The physical, emotional and cognitive changes that adolescence brings is a subject that almost everyone knows, so the aim of this article is not to explain these, but rather to draw attention to the issues that parents have the most difficulty in understanding their children entering adolescence.
Adolescence period. It is a process of change, transformation, metamorphosis, change. Every adolescent and adolescent family experiences this period with their own subjectivity and uniqueness. But while working with adolescents and their families, we can see that some basic questions arise in the minds of almost all families.
One of the most common issues that occur in girls or boys entering adolescence and that causes them to have problems with their families is physical change. Why do adolescents come to their families with demands such as changing their physical appearance (hair dyeing, piercing, losing weight, etc.)?
Adolescence is a period over which people have no control, which keeps the person in a passive state. Adolescents, on the other hand, hate this passive stance. To understand the reason for this hatred, we need to go back to the first years of life. At the beginning of life, even in the creatures closest to humans, the offspring quickly becomes self-sufficient and meets its own needs. However, it takes years for the human baby to be able to protect himself from dangers and meet his basic needs. While the newborn is helpless against dangers coming from outside; The adolescent is helpless against his own body, his own desires and impulses that he cannot control. In other words, the adolescent is helpless against the stimulation coming from within, and this makes him feel the helplessness of the beginning of his life and creates a feeling of hatred. In fact, being ashamed of your body means being ashamed of not being able to control the changes in your body. For this reason, they come to us with requests that may seem strange to us, the reason for this is to control the changes in their bodies and get rid of the passive state on their bodies.
One of the complaints we hear most from the parents of adolescents is; "I can't recognize my child anymore, he has changed so much" is the sentence. For this reason, I think it is useful to take a look at the concept of privacy. The first privacy people acquire is intellectual privacy. The child realizes that his mother cannot read his mind and can tell lies from time to time. With this awareness Together with this, a space for individual intellectual freedom emerged. The next stage is the emergence of emotional intimacy, which generally corresponds to adolescence. The era when mothers or fathers knew what their children wanted, what they liked, and how they would react to certain events is now over. With this emotional privacy created in adolescents, parents begin to feel alienated from their children's world. This is actually a sign of development; the adolescent will create emotional, intellectual and physical privacy areas as a whole and the transition to adulthood will be completed.
One of the issues that adolescents have the most difficulty with in the school environment or at home is the rules. Why don't teenagers want to follow the rules? Psychoanalytically oriented theorists look at the issue of discipline and rules in terms of "meaning". To put it simply, we are trying to control the impulses of adolescents through education; in fact, there are suggestions about finding a middle way on this issue. In today's world, it does not seem possible for adolescents who have already started to think abstractly to blindly follow a rule. That's why I think it is useful to ask the question of meanings rather than the question of rules; “What are the rules for?” We should put the question before the question "Who are the rules for?" and we should not forget this when communicating with adolescents or making rules.
Why do adolescents want to take risks? They can often take risks that may seem strange to adults and surprise the adults in their lives. In recent years, the use of motorcycles We see that the trend towards dangerous sports such as jumping and mountaineering is increasing. In fact, we can interpret the adolescent's risk behavior as an effort to seek a limit. The adolescent is in search of new limits through new experiments. While the adolescent is on the one hand searching for the limits of the new possibilities provided to him by his changing and transforming body, on the other hand, he is looking for a limit. On the other hand, he watches over social boundaries. This search is an indispensable element in determining his social relations and social development, so that the adolescent learns the social codes of adult life, recognizes and accepts them.
We can accept these risky attitudes as "normal", but there is a “When and which number "We won't worry after this point?" Marcelli and Braconnier give the answer to the question. They state the first criterion here as iteration; Having more than one traffic accident, constantly getting into fights at school, repeating truancy from school, etc. The second criterion is duration. If risky behavior persists for more than six months, it constitutes an issue that requires intervention. Another criterion is variations. The fact that a behavior is different from previously seen risky behaviors and new ones are added to it means that it constitutes an issue that requires intervention and support.
One of the most common sentences heard by experts working in the field and of course by adolescents is: "We care for our children." "We trust, but we don't trust those around us." In fact, we can say that behind this sentence is the issue of identification and self-ideals. During childhood, parents are the ones who set the ideals as well as the ones who set the prohibitions. The child first identifies with the parents, but as he or she begins to grow older and grow, he or she begins to find new objects of identification with the influence of socialization, and his or her self-ideals begin to change. The formation of these other self-ideals with adolescence will make parents feel that they have lost their exceptional status in the eyes of their child. In other words, parents are actually disturbed by their children choosing self-ideals other than their own.
So, why are adolescents so fond of their friends? According to French adolescent psychoanalyst Philippe Jeammet, friends are the adolescent's wealth. Because the value that the adolescent attaches to his friends is that they are his ticket out of the family universe. In addition, his friends serve as a mirror for the adolescent; he sees himself and others similar to him. The adolescent will now find in his relationships with his friends the unlimited sharing, physical and spiritual closeness, agreement without explanation, and acceptance without criticism or advice that he cannot find in his parents. That's why friendship and friends ('friends', as they call them) are of great importance for the adolescent.
One of the most important complaints we hear from parents is that the adolescent always wants to be alone, to stay in his room. Why does a teenager want to be alone? Actually what Loneliness is both an emotion and a state. When it comes to adolescence, both of these are the case. On the one hand, he seeks solitude; He always wants to stay in his room, the most secluded places of the school and garden corners are his favorite places. But on the other hand, loneliness, as a feeling, is one of the most basic emotions of adolescent psyche. Most adolescents feel lonely, not understood by anyone, and moreover, unloved. He tries to balance the heavy pressure of socialization with the feeling of loneliness as a counterweight. Another function of loneliness for the adolescent is that it provides a way to create the appropriate distance from the other.
I tried to compile the most frequently asked and curious questions while working with adolescents and their families. Our first question in this meaning-making process is actually “where is the child born?” should be. The child is first born into the dreams of the parents, so that all lost and forgotten dreams can be re-enlightened. Then it is born into the parents' past. Two parents aim (though not always consciously) to fill the gaps in their own fantasies and childhood stories through their children. During adolescence, the individual begins to fight with the answers previously given to him. It is very normal to have conflicts in this struggle, but how we manage this as adults determines the quality of our relationship with adolescents.
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