While transiting from childhood to adulthood, teenagers are confronted with a number of developmental tasks. In this maturing or adjusting process, the teenager’s body develops while the attitudes and relationships adjust to meet the demands of adult life. Unless these “developmental tasks” are successfully met, the teenager is bound to remain immature in his behavior. Parents, teachers, guardians, pastors, counselors must recognize their roles in shaping the teenagers for responsible adulthood. They must learn and know when to repress, when to boost, when to sympathize, when to keep hands off, and when to tighten the rein of disciplinary measures. Let’s consider some of these developmental tasks faced by adolescents.
• Adjustment to Physical Self
The adolescent needs to accustom himself to the changes taking place in his body. This adjustment may be needed when he does not see himself developing into his ideal for himself, or when he sees changes that he would like to make about his person, but can’t. From height to size of body or feet or nose, the teenager’s undue preoccupation with their bodies can hinder their personality development. Unless the teenager learns to accept himself as he is, he is bound to go through life with twisted self-images and snarled attitudes and behaviors. Adult handlers of teenagers must be ready to help teenagers through counseling and enough understanding to enable these young people to face themselves realistically, accept their physical characteristics, and get on with the job of realk living.
Teenagers with permanent disability either from birth or through accidents needed extra and special adjustments. Adults managing them must learn how to treat their disability in a normal way, showing their understanding, not coddling the teenager, and accepting him as he is. Others are bound to accept such physically challenged teenagers who have displayed proper attitude towards their plight in the course of time.
• Dependence and Independence
Each teenager is faced with the task of growing up to be an adult independent of others, in a sense. While he is yearning to be free, he is not yet ready to accept the responsibility demanded by such independence. For instance, the teenager who craves to drive the family car is not able to foot the fuel bill. Wise parents must teach their teenagers that independence brings responsibility along with it. Parents must be ready to loosen the rein when their teenager seeks to be independent but they must ensure the teenager is guided to accept the responsibility accompanying such freedom.
• Giving and Accepting Love
Receiving and giving love is an art that has to be learned through the developmental stages of life and with the help of parents. Teenagers with good parenting background usually develop into affectionate persons. The parents relationship with themselves and with the children will always influence their teens along the right relationship attitudes like being generous and unselfish.
Parents need to demonstrate unconditional love to their children so they can emulate loving habits from them. Growing away from childhood, the teenager learns that love is not only for oneself but also for giving others in reciprocal manner. A teenager may sometime develop some reluctance to show love or affection, especially to his parents. He might display shyness about what others will make out of his expression of affection. Not all teenagers are like that, however. Some show affection openly, as in families where love is usually freely shown. It takes the patience and understanding of the teenager’s parent to help him grow into maturity when he will pick up what he apparently dropped and begin to express love freely. Parents must show unconditional love to their teenagers. The teenager should have this assurance which must be real to them. It must be stated that although some teenagers complain about their parents restrictions, they are sure in their hearts that such restrictions are borne out of real love.
Young people need love. Parents must thus give their young ones the love they need at home to avoid their going out to seek such love that may not be real and perhaps hurtful as well as unwholesome.
A teenager must learn to relate to himself and others. A maturing person learns to get along with others. Right from home the teenager must adjust to the family members, school mates, church people, and the immediate community and larger society. He has to learn to adjust to other groups apart from his main group of friends. This adjustment will be difficult if his parents are intolerant. In the long run, teenagers will come to understand that intolerance and suspicions of others, especially the teenagers, usually stem from a lack of understanding and own feelings of insecurity.
This developmental task of relating effectively with others is especially important because in our society every effective person must learn to get along well with others. If this is not achieved in adolescence, it would be much harder, if not impossible to learn later. Parents, teachers and others should make every effort to help teenagers develop the skills necessary for working effectively with others, otherwise the result will show all around when people fail to accomplish the foregoing developmental task at their teenage.
The teenager should learn their proper sex role. Parents must avoid causing maladjustments in their children’s sex role. The occurrence of many maladjustments in sex role like the effeminate boy or the masculine girl and the like need be minimized. Parents should guide a boy to be manly and ready to accept the responsibilities associated with manliness. The Biblical teaching on the role of the man as the head of the family and protector as well as provider for the family is incontrovertible. The narrowing the line between male and female roles is not best. The female child should be taught to be feminine. She need not use her femininity as a weapon as is common in contemporary societies. This she can do properly without being kittenish, babyish, or flirtatious.
