Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood

“There are two things we should give our children: One is roots and the other is wings.”

Developmental Milestones for Adolescence and Emerging Adults

Physical Development

Physical growth is rapid during the first two years, slows in early and middle childhood, and then spurts again during puberty. Girls reach maturity faster than boys, beginning puberty 2 years earlier on average

Sleep.

Sleep is one of the most important thing for teens, yet more than 2/3 of teens fail to get sufficient sleep on school nights according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). Teens need 9+ hours of sleep per night.

• Insufficient sleep can results in deficits in concentration and memory, academics, and physical and mental health.
• AASM released the article Helping teens get healthy sleep: Five tips for parents. Tips include:
  • Discuss school start times with school board
  • Promote consistent sleep-wake schedule
  • Let in morning light
  • Ban devices from the bedroom
  • Set a communication curfew
• Look for a school that starts later, not 7 am. But establish consistency of when you go to bed, wake up.

Body Image

• Body image issues may develop during adolescence due to puberty
• May lead to eating concerns or disorders in rare and extreme cases
• Body dissatisfaction is just as common in boys ans it is in girls.

Brain Development

Brain development in the frontal lobe continues until age 25. The frontal lobe is associated with planning, organizing, problem solving, memory, impulse control, decision making, selective attention, self-regulation

• The function of the frontal lobe involves the ability to project future consequences resulting from current actions, the choice between good and bad actions (or better and best) (also known as conscience), the override and suppression of socially unacceptable responses, and the determination of similarities and differences between things or events.
• The frontal lobe also plays an important part in retaining longer term memories which are not task-based. These are often memories associated with emotions derived from input from the brain’s limbic system. The frontal lobe modifies those emotions to generally fit socially acceptable norms.
• Decision making isn’t the best up to 16 years old.

Cognitive Development

Adolescent Egocentrism: Adolescents fail to separate between what others focus their thoughts on (the object of their thoughts) and their own concerns.

As a result, many adolescents have a belief that others are just as preoccupied with his/her appearance and behavior as he/she is.

Since adolescents are aware of others’ thoughts:

• They may anticipate the reactions of others towards themselves
• Thus, others are just as admiring or as critical of him/her as he/she is of him/herself
• This affects cosmetics, dress, hair styles, body piercing, fads, etc.

Many adolescents construct and react (perform) to an imaginary audience.

• On a dance floor everyone is looking at me and will be critical of how I dance.
• “If I do not wear the right clothes or have the right hair style I will be shunned.”
• In always performing to the imaginary audience they may have a wish for privacy (to get away from the continual scrutiny/criticism of others)
• Besides being very critical of themselves, adolescents may be very self-admiring
• Also, they may spend hours getting ready for a date – “he will be impressed by how I look”
• In reacting to this imaginary audience, the most pressing concern of many adolescents is not guilt but shame

Thus, they may not understand why some adults disapprove of the way they dress or look.

Many adolescents fail to separate between what is Unique and what is Universal. Personal Uniqueness: “But you do not know how it feels!”

• “No one has experienced this kind of love like I’m having, or suffers as much when breaking up.”
• This concept of Uniqueness is reinforced by how some parents respond to adolescent problems.

Many adolescents construct a Personal Fable (that their own life is heroic or mythical) This effects their risk taking:

• “I can’t get pregnant, others may, but I’m destined not too.”
• “If I drive recklessly – I won’t get in an accident or die, I’m protected.”
• “If is break my leg, everyone at school will feel sorry for me and give me sympathy.”
• “If I die everyone who ignored me will be hurt, and I will get even for all the pain they have given me.”

Emotional Development

According to Brooks (2013), from about the age of ten and on moods decline and teens report an increase in negative feelings. Many early teens feel anxiety and nervousness at school, but feel safer and positive at home. However, if things become stressful at home, it can affect school performance (p. 313).

On another note, achieving a mature and healthy sense of autonomy is one of the most important developmental tasks of adolescence. There is a shift where it moves from parents making the decision to a joint decision, and ultimately the child makes the decision. It is important that parents slowly relinquish control as teenagers display a readiness to accept more responsibility WHILE continuing to monitor conduct and demand more self-governance. There are two types of autonomy:

Emotional— finding emotional strength within oneself

Behavioral—making decisions, self-government, and looking after oneself

Social Development

Working as an Adolescent

The average high school senior works 20 hours a week. Here is what the research says:

This may vary by ethnicity. Teens working is sometimes related to affluence problems. Also, related to drug use bidirectionally, makes a bad thing worse. However, summer work is good! During school here is a breakdown on hours worked:

Up to 10 hours per week

• Not related to any psychological symptoms
• Little effect on adolescent development

