Adolescence Stage: a Life-changing Experience of Mental Health

This adolescence stage experience essay explores the challenges and transformations individuals go through during this critical period of development.Adolescence is a time in which everyone experiences this roller coaster full of twisting emotions. In this stage of life, benefits or possible consequences are demonstrated from how well the caregivers raised the child. There are two main attachment styles that affect the child later on in life, Secure and Insecure attachment. And depending on how well the caregivers raised the child, it can lead to some of the children living a long and healthy life or a drastic and body damaging hell.

The Lifelong Impact of Secure Attachment in Children

John Bowlby, a British psychologist, came to the conclusion of the attachment theory. His theory expands on the idea of children learning nearly everything from their caregivers. His theory touches on the ideas of the child and the parent or caregiver has a strong emotional tie between the two. Being that children mimic their actions, ways of expressing emotions, and rely heavily on the older being for evolutionary needs. Mary Ainsworth, an American-Canadien psychologist, saw Bowlby’s work and wanted to add her own bit of knowledge to it. She continues by saying that attachment leads to development of survival skills. Ainsworth believes that the need for attachment in a child is as big of a need such as food and water. Therefore, it is very important for the caregiver to acknowledge the importance of their care taking skills and craft the perfect model for the child to look at and to grow up based off that model. With that being said, the caregiver must also notice that the model will not be built for the child in one day, but rather over the span of their childhood. Ainsworth also constructed an experiment called the Strange Situation Classification. In this experiment, a mother, her baby, and the experimenter are in a room while the child plays. The experimenter then leaves the mother and baby alone, after sometime a stranger joins the mother and infant. Mother leaves, the stranger then tries to play with the infant, then the mother returns. This experiment has each sequence for a set amount of time and the baby’s reactions and emotions are being recorded for data throughout. Depending on how the baby reacts, whether it is avoiding the mother, the stranger, or crying when the mother leaves, shows the results of the kind of attachment that the child has been exposed to since the day the infant was born. Mary Main, an American psychologist, brought forward the idea of disorganized attachment theory. She builds upon Ainsworth work and gave them three classifications. Her experiments had results that demonstrated how children were responding to their own caregiver how they would react towards a stranger. Depending on how the reaction changed, it would be classified by a range of severity. It is quite obvious that attachment follows an infant throughout their life. First, the infant begins completely dependent on their mothers to care for them in order to manage the world for themselves once they become alone in it later on in the future. The two main categories for attachment, secure and insecure, with insecure having three subcategories; insecure-avoidant, insecure-ambivalent, and insecure-disorganized can be classified later on. When talking about Secure attachment, the parent-child relationship serves as the layout for future relationships that the child will have. It is important for the child to learn how to have trust and can understand emotional recognition. The more secure the child’s attachment is to a nurturing adult, the more independent the child will be in the future. A child that is secure is more likely to be confident and resilient when peer pressure arises. Infants that are exposed to a non-caring parent may induce developmental deficits. Aggressiveness, anxiety, depression, delinquency, and intellectual retardation may be some of the deficits. If the attachment is not secure, the baby will not be responding to their mother as well as they should be. These children tend to smile less, direct more anger, and have more physical aggression. Avoidant-Attachment develops when the parents who do not offer appropriate sympathy towards the children. Ambivalent Attachment is developed once an infant feels that their expressions will not be attended as needed due to the parents’ lack of consistent nurturing and protection. Disorganized Attachment occurs once the parent has too many personal unresolved emotional issues that they do not have time nor space to think about their baby. They are also unable to determine whose issue is more grave, being their own or the child’s. Once the childhood stage comes to an end, Adolescence stage begins.

