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

NEEDED:A Time to Grow

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

Manifestations, (cont.)

• Pseudo-Stupidity

• Hypocrisy

• Personal religion

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

Three important lessons

• Exclusion

• Betrayal

• Disillusionment

Given:A Premature Adulthood

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

What about schools?

• Educational reforms

• School size

• Class size

• Universality

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

ResultStress and its Aftermath

Stress

• A response to an extraordinary demand for adaptation

• Lack of stress management

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

Effects of Stressors on the Patchwork Self Adolescent

• Type A

• Type B

• Type C

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

Helping Teenagers Cope

Encourage Growth by Integration

“Parents are the single most powerful, nonbiological influence on

their children’s lives”(p. 241)

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

Always remember

“Even if we can’t do it all, we can do something” (p. 253).

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