Parents of teenagers have a lot of concerns. With whom and why do their children spend time, what does communication with peers mean for them? Psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya tells.
Between the ages of 10 and 12, an important change occurs in a child’s life – the peer group becomes increasingly important. Until that time, the most important people for the child are the elders. First of all, his parents, then other relatives, educators and teachers. They take care of him, teach him, set the rules and tell him how the world works. The child has playmates, but when the mother calls, the game stops. The most important interpersonal connections for a child are vertical: bottom-up and top-down. Everything changes after 10 years. Now he is learning to establish horizontal connections, build partnerships. The opinion of peers is gradually becoming more important than what parents say. “The company is not a whim and is not a way to avoid unpleasant and boring things,” emphasizes Lyudmila Petranovskaya. – Communicating with peers, he learns to gain authority, resolve conflicts, understand people, survive betrayal, remain faithful, choose friends, cope with enemies. This is the leading activity of a teenager, and not the study of school subjects at all” (1).
belong to a group
Adolescents go to school primarily not for the sake of new knowledge, but for the sake of communicating with classmates. “Academic excellence only makes sense to them if it contributes to prestige among their peers. If in this team it is shameful to be an excellent student, then a capable child can, for example, specifically stop doing homework. Reproaches from parents and teachers are not at all as significant for him as the role of the white crow in the team.
The teenager wants to “be like everyone else” – that is, to be like those around him, those with whom he spends his time. Parents cease to be a role model for him. He imitates his band’s subculture. And this applies not only to appearance. Not only does he dress or cut his hair like the teenagers around him, he plays the same games, watches the same movies, tries to think like them, love and despise the same things. “Parents who dream of raising their child to be an independent thinker, a bright individual, are very annoyed by teenage group conformity. It is especially difficult for parents to understand the imitation of a leader, often less intelligent than their child. But it is useless to waste efforts on debunking authority in the eyes of a teenager. It’s better to just wait until the age of collectivism and imitation is replaced by the age of individualization, emphasizing one’s own uniqueness – and this will happen very soon.” When the teenage crisis is over, the time of youth will come – and with it the desire to find your own, special path. But before that, the teenager has yet to find out who he is.
Find out who I really am
“A teenager, unlike the child he was quite recently, acutely feels his imperfection, his dependence on elders and peers. He tries to be better – and as a result suffers from feelings of insincerity, falseness. Then he decides: “since I’m so bad, there’s nothing to hide it” – and does and says a lot of things that he later regrets. The teenager is no longer satisfied with the assessments from the outside and wants to know “what I really am.” Preoccupation with oneself, the constant need to evaluate oneself makes a teenager very vulnerable. The behavior, words, feelings of others are perceived by him through the veil of his own emotions. It seems to him that everyone around is only doing what they are watching him, discussing his appearance and actions.
The teenager begins to realize his responsibility for what happens to him. Previously, actions, good and not very good, were committed impulsively, under the influence of instantaneous feelings. Then it was not clear to himself – how did you manage to do such a thing? The child sincerely claims that the cup “fell by itself.” Now everything is different. Doing something stupid is still very easy on the spur of the moment. But then, regardless of whether it entailed some kind of trouble, a painful process of deliberation begins, sometimes real self-discipline.
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- She came home very late
Self-knowledge, a sense of responsibility, self-awareness are all components of the very sense of identity that a person acquires at this particular age. It is sometimes experienced so new and acutely that a teenager seems to himself “not like everyone else”, special, and this feeling can range from consciousness of his genius, a special mission, to a feeling of complete insignificance, ugliness, abnormality. Ordinary at this age is experienced as a sentence, as an extremely negative characteristic, which is strikingly combined with the desire to “be like everyone else.”
(1) According to the definition of the Soviet psychologist Alexei Leontiev, “leading activity is such an activity, the development of which causes major changes in the mental processes and psychological characteristics of a person at a given stage of his development” For more details, see A. Leontiev “Selected psychological works”, Pedagogy, 1983).
forest house
In archaic societies, there were customs of transition from childhood to adulthood. Children were taken away from their parents and settled away from the tribe, in the wilderness, in the so-called “forest houses”, girls and boys separately. Priests were engaged with them – the best, wisest people of the tribe – they taught rituals, hunting and everything else needed. It was believed that in this case the child dies, and a completely different person is born – an adult. Therefore, moving to the “forest house”, the children symbolically moved to another world – the world of the dead, the ancestors. They were not supposed to be seen by other members of the tribe, they could not eat ordinary food.
On the one hand, these customs look rather harsh in our time of humanistic values. On the other hand, children still need something like this. To group, to mystery, to away from ordinary adults, but led by the unusual, to scary and difficult, and to overcome oneself. And symbolism, and rituals, and the exact line between “us” and “strangers.”
This is the need of age, without it, children suffocate. It is especially difficult for boys. It seems that they should be in the steppe or in the forest, jump, fight, test their strength, and not sit in the classroom. It’s a little easier for girls, because being in school is more like the initiation rites that were meant for girls. They included patience, immobility, silence, unconditional obedience, communication with older women.
Being with others is a need of adolescence. Modern culture blocks many ways to implement it, but it still finds a way out. But sometimes it takes on ugly forms. Hence skinheads of various kinds and less dangerous, although shocking goths and emo. In the absence of a wise mentor, such associations are sometimes led by manipulators who use the energy of the young and their impracticality for their own purposes. V.R.
Learn more: L. Petranovskaya “Secret support: attachment in a child’s life” (AST, 2015).