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3 AUGUST 2009
NO 1469
Adolescence
As we follow children's developmental
progression, we notice that their range of activities from childhood to
adolescence can be summarized as doing more, with more people, in more
places, with
a wider range of systems, to an ever-enlarging societal context. With
growing experience, adolescents gradually come to, and become competent
in relating to, societal issues as such. They also will be able to tease
out personal considerations as separate from organizational and communal
matters. In fact, the teenagers
...normally are capable of remarkably sophisticated reasoning about the social relations and regulations of their social world...[They] take into account a multiplicity of important considerations and reconcile these considerations to suit the needs of specific situations; in constructing solutions to social problems they show both coherence and flexibility. (Damon, 1977, p..335)
Conceptually, childhood ways are typified by doing because it seems natural and adolescent/adult ways as processing selectively. This budding adolescents' capacity to generalize brings with it also the young persons' tendency to assume that their conception of order is applicable everywhere (Youniss, 1980, p. 30).
We can readily picture a teenage girl in a group home impatiently asking her worker: "When are you getting word about our clothing allowance? I must have a new warm jacket, my ofd one is all shreds and outgrown!" We note that this adolescent no longer envisages the careworker as her provider with money for the purchase of her coat. She fully comprehends that her trip to the store, however urgent and personally justifiable, is grounded in the personal and organizational commitments of her careworker. She also is cognizant that much depends upon the agency's backing of the worker and the agency's capability to secure the proper funding from the child welfare service network. (In actuality, that projected budget depends upon priority determinations of its "society" – that is; the respective communal supra-systems, a combination of socially involved, established, and politically elected citizenry.) The adolescent, however, tends to see her caregivers and the immediate institutional systems as the determinants. Attitudes about people and institutions are formed at this level and grounded in these specific and personally significant experiences.
Adolescents increasingly do discover and comprehend the complexity of contemporary life. In fact, much of their repeated concerns with social and organizational issues is directly associated with this new social learning. The teenager's daily life experience in school, at work, in recreation, peer experience, and hopefully in meaningful community activities (e.g., selected volunteer tasks) brings them face-to-face with contemporary living in a multisociety. What in pre-adolescent years involved a recognition and experience of reciprocity becomes now more and more an engagement in reciprocity. Reciprocity is practiced, valued, and incorporated as an instrumentality of living. Social life comes into full force as reciprocity finds its ethical extension in social responsibility and its contextual counterpart of a caring community. An adolescent's induction into a caring community will vary with both the degree of social responsibility valued by the young person's immediate and larger society, and the extent such an individual is able to comprehend the reciprocal dimensions of his or her communal experience (Maas, 1979, p. 6).
Adolescents' newly developed grasp for societal issues illustrates a common human developmental fact: "what is learned is used." Adolescents will quickly spot the "realities" of life, including the ones which reveal new conflicting dimensions of life to them. These new discoveries, especially the awareness of stark inconsistencies in the adults' world of "realities," will get much of their attention affirming that their adult counterparts are also subject to improvement! They will discover the powerful informal networks which counteract or obscure the formal systems. They are particularly apt to spot processes which can serve their immediate personal advantage. Corruptive or criminal informal systems are quickly identified (Polsky, 1962). Moreover, adolescent development brings an intimate preoccupation with identity formation; ethnic, racial, and other socio-cultural variables are important to them.
HENRY W. MAIER
Maier, H.W. (1987). Developmental group care of children and youth: Concepts and practice. New York. The Haworth Press. pp. 101-102.
REFERENCES
Damon, W. (1977). The Social World of the Child. San Francisco. Jossey-Bass.
Maas, H.S.(1979). Social Development and Social Loss. Berkeley, CA. University of California (unpublished paper).
Polsky, H.W. (1962). Cottage Six. New York. Russell Sage Foundation.
Youniss, J. (1980). Parents and Peers in Social Development. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press.
