418 Chapter
12
Development
These students are kneeling by a friend’s tombstone. The rate
of suicide among teenagers has risen signifi cantly over the
last few decades. Can you think of any reasons for this
phenomenon?
through adolescence without appreciable
turmoil in their lives, and that parents
speak easily—and fairly often—with their children about a variety of topics (van Wel,
Linssen, & Abma, 2000; Granic, Hollenstein, & Dishion, 2003).
Not that adolescence is completely calm! In most families with adolescents, the
amount of arguing and bickering clearly rises. Most young teenagers, as part of their
search
for identity, experience tension between their attempts to become independent
from their parents and their actual dependence on them. They may experiment with
a range of behaviors and fl irt with a variety of activities that their parents, and even
society as a whole, fi nd objectionable. Happily, though,
for most families such ten-
sions stabilize during middle adolescence—around age 15 or 16—and eventually
decline around age 18 (Smetana, Daddis, & Chuang, 2003; Smetana, 2005).
One reason for the increase in discord during adolescence appears to be the pro-
tracted period in which children stay at home with their parents. In prior historical
periods—and in some non-Western cultures today—children leave home immediately
after puberty and are considered adults. Today, however, sexually mature adolescents
may spend as many as seven or eight years with their parents.
Current social trends
even hint at an extension of the confl icts of adolescence beyond the teenage years
because a signifi cant number of young adults—known as
boomerang children —return
to live with their parents, typically for economic reasons, after leaving home for some
period. Although some parents welcome
the return of their children, others are less
sympathetic, which opens the way to confl ict (Bianchi & Casper, 2000; Lewin, 2003).
Another source of strife with parents lies in the way adolescents think. Adolescence
fosters
adolescent egocentrism, a state of self-absorption in which a teenager views the
world from his or her own point of view. Egocentrism leads adolescents to be highly
critical of authority fi gures,
unwilling to accept criticism, and quick to fault others. It
also makes them believe that they are the center of everyone else’s attention, which
leads to self-consciousness. Furthermore, they develop
personal fables, the belief that their
experience
is unique, exceptional, and shared by no one else. Such personal fables may
make adolescents feel vulnerable to the risks that threaten others (Tucker Blackwell,
2006; Alberts, Elkind, & Ginsberg, 2007; Schwartz, Maynard, & Uzelac, 2008).
Finally, parent-adolescent discord occurs because adolescents
are much more apt
to engage in risky behavior than later in life. In large part, their riskiness is due to
the immaturity of brain systems that regulate impulse control, some of which do not
fully develop until people are in their 20s (Steinberg, 2007).
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: