Psychosocial Variables - Essay Example

Writer’s Name] [Professor’s Name] [Course Title] [Date] Adolescence Psychosocial Variables The subject is a 15 years old girl who, like many adolescents, is confused by various changes in her life. She has many friends but seems to be rebelling against her parents. But like a good Christian child, she goes to church every Sunday. Her love for Jesus is great, then again she feels confused if she is a good Christen or not because she is attracted towards the opposite sex. She doesn’t like her culture and she deviates from it quite often. Her dressing is getting worse day by day and so is her believes in religion. She has many complexes, as she seems to be searching for her personal identity. Her name is Stella. As days pass, she is becoming a part of the adolescent subculture. There seems to be an ever ending cultural lag between Stella and her parents, she feels like her parents don’t understand her. She feels that she is justified in going against them, as they are always telling her what to do. These feelings have further intensified her complexes. The many changes in her life have forced her to turn towards friends, and not family. She watches television for hours. Even though her faith in her religion seems to be weakening, she still remembers to go to the church, every Sunday. She still says that it gives her mental peace in doing so. At church, she usually confesses that she does not like her culture, and that she disobeys her parents, because they don’t understands her. But nowadays, she seems to prefer sleeping in on Sundays, rather then going to church. She feels that church is only for oldies, and that she wants to live her life, like all the other young and beautiful girls she feels that no boy will come near her if she becomes religious. She refuses to go to family picnics because she finds them boring. All she wants to do is hanging out with friends. She feels that her parents are her enemies. Reading I read article of Sociologist Karl Mannheim, concurring to some degree, visualized a useful, if not indispensable, function in adolescent dissent: a force checking society's follies and blind spots, and a perennial challenge to seek more just and complete ways of meeting personal and social needs. Adolescents are potentially mature, creative human beings who differ from their elders largely because they are not allowed to participate in adult activities. The resulting frustrations make them rebellious and often destructive inverts that join ranks to confront the establishment with seemingly illogical dissent. Adolescents thus form a catalytic element in society. But many others equate adolescence with "teenagers," consider it a disease without which the young as well as the old would be happier. This interpretation is fostered by a number of factors: first, by the extensiveness of adolescence, stretching into the twenties and making large numbers of youth appear useless and parasitic; second, by the intensity of adolescence, bringing out disturbed, confused, and searching behavior; and third, by the collectivization of adolescent disturbance, advancing a dissentful, alienated, and alienating culture of its own (Alfred p321). This does not fit the traditional view that youth should be a preadult stage and that young people are apprentices going through an awkward yet learning and preparatory phase before taking their places in the adult world. Long, drawn-out adolescence and millions of cultist members of the teenage subculture seem to defy this view. Indeed, most teenagers no longer possess this preparatory feeling (Elizabeth p210). They behave as if they have arrived; bearing testimony to the fact that adolescence has evolved as a phase in its own right within the life span of the modern individual. The ingredients of the youth subculture assume a semi permanent quality, particularly since much of it is adulated and imitated by the rest of society, including adults. The heroes, songs, music, styles, and fads appear more all-American than the world of jobs and professions looming somewhere out there -- the encounter with which is continually postponed. Observation during treatment Stella’s parents were afraid that they were loosing their daughter so, they asked therapist doctor Annie Kane to come and have a session with their daughter. Annie came over and asked to meet Stella. Stella came out of her room, grumbling. The following observations were taken by Doctor Annie. Annie already had in mind that whatever one might say about adolescents, it must be clear that adolescence is determined as the interim phase between childhood and adulthood. During speaking to Stella, Annie observed that Stella was striving for a personal identity from a specific position within the social structure and was correlated with the weakening of cultural control. This means that as the persuasiveness of the cultural ethos decreased and became too nonspecific for life-orientation, the importance of the vocational or professional position for meaning and behavioral orientation increased, identity-genesis and identity-reinforcement shifted from the general cultural ethos to more vastly specific and discrete social position. This shift constitutes an attempt to search for identity and can be understood as a natural reaction to unstructuredness and uncertainty. It was observed that Stella thought that people need clearly defined norms and expectations that enable them to engage in meaningful, predictable, and in fact, viable behavior. Clearly, a life situation offering noncompelling cultural guidelines and highly diversified and discrete adult positions must be frustrating to young people, and it is prone to create a hotbed of unrest. Annie observed that in Stella’s case this feeling came from, other adolescents who form a pool of vulnerable individuals who starve for new (vs. the outgrown familial) object fixation, and that as such they are convenient targets for demagogues. The subject began to talk about as how she felt that her parents hated her, and besides this she felt that, her parents were suffering from a general cultural lag, she also said that her parents also suffer from specific knowledge lags, for it is virtually impossible for them to keep up with the latest information provided by fast-moving science and technology. The subject felt this lag so strongly that she felt that, The cultural-lag condition of the parents has also been appraised in popular teenage songs, advising more seriously than facetiously that teenagers should try to understand parents in spite of all the "foolish things they are doing," since they are at a difficult stage in life and need youth's understanding and forgiveness. Other indications that the socialization process of the subject had undergone considerable change came from further interviewing the subject. She gave suggestions to remedy the communication gap typically demand of parents that they (1) must listen before teenagers can tell them anything; (2) must want to cooperate before there can be communication; (3) must update their views; (4) must