Adolescence (11-15 years).
SOCIAL SITUATION OF DEVELOPMENT
Like any other, adolescence “begins” with a change in the social situation of development.
The specifics of the social situation development lies in the fact that a teenager is in a position (state) between an adult and a child - with a strong desire to become an adult, which determines many features of his behavior. A teenager seeks to defend his independence, to acquire the right to vote. Escape from parental care is the universal goal of adolescence. But this deliverance does not take place by breaking off relations, by separating, which probably also takes place (in special cases), but by the emergence of a new quality of relations. It is not so much a journey from dependency to autonomy as a move towards ever more differentiated relationships with others.
Everything that a teenager has been accustomed to since childhood - family, school, peers - are evaluated and re-evaluated, gaining new meaning and meaning.
“A challenge to adults is not so much an attack on adult standards as an attempt to establish boundaries that contribute to their self-determination” (C. Shelton).
Thus, a fundamentally new component appears in the social situation of adolescent development—alienation, that is, disharmony of relations in significant areas of content. Disharmony manifests itself in activity, behavior, communication, inner experiences, and its cumulative result is the difficulty in “growing” into new content areas. Relationship disharmony occurs when a teenager leaves the system of relationships that is familiar and comfortable for him and cannot yet enter (grow) into new areas of life. In such conditions, adolescents need those qualities, the absence of which they are characterized by.
Adolescence is divided into younger teens and older teens by a crisis of 13 years. Although, both in essence and in the nature of the changes taking place at this age, adolescence as a whole is a crisis.
There are both external and internal (biological and psychological) prerequisites for this.
The external ones are:
- Changing the nature of educational activities:
a) versatility
c) the abstractions offered for assimilation cause a qualitatively new cognitive attitude to knowledge.
2. Lack of unity of requirements: how many teachers, so many different assessments of the surrounding reality, as well as the behavior of the child, his activities, views, attitudes, personality traits. Hence the need to form one's own position, emancipation from the direct influence of adults.
3. The introduction of socially useful labor into schooling leads to the emergence of a teenager's experience of himself as a participant in social labor activity.
4. The emergence of new requirements in the family - real help with the housework, responsibility.
5. Changing the position of the child in the family - they begin to consult with him. Expansion of social ties of a teenager - an opportunity is provided for participation in the multifaceted social life of the team.
The presence of internal biological prerequisites is explained by the fact that during this period the entire human body enters the path of active physiological and biological restructuring.
Three systems are being radically rebuilt at once: hormonal, circulatory and musculoskeletal. New hormones are rapidly released into the blood, have an exciting effect on the central nervous system, determining the onset of puberty. The uneven maturation of various organic systems is expressed. In the circulatory system, the muscle tissue of the heart outstrips the blood vessels in terms of growth, the pushing force of the heart muscle makes the vessels that are not ready for such a rhythm work in an extreme mode. In the musculoskeletal system, bone tissue outstrips the growth rate of muscles, which, not keeping pace with bone growth, are stretched, creating constant internal inconvenience. All this leads to the fact that fatigue, excitability, irritability, negativism, and pugnacity of adolescents increase by 8-11 times (AP Krakovsky, 1970).
This is how the negative phase of adolescence begins. It is characterized by anxiety, anxiety, disproportions in physical and mental development, aggressiveness, inconsistency of feelings, decreased performance, melancholy, etc. The positive phase comes on gradually and is expressed in the fact that the teenager begins to feel closeness to nature, to perceive art in a new way, he has a world of values, the need for intimate communication, he experiences a feeling of love, dreams, etc. (I. S. Kon).
Four types of the most striking interests of a teenager, called dominants, are distinguished:
"egocentric dominant" - the interest of a teenager in his own personality;
"dominant gave" - the adolescent's setting on a vast, large scale, which for him is much more subjectively acceptable than near, current, today's;
"dominant of effort" - the interest of a teenager in resistance, overcoming, volitional tensions, which sometimes manifest themselves in stubbornness, hooliganism, struggle against educational authority, protest;
“dominant of romance” is an interest in the unknown, risky, adventure, heroism.
LEADING ACTIVITIES
In this context, there is also a change in the leading activity. The leading role in adolescence is played by socially significant activities, the means of implementation of which are: teaching (L. I. Bozhovich), communication (D. B. Elkonin), socially useful work (D. I. Feldstein).
