and commitment for their work, their effectiveness as a role model is diminished, or lost
What has taken the joy out of teaching?
• Many more students than in the past are troubled, unhappy, and difficult to teach
• Diversity of curricula, variety of educational reforms, and demands for accountability take time and energy that once went into teaching
• Salaries have not kept pace with inflation
Three stress situations
• Type A- Foreseeable and avoidable
• Type B- Neither foreseeable or avoidable
• Type C- Foreseeable yet not avoidable
The Patchwork Self…Revisited
• Low self evaluation
• Mixed bag of values, attitudes, habits, and beliefs
Teenage Reactions to Postmodern Stressors
• Eating disordersAnorexia nervosa
Bulimia
• Alcohol and drug useAlcohol accounts for 80% of teenage deaths45-50% violent teenage deaths400,000 teenage alcoholics
• Depression• Repression/ Denial
PTSD
• Suicide• Violence
What Parents Can Do
• Inform yourself about child growth and development
• Be an adult, set limits and boundaries
• Deal with adolescents on the basis of principle, not emotion
• Engage in mutual authority, when appropriate
What Schools Can Do
• Again, be adults, set limits and boundaries
• Work with individual students when possible
• Make the last two years of high school more like a junior college
Other sources of information on Child Development and Techniques
• Touchpoints by T. Berry Brazelton (1992)
• Parenting Your Teenager by David Elkind (1994)
Services for Troubled Teensin this area
Foothills Mental Health Point of Access
Toll Free
1-866-327-4968
All Grown Up and No Place to Go: Teenagers in Crisis
Presented by
Keith Warta
Summer 2004
CI 3920
Dr. Tracy Smith