Beyond 10 hours per week

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Sleep per night declines
• Disruptive to eating and exercise habits

Beyond 20 hours per week

• Problems become considerably worse

Dating

• Pairing off is powerful! It is important to explain why we want to wait to pair off. It is key to not make them feel like dating is bad so we shouldn’t over talk not dating.
• Healthy dating starts earlier than parents realize
• Texting can be a method of pairing
• Encourage young adults to date
• Emphasize the “why”, not just the “what” of chastity and dating

Moral and Spiritual  Development

Moral Development

Conventional reasoning for this age:

• Based on informal group norms and formal societal norms
• Ability to take the point of view of others
• Golden Rule
• Desire to uphold the laws because they protect people
•  Developmental of empathy-based morality

Parents can help their teen develop their sense of morality by:

• Have moral discussions/debates with your teenager
• Allow your teenager to express his or her opinions
• Involve your teenager in meaningful service
  • Making kids serve promotes moral development even if they don’t want to do it.
• Involve your teenager in politics
• Learn from your teenager

Spiritual Development

Synthetic-Conventional Faith (early adolescence): More aware of symbolism, understanding becomes more complex. So they can probably understand parables better. 14-15 yrs old is the difficult age where they flounder most.

Individuative-Reflective Faith (late adolescence – emerging adulthood): develop individualized faith by questioning beliefs and incorporating personal experiences. Most adults get stuck in the previous stage because they never as questions or explore.

• Americans are more religious than people in virtually all other industrialized countries. 87% of all adolescents pray, 95% believe in God, although only 32% report weekly church attendance.
• Despite the above statistics, 60% of adolescents feel that organized religion doesn’t play a very important role in their lives
• Adolescents spirituality becomes more oriented towards ideological matters and less oriented toward rituals and strict observance (religious attendance drops significantly for youth who attend college)
• Adolescents also place more emphasis on internal aspects of religion (what people believe), whereas children place more emphasis on internal aspects (such as church attendance).
• Even adolescents who explore other religions tend to return to their parents’ religion, especially if they had positive relationships with their parents and were securely attached.

Other Issues to be Aware of with Teens and Young Adults

• Teens start driving
• Alcohol and drug use, learn more here
• Teen suicide, learn more here
• Eating disorders
• Parent-adolescent conflict
• Teens will spend more time with friends than family normally (2x as much a week). Peers influence a teen’s style, clothing, music and media choices, and social activities.
• Teens and young adults with parents who are authoritative are more likely to choose friends with similar family values. And their parents’ influence is felt long term in educational values, job aspirations, religious values, sexual and moral values, political values, and drug use values.
• Young adults will be moving on to college or moving out of the house. It is important to let them have their autonomy. Learn more here in this article about Helicopter Parenting. Financial independence should be sought after for young adults as well.
  • Still important to maintain a quality parent-child relationship. Role changes to one of advice and guidance rather than decision making. Respect their space and new found autonomy. 
  • College students are generally more successful at finishing when parents assist financially (somewhat – parents provide tuition, housing. Students everything else)

Parenting Teen and Young Adult Tips

• Teens whose parents talk to them regularly about the dangers of drugs are 42 % less likely to use drugs than those whose parents don’t. However, only a quarter of teens report having these conversations
• Parental knowledge (monitoring) is consistently linked to lower delinquency and drug use
• Parental knowledge is predicted most strongly by child disclosure
• Promote child disclosure:
  • Open the lines of communication
  • Be calm, don’t over react, let them know they can come to you, thank them for coming to you and they can come to you again. Ask questions! Rely on the Lord to know and receive promptings of what you can talk to your kids about.
  • Teens do better if you talk about someone else’s behavior rather than their own behavior. Then talk about it after – what can you do? Prearming strategies.
  • Knowing they can trust you helps. Confidentiality. But don’t keep things from spouse and let them know you won’t do that. But you will ask dad not to talk to them about it etc.
  • Don’t make bad comments about other people’s actions because if they are in the same situation, they may think you think they are bad etc.
  • Parental solicitation is also sometimes linked to knowledge
  • Parental control is almost never linked to knowledge
• Allowing for autonomy can help to reduce parent-child squabbles and maintain a strong relationship
• Try to know where your child is between 3-7 p.m. This is when most things (drug abuse, premarital sex, other delinquent behaviors) happens.

Concerns or Issues with Adolescence and Emerging Adults

1. Body image is a big concern for teens and even emerging adults. It is important to address this as parents.
2. Adolescent Egocentrism: Adolescents fail to separate between what others focus their thoughts on (the object of their thoughts) and their own concerns. This can cause a lot of stress for teens.
3. My goals is to develop an intimate relationship with each of my teens (I need to start during early childhood). However, conflict can be a problem during this time between teens and parents, many conflicts tend to be a power struggle.
4. Young adults church attendance numbers drop when they attend college. This is defintely something to be proactive about.