Doctrine
It is in the process of learning that the assimilation of thinking in concepts takes place, without which “there is no understanding of the relations underlying phenomena” (L. S. Vygotsky, 1984). Thinking in concepts makes it possible to penetrate into the essence of things, to understand the patterns of relations between them. Therefore, as a result of the assimilation of new knowledge, the ways of thinking are also reconstructed. Knowledge becomes the personal property of the student, developing into his convictions, which, in turn, leads to a change in views on the surrounding reality (L. I. Bozhovich, 1968). Thus, “the complete socialization of thinking lies in the function of concept formation” (L. S. Vygotsky). The nature of cognitive interests also changes - there is an interest in relation to a particular subject, a specific interest in the content of the subject. (L.I. Bozhovich, 1968).
Communication. The leading motive of a teenager's behavior is the desire to find his place among his peers. Moreover, the lack of such an opportunity very often leads to social maladaptation and offenses (L. I. Bozhovich, 1968). Peer assessments are beginning to become more important than assessments of teachers and adults. A teenager is most exposed to the influence of the group, its values; he is afraid of losing popularity among his peers. Interestingly, the place of a teenager in the system of relationships depends mainly on his moral qualities, and his position in the group determines the varying degree of his "emotional well-being." In communication as an activity, the child assimilates social norms, reassesses values, and satisfies the need for recognition and self-affirmation.
Socially useful activity. Trying to establish himself in a new social position, the teenager tries to go beyond student affairs into another area of social significance. To realize the need for an active social position, he needs an activity that receives the recognition of other people, an activity that can give him importance as a member of society. It is characteristic that when a teenager is faced with the choice of communication with comrades and the opportunity to participate in socially significant affairs, confirming his social significance, he most often chooses public affairs. Socially useful activity is for a teenager the area where he can realize his increased opportunities, the desire for independence, having satisfied the need for recognition from adults, “creates the possibility of realizing his individuality.
CENTRAL NEOPLASMS
Against the background of the development of leading activity, the development of mental neoplasms of age occurs, covering all aspects of personality development in this period: changes occur in the field of morality, in sexual development, in higher mental functions, in the emotional sphere.
Central neoplasms:
- abstract thinking;
- self-awareness;
- gender identity;
- feeling of "adulthood"
- change of world view,
- autonomous morality.
Thinking
In the transition from primary school age to adolescence, the schoolchild's thinking should change qualitatively.
The essence of the change is in the transition from visual-figurative thinking and the initial forms of verbal-logical thinking to hypothetical-reasoning thinking, which is based on a high degree of generalization and abstractness.
A necessary condition for the formation of this type of thinking is the ability to make the thought itself the object of one's thought. And it is in adolescence that all the conditions for this appear.
At the age of 11-12, children have a desire to have their own point of view, to weigh and comprehend everything, the need to think about themselves and others, to think about objects and phenomena, including those that are not given in direct sensory perception.
This need is also met by the opening up of new intellectual opportunities for middle school students.
The general intellectual development of students who do not know how to operate with abstract concepts, the formation of which is an important indicator of mental and speech development, slows down significantly. Not knowing the methods of logical and speech transformations, the student demonstrates a low level of language development. At the same time, he inaccurately expresses his thoughts, draws incorrect conclusions, strives for verbatim reproduction of the text of the textbook, thereby creating in the teacher an idea of himself as an incapable, “difficult” student.
The lack of formation of abstract-logical thinking is also associated with a significant number of school difficulties for children, often leading to persistent academic failure. Knowledge of different levels - generalized and specific, acquired with the help of spontaneously formed processes of mental activity, are poorly ordered, and therefore they often “coexist” in the student’s head instead of forming hierarchized systems.
Schoolchildren who are just starting to study in secondary school, due to the low level of formation of abstract-logical thinking, from the very first days begin to experience significant learning difficulties, and, in addition, they may develop a persistent negative attitude towards learning and intellectual activity in general.
The purposeful formation of abstract-logical forms of thinking should be the main task of the development of secondary school students, starting from their early adolescence.
In the moral realm, two features deserve close attention:
- change of world view;
- stable "autonomous" moral views, judgments and evaluations, independent of random influences.
However, the morality of a teenager is not supported by moral convictions, is not yet formed into a worldview, and therefore can easily change under the influence of peers.
The inconsistency of moral development is characterized by the following typical manifestation: “Teenagers are exceptionally selfish, consider themselves the center of the Universe and, at the same time, they are not capable of such devotion and self-sacrifice in any of the subsequent periods of their lives.
