HEALTH PLUS:Adolescents need advocacy, not defamation
ADOLESCENTS HAVE a right to be angry. They are a group too often defined in negative stereotypical terms. The range of deprecatory descriptions of them is alarming and undeserved.
The implication of these negative ascriptions is that young people are all equally and inevitably engaged in a developmental stage that makes them challenging, confrontational, uncontrollable and in conflict with their parents. It implies that they are self-centred, egocentric and unable to see beyond themselves and their immediate needs.
A quasi-comedic, pseudo-psychological, insulting societal discourse surrounds this lifestage of adolescence. It implies that at the age of 13 (or even earlier with “tweens”) that a terrible transmogrification occurs which turns an adorable child into an incomprehensible adolescent.
This hyperbole does a disservice to young people and to their parents. It can alter the parent/child dynamic as parents anticipate behavioural difficulties, or construe ordinary emotional responses as examples of adolescence anger or angst. It can make parents feel helpless and lose sight of their own natural competence.
Adolescence needs what every childhood stage needs. It needs boundaries, protection, age-appropriate rules that are clearly, fairly and consistently enforced, stability, parental time, and listening to what the young person has to say.
It means knowing where they are, who they are with and always ensuring they get home safely. It means staying involved in their lives while respecting the need for graduated, age-appropriate, independence. It means making decisions in the best interests of the child while protecting the child in the adolescent, and respecting the adult in the child.
Adolescence is no more or less than any stage along the continuum of living and changing. It has its own transitional tasks, its own relationship negotiations, its own difficulties and distresses, and identity issues.
And every life cycle stage requires transition, adaptation and alteration of identity. It is just that we do not negatively connote the psychological challenges of other stages as much as we do the adolescent stage.
The extreme bad press young people receive is unfair. It is not objectively verifiable nor is it clinically observed. And while of course there may be difficulties at this stage of life, as at any life stage, psychological distress is not limited to youth, and bad behaviour is most certainly not confined to adolescence.
If the airwaves were open to adolescents to describe and define adulthood, what descriptions might emerge? What recklessness, risk-taking, deception and promiscuity, what drunkenness, drug-taking and duplicity would adolescents identify in their adult role models? What would they say about us?
And how would we feel if they were to take the most negative and extreme examples of adult behaviour and attribute them to each and every one of us who happened to be in the category of adult? How would we feel if they challenged our individuality, categorised our vulnerabilities, pathologised our human pain and made fun of our lifecycle stage?
Yet that is what we do to young people. In so doing we do not deal, on their behalf, with many real issues that beset them: the mixed messages, sexualisation of their youth, corporate intrusion into their lives, and their need for protection from exploitation. Adolescents need advocacy, not defamation.
The factors that determine positive identity development include awareness of being distinct from other people, as well as belonging to a group; awareness of the uniqueness of one’s experience as well as the universality of emotions; awareness of one’s power to act as well as dependence. If identity formation requires appreciation of the continuity of self, as well as of change, then adolescent identity is surely compromised by discussion about it, as if it is a single rupture with childhood or a pathetic emulation of adult life.
Early in the 20th century when Stanley Hall published the first scientific work on adolescence, when psychology first identified adolescence as a distinct period of life, it did not intend to construct a problematic category, but to recognise, understand and honour a chronological period between childhood and adulthood. How we speak to young people and how we speak about them during this transition is significant in shaping their constructions of themselves.
- mmurray@irishtimes.com
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is the director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD. She is author of many books and her new radio slot, Mindtime, on Drivetime is on Wednesdays on RTÉ Radio One