Addressing Concerns or Issues

1. In order to help our children develop a healthy body image, there are several things that parents can do:

• Avoid putting down your own body or that of others
• Avoid making comments about your child’s body, focus on health
• Engage in family activities together that promote health
• Avoid comments about the value of others based on body type (e.g., movie stars, super heroes)
• Encourage your child to focus on what his/her body can do
• Encourage your child to establish patterns of healthy eating and exercise – without obsessing
• Talk about health not weight, whole family being active and healthy together
• Be careful what you say because if they know what mom and dad think, they will want to know what others think of them.
• Tell them how beautiful they are when they just woke up and when they are all ready

2. I think it can be hard for parents to deal with or know how to handle a teen’s egocentrism because they are so far removed from being a teen and may not quiet remember how it actually was as a teenager and remember instead how it should have been.

• Parents may not recall very often unpleasant experiences in their childhood, they may just recall the good events
• Some parents give advice based upon their present level of understanding/maturity and not based upon the level of understanding/maturity of the adolescent
• Thus, parents may lose credibility with adolescents.

However parents can help their teens by:

• Remembering how you felt as a teen – talk to them and teach that this too shall pass
• Give them perspective, “Do you remember what the person next to you wore yesterday – then they won’t remember.”
• Try and be sensitive
• Welcome them to being the challenge of being a male or female, be realisitc.
• When it comes to liking the opposite gender, as them why do they like them, what characteristics etc?
• Give advice based on what you remember as being a teen. As a teen, I remember:
  • My hair has to be perfect, no bumps
  • Outfits, not repeating outfits in a week
  • If I presented or said something wrong, I thought people would always remember my mistake.

3. Conflict is going to be something we will have to deal with as parents. I hate conflict and am quite the avoider. I need to strive to be a bit more open and willing to talk about things if there is conflict in the home. Parenting Teens – Handling Disagreements is a great article that offers various tips and things to do when there is conflict between a parent and teenager. According to lecture, parents can also help reduce conflict by:

• Listening
• Loosen up/let go
• Maximize autonomy
• It’s ok to be upset with each other, but it’s not ok to say hurtful things
• Look at the positive side
• Look at conflict as an opportunity to become closer (constructive conflict)
• Learn to apologize, be the adult in the situation

Parents also should gradually let go of control and encourage a child’s autonomy to help reduce conflict. Parents can facilitate this by:

• Before you do anything, make sure they know you are going to read their texts, Facebook, and other social media accounts etc…
• Don’t be a lecture as a parent. Let your conversation be youth centered – how do they think things should happen? What are you going to do about it?
• Give them critical thinking skills – ask questions about their motives of doing something.
• Follow up, give them the autonomy of choosing to do and to stop doing something
• Keep rules and regulations to a reasonable minimum (not overly restrictive or permissive) and explain them
• Continue to be warm and supportive, even in the face of inevitable conflicts
• In sum, authoritative parenting

To help teens manage their emotions, remember that teens aren’t any more emotional, but they do have more extreme emotions. We can ask or suggest doing the following:

• What emotion is the anger masking?
  • (embarrassed instead of angry?)
  • Angry with self
  • What is the root cause
  • Nothing wrong with anger, fear – just figure out how to express them appropriately
• Exercise
• Music
• Writing/drawing
• Good things to look forward to
• Deep breathing
• Yoga stretching

4. How can parents foster religiosity? Be proactive!

• Relationship, relationship, relationship
• Talk about the gospel doctrines and debates – engage child in higher level thinking
• Encourage seminary/Sunday school – ask what they learned
• Let them teach
• Bear testimony as a family
  • In Church, encourage after they could do it on their own.
• Create opportunities for spiritual experiences
  • Temple open houses
  • Scriptures, temple grounds, family history together (promises of protection for youth)
  • “Do you young people want a sure way to eliminate the influence of the adversary in your life? Immerse yourself in family history – Elder Richard G. Scott
  • Referring to family history work, Elder David A. Bednar said, “You will be protected against the intensifying influence of the adversary.”

Parents can teach their young adults the benefits of religiosity early.

Less likely to: Be depressed Engage in premarital sex Engage in deviant or delinquent behavior

More likely to: Have positive relationship with parents Volunteer in community

Other sources to look at for teens: Healthy Children

Reference unless otherwise sited/linked:

• Walker, L. Class lecture 12: Parenting Teens, School of Family Life 240: Parent Child Guidance, Winter 2017