think as teenagers think; (5) must make themselves available; and (6) must be more understanding. Such expressions indicate that the direction of condescension and instruction has been reversed, proceeding now from young to old. Other evidence of the parental (or general adult) effort to establish rapprochement with the teen world included the fact that the subject said that her parents also tried to the adopt teenage customs, fashions, and modes of behavior. The subject has greet knowledge of religion which meant that , she still has a little space in her life for it , the subject said that innovations can even be observed in the religious institution, traditionally the most conservative bastion of culture. Services have been employing the type of music, prayer, and dance preferred by modern youth. Tunes of folk songs and the beat of jazz and rock'n' roll have become acceptable in worship services. In 1967, the Roman Catholic Church relented in its nearly 2000-year-old adherence to sacred liturgy and Pope Paul VI issued a revolutionary document that allowed the use of secular tunes and rhythms in the Mass. The churches' adaptations to teenage styles include clothes, lingo, philosophy, and ritual. Churches have emphasized their adaptability by headlining newspaper ads with "Geared for Teenagers." Others invite the young to come and "wear anything you feel comfortable in." The subject explained about how her parents reacted she said that One parental reaction to this realization was an apologetic mea culpa, and parents, desiring to establish rapprochement between the generations, resorted to communication, information, and equality. This idealistic approach largely failed, for it neglected to assess realistically the nature of socialization, which is not conducive to an equalitarian relationship between socializer and socializee. Another reaction was to reassert traditional authority. This reaction came with the awareness that teenagers, in spite of their up-to-date technological knowledge, lack insights into life's problems -- the mature solutions of which require more than classroom learning and technical know-how. The subject seems to be feeling that on one side, parents are constantly exposed to the American "youth cult" that creates feelings of inferiority in the face of declining strength, prowess, and youthful appearance. On the other side, young people feel inferior in the face of many restrictions that limit activities and privileges. The interplay between the complexes results in a cumulative, mutually reinforcing cycle that perpetuates reciprocal resentment. The shift to the small nuclear family created a drastic reduction of concrete adult models. It also brought about a reduction of familial peers. According to the subject t he contemporary vagueness in cultural precepts and the emphasis on individual freedom have burdened marriage and the family with a heretofore unknown intensity of personality functions. Gratification from marital and familial affiliation, however, is often curtailed by individualism and secularism, which tend to neutralize the beneficial effects of feminism. The effects of individualistic and secular philosophy are also observable in the abrogation of the placement function of the family: the adolescent is now largely on his or her own in determining career and social standing. There is even suspicion that the primariness of group interaction of the modern family has shifted slightly toward secondariness. The subject said that it is unrealistic to expect that she can or will defer gratification of sexual needs until completing schooling, which may extend into the twenties if college is attended. As long as youth are affiliated with an educational institution, it is difficult to accord them full adult status. Not until establishing themselves occupationally and earning a living do they achieve major criteria of adult status. To some degree according to the subject, premarital chastity still is a social value. The subject explained how technically, any form of sexual gratification during adolescent years, constitutes a deviation from the blueprint. Whatever sexual gratification does take place -- autoeroticism, hetero- or homosexuality -- is defined as illicit, or at least improper, and burdens the majority of adolescents with negative self-feelings. She felt that she was tempted to equate a verbal statement about behavior with behavior as such. The New Sexuality consisted to a large degree only of the New Verbiage -- a greater outspokenness, a greater willingness to express and look at the fact of human sexuality. Symptomatic of this new expressiveness were pornography, four-letter expletives, and coed dorms. But, alas, the actual implementation of the verbal liberality may have been slightly different (Charles p184). Though change in attitudes, she was quick and had seemingly radical, behavior. Her new sexuality represented indeed a new and somewhat radical change, but actual sexual behavior still had a way to go before matching her verbal openness. Assessment On observing the subject I felt that Stella like any normal adolescent is facing many coping problems with her parents. Like many adolescents, she seems to be untested in sexual activities. She has gone far from religion which is also normal in her stage in life. My observation completely coincides with the article chosen for reading. As adolescent is a hard stage to go through, I felt that Stella is a normal girl. After observing her, I also came to the conclusion that it may be her parents’ fault as well. On observing the subject it can be said at she felt that Clan association was replaced by association with peers whose background experiences and attitudes frequently differed greatly. Over time, this body of peers evolved into an influential collectivity forming a corporate identity apart from, and often opposed to, the family. Association with no familial peers thus encourages her to maintain independent subcultures. I observed that the subject accepted her sexual needs, and said that it was realistic, she knows that despite the prolonging of the period between child and adult statuses, no socially acceptable provisions have been made to allow sexual needs to be fulfilled outside of marriage The entire subject wanted was that her parents understand her. She wanted to make her parents happy, but not on the cost of her friends. She knew that there was generation gap, and she wanted to fill that gap up badly. On observing the subject it can be said that she had accepted the changes, going on in her life, it was her parents who had not accepted the fact that their daughter was growing up. Works Cited Alfred R. Lindesmith, Anselm L. Strauss, and Norman K. Denzin, Social Psychology (New York: Holt, 2000), pp. 312-48. Charles H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Scribner's, 2003), p. 184 Elizabeth Douvan and H. Gold, "Modal Patterns in American Adolescence", in Review of Child Development Research, vol. 2, ed. L. Hoffman and M. Hoffman (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003). 210-19 Read More