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Essay / Adolescence: A Life-Changing Mental Health Experience
Table of ContentsThe Lifelong Impact of Secure Attachment in ChildrenAdolescent Physical Development: The Roller Coaster of Adolescence pubertyInsecure attachment in adolescence: parent-child challenges and conflictsConclusionReferencesThis essay on the experience of the adolescence stage explores the challenges and transformations that individuals go through during this critical period of development. Adolescence is a time when everyone experiences this roller coaster full of twisted emotions. At this stage of life, possible benefits or consequences are demonstrated by how caregivers raised the child. There are two main attachment styles that affect the child later in life: secure attachment and insecure attachment. And depending on how well caregivers raised the child, it can lead some children to live long, healthy lives or drastic, body-destroying hell. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The Lifelong Impact of Secure Attachment in Children John Bowlby, a British psychologist, came to the conclusion of attachment theory. His theory develops the idea that children learn almost everything from their caregivers. His theory touches on the ideas of the child and the parent or guardian has a strong emotional connection between the two. Since children imitate their actions, their ways of expressing their emotions and rely heavily on the older being for their evolving needs. Mary Ainsworth, an American-Canadian psychologist, saw Bowlby's work and wanted to add her own knowledge. She goes on to say that attachment leads to the development of survival skills. Ainsworth believes that a child's need for attachment is as important as that of food and water. Therefore, it is very important for the caregiver to recognize the importance of their caregiving skills and develop the perfect model for the child to look up to and grow based on this model. That being said, the caregiver should also be aware that the model will not be built for the child in one day, but rather throughout their childhood. Ainsworth also built an experiment called 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 which a stranger joins the mother and baby. The mother leaves, the stranger then tries to play with the child, then the mother returns. This experiment has each sequence for a set length of time and the baby's reactions and emotions are recorded for data throughout. Depending on how the baby reacts, whether he avoids the mother, the stranger, or cries when the mother leaves, it shows the results of the type of attachment the child has been exposed to since the day he was born . Mary Main, an American psychologist, put forward the idea of disorganized attachment theory. She builds on Ainsworth's work and attributes three classifications to them. His experiments produced results demonstrating how children reacted to their own guardian and how they would react to a stranger. Depending on how the reaction progresses, it would be classified into a range of severity. It is clear that attachment follows an infant throughout his or her life. First, the infant begins to completely depend on his mother for care in order to manage the world on his own once he is alone in it later in the future. The two main categories of attachment, secure andinsecure, insecurity comprising three subcategories; Insecure-avoidant, insecure-ambivalent, and insecure-disorganized can be further classified. When we talk about secure attachment, the parent-child relationship serves as a model for future relationships that the child will have. It is important that the child learns to trust and understand his or her emotions.recognition. The stronger the child's attachment to a caring adult, the more independent the child will be in the future. A secure child is more likely to be confident and resilient in the face of peer pressure. Infants exposed to a non-caring parent can induce developmental deficits. Aggression, anxiety, depression, delinquency and intellectual delay can be among the deficits. If the attachment is not secure, the baby will not respond to his mother as well as he should. These children tend to smile less, express more anger and be more physically aggressive. Avoidant attachment develops when parents do not provide appropriate sympathy toward children. Ambivalent attachment develops once an infant feels that his or her expressions will not be heeded as necessary due to lack of consistent care and protection from parents. Disorganized attachment occurs when the parent has too many unresolved personal emotional issues and does not have the time or space to think about their baby. They are also unable to determine which problem is more serious: theirs or the child's. Once the childhood phase is over, the adolescence phase begins. Adolescent Physical Development: The Roller Coaster of Puberty Adolescence is the time when the strangled roller coaster of emotions begins. This stage is considered between 12 and 18 years old. Physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development all experience changes. When it comes to the physical development of adolescents, puberty is one of the major changes. Girls tend to experience their growth spurt first between ages ten and twelve, while boys grow after them around ages twelve and fourteen. Puberty, however, is more known for the maturation of the reproductive organs, signaling the start of physical and psychological changes. Each sex develops its primary sexual characteristics. This means that each sex, respectively, begins to stimulate the production of hormones. In women, estrogen and progesterone are produced by the ovaries. In men, the main hormone is testosterone, which is produced in their testicles. As these hormones begin to mature the sexual organs into their proper functionality, they must produce their secondary sexual characteristics. Adolescents also learn at this stage how the illness affects them. They now understand that it is the combination of an internal process and the psychological factors of the body and said disease that play a role in the immune system. However, adolescents may feel the urge to become anorexic or bulimic. Anorexia is when a teenager reduces the amount of calories they consume, aka starvation, in order to lose enough weight so as not to be judged overweight. Bulimia refers to eating excessive amounts of food and then vomiting the food afterwards. Teenagers do this because they believe their body will absorb the calories and nutrients and then be able to vomit up the unnecessary weight that would be added to their body. However, it has been found that adolescents who commit these actions can and will result in either their own death from malnutrition or the formation of ulcersin the stomach or esophagus due to stomach acid burning the simple tissue lining the organs. Cognitive development in adolescence leaves behind concrete thinking, such as facts, visible physical objects, etc., and opens the adolescent's mind to formal operational thinking. Formal operational thinking allows adolescents to become more hypothetical in their thinking and use inductive reasoning. While this is the positive side of cognitive thinking, some negative aspects can also begin to occur. Things such as hypocrisy, self-centeredness, and imaginary audience can also begin to manifest in the adolescent mindset. The imaginary audience refers to when the adolescent feels like everyone is constantly watching and judging their every move when in reality no one is. This can lead to constant overthinking about failing and being ridiculed, or simply any mistake the teen may make, which will result in them being the new laughing stock wherever they go. Which also has an effect on how socio-emotional development takes place in their minds. During this development, adolescents constantly think about who they are supposed to become and focus a lot on developing their identity. Therefore, their mentality is to constantly wonder where they will end up in their life and where they are supposed to be in the world once they achieve their goal. This leaves adolescents' peers to play a very crucial role in socio-emotional development, with parents providing the greatest social and emotional support. At first, adolescents do not have the ability to read other people's emotions. Because the adolescent is constantly thinking about himself and the direction he is supposed to take in life, he does not focus on what others are thinking or feeling and fails to recognize his emotions. Bullying is also common at this stage, due to the intensification of changing emotions, but fortunately these diminish as they get older. Bullying happens either at school, on social media, and in some cases at home. Understanding oneself and others depends heavily on the strength of the parent-adolescent relationship. Parents tend to ask the teenager how he is doing at school, how he is feeling, etc. and the adolescent will slowly recognize that the parent cares about others. Teenagers who have a strong relationship will reach early adulthood sooner rather than later. Teens who bully others tend to have a very weak parent-teen relationship and lack the importance of considering how others feel. Insecure attachment in adolescence: parent-child challenges and conflicts the adolescence stage occurs. At the adolescent stage, the caregiver will begin to see how effective the model they have constructed for the infant has been. Starting with secure attachment, this is obviously the result of caregivers whose models were very supportive. According to Moretti and Peled, adolescents whose parents demonstrate that they understand what they feel have a very strong bond of trust with them and share this same bond with their peers. These same teenagers tend to show no fear towards early adulthood once they see this stage coming and agree to face any future challenges that may approach them. Furthermore, these adolescents do not tend to avoid conflicts, on the contrary they invite them. They like to face problems because they are not afraid of possible failures and also demonstrate that they like to explore new areas on their own.