Teenagers should be helped to assume their God-intended roles as a matter of great importance not withstanding the considerable time and counsel involved. A cruel father may cause his teenage son to reject him and by extension reject men later in life, and even reject his own sexuality. A domineering mother and a “milk toast” father may cause their teenage son to learn to relate so closely with his mother that when he tries to enter the male circle during adolescence, he then thinks of himself as a female on entry. On the other hand, a girl who is so starved of love and affection may as the years pass by become vulnerable to other single women who show her affection. With this tendency at the outset, she learns to respond sexually to women, eventually excluding men. This is the beginning of homosexuality, but well-informed parents and other adults can help prevent or change this abnormality with proper counseling of teenagers by bringing to the surface the causes of their underlying feelings. These and other problems of sexuality may be avoided by parents helping young people feel comfortable in their own sex roles.
A teenager must adjust to his environment and, when necessary, learn to control it. God made animals the ability to adapt to their environment in other to live with it but man CA adjust his environment to suit himself to remove the burden of living with the inconvenience. Man can change clothing to live in wet environment, for instance, or pipe water over a long distance and terrains to manage to live in the desert. With scientific and technological ingenuity he can control even the most adverse circumstances. Man can change his environment or adjust, not adapt, to it as he has no capacity for adaptations. Teenagers must be guided to develop this capacity to influence their environment for positive ends as a matter of daily considerations. This knowledge will serve them well throughout life.
Parents and other informed adults stand in a unique position to help young people meet this crucial developmental task.
A teenager must learn to communicate effectively. Because communication is a vital need for people to get along well with one another, it is important that they learn how to do it well enough. An adult who cannot express himself well for others to understand him and who cannot disagree without getting upset or angry is seriously handicapped. In this, he is not more skilled than a child. Actually, his failure to learn the developmental task of communicating effectively during his teen years caused him the trouble.
It is very essential that young people are not allowed to wither away or become introverted during their formative years, but are helped to learn to communicate effectively. He has to learn to accept other peoples’ point of view at face value. He must also be able to effectively state or, if necessary, defend his own point of view. If a Christian, he must learn to give a reason for the hope that he has.
We only understand each other to the extent that we are able to express our own point of view. Communication, hence, is one of the most necessary developmental achievements for everybody. It forms the basis of our relationships with all other people.
A teenager must relate needs to relate himself to the universe, the world around him. This means that he must endeavor to find his place and make his mark where he can. This includes the choice of his life work, career, vocation or profession. The teenager has the tendency to find an ideal in an adult whom he admires his vocation and decides to pursue the same. All the same, it is more advisable for the teenager to be guided in line with areas of his strength, interests and aptitudes. It is important to expose teenagers in various areas of human activities through sight-seeing and vast reading so that he can make necessary adjustments required to fit into any career of his choice. Unless this is done some teenagers may be disappointed to find out later after making unguided choice of career that their strengths and interests may not match their choice of careers. That they may need to change their initial choice of career. Moreover, Christian teenagers may do well to know early enough in life that God has promised to guide them, that God has a plan for their lives. That God can turn whatever seemed to be a disappointment into blessings. They need not get frustrated out of such seeming disappointments. Rather, those disappointments can become testing ground so that the teenager may grow Into mature, stable adults.
A teenager must develop spiritually. As spiritual beings, people must have their spiritual needs fulfilled in order to become mature adults. A young person passes through several phases of spiritual development in a Christian family. First, he is taught some truth at home and in Church for him to accept, as a background. Then his developing mind gets curious about the world around him, prompting him to ask questions that demand answers. Parents must be at alert and hard working on their teens during these turbulent teen years. They should find ways of pointing their teenagers to God. A family altar should have been in place before this time and during the initial formative years of ages one to three to five years depending on individual and environmental differences. The teens life should be built around God and his gracious provisions. The right material, God’s Word (the Bible) should be a great book for the teens. The Bible is the best guide to proper spiritual development. Building on its foundation would result in the teen finding the right answers to the questions of sin, forgiveness, salvation, right standing with God, right living, and service to God and mankind. This, indeed, is the most important developmental task of all.
Summarizing, during the adolescent years the teenager faces many developmental tasks. They are all important and determine what kind of adult a teenager may become. It may be difficult to accomplish these tasks, in many instances. Yet if parents and other adults understand these necessary adjustments, they can give excellent training and guidance to these hapless teenagers. This investment in teenagers will help to produce mature, happy adults in the society.
Comments
Post a Comment