Adolescent Physical Development: The Roller Coaster of Puberty

Adolescence is when the strangle roller coaster of emotions begins. This stage is considered from ages 12-18 years old. Physical, Cognitive, and Social-Emotional Development all see some changes. When it comes to physical development in adolescents, puberty is one of the main changes. Girls tend to experience their growth spurt first between the ages of ten and twelve while boys grow after them around twelve and fourteen years of age. Puberty, however, is more known for the maturation of the reproductive organs, signalling the beginning of the physical and psychological changes. Each sex has their primary sex characteristics develop. Meaning that each sex, respectively, begins to stimulate the production of hormones. In females, estrogen and progesterone are produced by the ovaries. In males, the primary hormone is testosterone, which is produced within their testicles. While these hormones begin to mature the sexual organs into their appropriate functionality, they being to produce their secondary sexual characteristics. Teens also learn at this stage how illness affects them. They now understand that it is the combination of an internal process and the psychological factors of the body and said illness that play a role in the immune system. However, teens may feel the need to become Anorexic or Bulimic. Anorexia is when a teen reduces the amount of calories they intake, in other words starvation, in order to lose enough weight to not be judged as being overweight. Bulimic refers to binging, or eating excessive amounts of food, then puking up the food after. Teens do this since they believe their bodies will absorb the calories and nutrient intake then be able to puke the unnecessary weight that would be added on to their bodies. However, it has been found that teens that do these actions may and will lead to either their own deaths from malnourishment or ulcers forming in the stomach or in the esophagus from the stomach acid burning the simple lining tissue of the organs. Cognitive development in adolescence leaves the concrete thinking, such as facts, physical objects that can be seen, etc., behind and opens up the teens mind to formal operational thinking. Formal operational thought allows the teens to become more hypothetical with their thinking and to make use of inductive reasoning. With that being the positive side of cognitive thinking, there are also some negatives that may begin to occur. Things such as hypocrisy, egocentrism, and the imaginary audience can also begin to show in the teens mindset. Imaginary audience refers to when the teen feels that everyone is constantly watching and judging their every move when in reality no one is. This can lead to constant overthinking the idea of failing and being made a fool, or that simply any mistake that the teen can make will grant them to be the new laughing stock wherever they go. Which also has an affect on how Social-Emotional development takes place in their minds. During this development, teens are constantly thinking of who they are supposed to become and focus a lot on their identity development. Therefore, their mentality is constantly wondering where they will end up in their life and where in the world they are supposed to be once they reach their goal. This leaves the teens’ peers being very crucial to social-emotional development, with parents providing the most social and emotional support. Teens start off lacking the ability to reading others emotions. Since the teen is constantly thinking about himself and where they are supposed to be heading in life, they do not focus to what others are thinking or feeling and fail to recognize their emotions. Bullying is often found during this stage as well, due to swinging emotions intensifying, but thankfully decrease as they age. Bullying either occurs at school, on social media, and in some cases, at one’s home. The understanding of self and others heavily relies on how strong the parent-teen relationship is. Parents tend to ask how the teen is doing at school, how they feel, etc. and the teen will slowly recognize that the parent is showing care for others. Teens that have a strong relationship will actually develop into early adulthood sooner than later. Teens that are bullies towards others tend to have a very weak parent-teen relationship and lack the importance of having how others feel into consideration.

Insecure Attachment in Adolescence: Challenges and Parent-Child Conflicts

There are significant differences between secure and insecure attachment outcomes once the adolescence stage occurs. In the adolescence stage, the caregiver will start to see how well their model that they had constructed for the infant turned out. Starting with secure attachment, this is obviously the results of the caregivers whose models were very supportive based. According to Moretti and Peled, adolescents who had their parents demonstrate that understand what they are feeling have a very strong trust relationship bond with them and shared that same bond with peers. These same adolescents tend to not show any fear towards early adulthood once they can see that stage coming and accept to face any upcoming challenge that may approach them. Also, these adolescents do not tend to avoid conflict, they actually invite conflict. They like to confront the problems since they are not afraid of possible failure outcomes, and they also demonstrate that they like to explore new areas on their own. Those areas being in education, friendships, cultures, cliques, sports, etc. Though these individuals do not imply the idea of total isolation and independence from their parents or guardians, but rather show them that they want to welcome new ideas and thoughts into their lives. On the contrary however, insecure attachment will show opposite results to that of secure attachment. If an infant is raised being very shy and to themselves a lot, it is more than likely to be the same result when they hit the adolescence stage. The caregivers begin to see an increase in parent-child conflicts, due to the uncontrollable swing of emotions that they will experience. In some cases, some parents take those outbreaks in emotions as a signal to leave the teen alone and to “give them some space” rather than to take advantage of showing the teen the support and understanding feeling that they are missing. Once the parent-child relationship becomes the detached relationship, the teen will now lack the ability to control temperament control. These teens also tend to feel neglected, have a very low self esteem, poor, if any, peer relationships, low social competence, and may have some increased levels in psychopathology. These teens develop the “imaginary audience” as mentioned earlier, due to lack of understanding and communications with other peers and their parents.

Conclusion

It is incredible to see how some people were raised compared to others. Interestingly enough, based just off some of the characteristics that some people portray can say so much about their own childhood. Those with high self esteem and having strong peer relationship bonds obviously had the caregivers craft them a strong model to follow growing up. Unfortunately, the teens who are anorexic or bulimic have severely low self esteem and feel as though the entire world is judging them when in reality no one is. This teens are usually isolating themselves from society, depressed, and sometimes commit suicide to end the “hell” they are living. To think that this small thing called Attachment is truly the layout of everyone’s life and how their personality and character will be built upon.   

References

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