Sometimes the behavior of adolescents in relation to other people is rude and unceremonious, although they themselves are incredibly vulnerable. Their mood fluctuates between radiant optimism and the most gloomy pessimism. Sometimes they work with inexhaustible enthusiasm, and sometimes they are slow and apathetic” (A. Freud).
The ideal acts as a condition that increases moral stability. The ideal perceived or created by the child means that he has a permanent motive. As the child develops, moral ideals become more and more generalized and begin to act as a consciously chosen model for behavior (L. I. Bozhovich, 1968).
The “sphere of significance” changes significantly, and interest in the intimate world of adults is born.
self-awareness
“For the first time, the world of the psychic is revealed to the maturing teenager. In penetrating into inner reality, into the world of one's own experiences, the decisive role is played by the function of concept formation that arises in the transitional age. Only with the formation of concepts comes the intensive development of self-perception, self-observation, intensive knowledge of inner reality, experiences. The concept, being the most important means of cognition and understanding, leads to major changes in the content of a teenager’s thinking” (L. S. Vygotsky). In the thinking of a teenager, the ability to abstract the concept from reality, to formulate and sort out alternative hypotheses, to make one's own thought the subject of analysis, opens up.
Accordingly, self-consciousness develops in strict dependence on the development of thinking. The formation of a teenager's self-awareness lies in the fact that he begins to gradually distinguish qualities from certain types of activities and actions, to generalize and comprehend them as features of his behavior, and then the qualities of his personality. Self-concept in adolescence is one of the most dynamically developing psychological structures.
The subject of assessment and self-assessment, self-awareness and consciousness are the qualities of the individual, associated primarily with educational activities and relationships with others. The behavior of a teenager becomes behavior for himself, he is aware of himself holistically. This is the end result and the central point of the entire transitional age.
An extremely important component of self-awareness is self-respect. Self-esteem expresses an attitude of approval or disapproval towards oneself and indicates to what extent an individual considers himself capable, significant, successful and worthy. Adolescents of 12-14 years of age have a significant decrease in self-esteem, and the majority of girls consider themselves "bad".
PSYCHOLOGICAL FEATURES OF AGE
The most essential feature of the transitional age is that the epoch of puberty is at the same time the epoch of the social maturation of the individual.
In general, a significant number of adolescents have disharmonized relationships to one degree or another. These are mutual misunderstanding with parents, problems with teachers, negative experiences, anxiety, anxiety, discomfort, expectation of aggression, quarrels with peers, closeness, unwillingness and inability to talk about yourself, your inner world, ignorance of how and what information to receive about yourself, ignorance and inability to work with it. The relationship of adolescents with the outside world is spontaneous, unconstructive, immature, incompetent.
Adolescents show negativity towards adults (teachers), tragically experience situations of non-inclusion in a peer group (if everyone is against me, I am against everyone), hope for an uncertain bright future, flaunt their independence, commitment to material interests, feel the need for communication.
The intensive development of abstract thinking leads to a change in the ways of thinking, its socialization.
As a result, the views on the surrounding reality and on oneself change. The behavior of a teenager becomes for him the reality in which he begins to evaluate himself as what he really is. The active formation of self-consciousness and reflection gives rise to a lot of questions about life and about oneself.
The constant worry “what am I?” forces the teenager to look for reserves of his possibilities. Interest in yourself is extremely high. There is an opening of the inner world. The inner “I” ceases to coincide with the “outer”, which leads to the development of self-control and self-control.
Together with the awareness of their uniqueness, originality, unlikeness to others, a teenager often experiences a feeling of loneliness. On the one hand, the need for communication is growing, on the other hand, its selectivity is increasing, there is a need for solitude.
Adolescents are especially sensitive to the peculiarities of their bodies and their appearance, they constantly compare their development with the development of their peers. Specific to them is fixation on real or imagined shortcomings. Describing himself, a teenager often uses the expressions: “ugly”, “stupid”, “weak-willed”, etc. It is important how much his body corresponds to the stereotypical image of masculinity (masculinity) or femininity (femininity). Adolescents often become victims of the so-called dysmorphomania syndrome (fear or delirium of a physical defect).
A teenager seeks to comprehend his rights and obligations, evaluate his past, consider the present, approve and understand himself. The desire to be and be considered an adult is formed. The feeling of adulthood as a manifestation of self-consciousness is the core, structural center of the personality.
Features of self-consciousness and self-esteem are manifested in behavior. With low self-esteem, a teenager strives to solve the simplest tasks, which hinders his development. With overestimated (which is quite rare at this age), he overestimates his abilities, strives to accomplish what he is unable to cope with.
An important point is the inconsistency of self-characteristics, especially for boys. So, in essays on the topic “What am I?” teenagers write: “I am good, honest, sometimes I lie to my parents...”, etc.
A powerful factor in self-development in older adolescence is the emerging interest in the question “What can I become in the future?” It is with such reflections that the restructuring of the motivational sphere, conditioned by an orientation towards the future, begins (N. N. Tolstykh).
Relationship with parents
The sphere of relationships with parents throughout the entire period of growing up remains significant and has a strong influence on the formation of personality. Older teenagers “discover their parents” for the first time and begin to make extremely high demands on them.
Families lack an atmosphere of warmth and intimacy between parents and children. Every sixth teenager (from a complete family) experiences emotional rejection from both parents. The most typical hostile-inconsistent attitude of parents, combined with their psychological autonomy. Adolescents formulate it as a “not up to you” attitude. In half of the cases, there is overt or covert hostility towards parents in relation to adolescents.
In adolescence, the attitude towards the family as a whole and towards parents changes in the following directions:
Criticism, doubts and opposition to the values, attitudes and ways of acting of adults appear.
- Emotional ties to family are weakening.
- Parents as a model for orientation and identification recede into the background.
- In general, the influence of the family is decreasing, although, in fact, it remains an important reference group.
Nevertheless, there are sprouts of a new positive attitude towards parents, as well as in general, empathy develops for adults, the desire to help them, to share joy and sorrow with them. Adults, as studies show, are at best themselves ready to show sympathy for a teenager, but are completely unprepared to accept such an attitude on his part (N. N. Tolstykh).
Relation to peers
The general motivation of a teenager shifts to communication. Here conflicts arise, values are reassessed, the need for recognition and the desire for self-affirmation are satisfied. The dominant need for communication is formulated as follows: “Learn to communicate”, “Learn to understand each other better”. Peers are seen as a source of safety and support.
The need to communicate with peers actualizes the problem of confident behavior. Modern teenagers often get lost in provocative, hurtful, threatening situations, choosing either submission or reciprocal aggressiveness. Another type of situation in which a non-constructive style of behavior predominates in adolescents is situations where the adolescent himself or another person needs support.
In half of the situations, the communicative style of adolescents is confident, while the second half of the situations show an overwhelming predominance of dependent behavior over aggressive.
Rigid polarization of peers is characteristic, based on the following oppositions “good - bad”, “for me - against me”, as well as negligence and aggression. Approximately 40% of adolescents demonstrate a negative attitude towards their peers, 30% - positive, 30% - neutral.
The following dynamics of motives for communicating with peers is observed: at the age of 12-13, it is important for a teenager to take a certain place in a peer group. The content of communication of younger adolescents is centered around the processes of learning and behavior - the leader among peers is the one who learns better and behaves correctly, a positive image is leading. At the age of 14-15, the desire for autonomy in the team and the search for recognition of the value of one's own personality in the eyes of peers dominate. The content of communication focuses on issues of personal communication, individuality - the most attractive personality becomes “interesting”, “strong”, “special”. Many adolescents find themselves frustrated with the need to "be significant" in their environment.
From about the age of 12, adolescents begin to develop intensively personal and interpersonal reflection, as a result of which they tend to see the reasons for their failures, conflicts or successes in communication in their own personality. The ability to take responsibility for the success of their communication with others appears.
In the relationship of boys and girls, immediacy disappears. The feeling of adulthood that appears in a teenager pushes him to master “adult” types of interaction, including with the opposite sex. The emerging interest in the other sex in younger adolescents is often inadequately manifested. Boys begin to “bully”, “molest”, etc. Girls most often, understanding the reasons for such actions, do not take offense, demonstrating that they do not pay attention to this. Older teenagers have shyness, tension, stiffness.
FORMATION OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CULTURE OF THE PERSONALITY OF A TEENAGER
Adolescence is sensitive for the formation of the psychological culture of the individual. The specificity of the phenomenon of alienation in adolescence and the psychological characteristics of age make it possible to solve the problem of alienation in adolescence through the purposeful development of the self-concept.
At this age, children are especially receptive to psychological knowledge and psychological training aimed at developing basic communication skills.
Consultant - diaanalyst, teacher - psychologist Bykova Svetlana Viktorovna.
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