Psychological Problems of the Adolescent: Part II

It is not surprising that adults find adolescents challenging and irritating, bafflng and obvious, charming and crude, stimulating and dull, frustrating and gratifying. The normal adolescent has at one time or other any or all of those contradictory characteristics. He will remain so until he either gives up the struggle and returns to a preadolescent psychological structure, or masters the conflicts and finds a satisfactory and adult answer to them. The function of those working with and interested in adolescents is to strengthen those forces leading to the latter solution and lessen the impact of those forces opposing it. There are multiple detailed ways in which this may be done. In broad terms certain general considerations can be outlined. 1. The adolescent needs not only an opportunity to try out his newly found strength in new areas of independence; he also needs the assurance of support when he becomes baffled, ineffective, or frightened. He needs, therefore, someone upon whom he can be dependent if he becomes frightened, but who will not demand that dependency as he becomes assured and safe in a more independent role. 2. It is important that adults realize the extreme sensitiveness of the adolescent. His state is comparable to that observed in an inflamed nerve. Slight stimulation may result in vigorous, undirected response. Thus his irritability, his moodiness, his unrealistic ambitions, and his unrealistic sense of failure should be met with casual though basically sympathetic tolerance. 3. His need to revolt and his anxiety over the implications of that revolt are perhaps the most difficult situation to handle wisely. As indicated earlier, the recognition upon the part of people interested in adolescents that the adolescent needs to be independent and to know the facts of sexuality did not lead to a marked lessening of the problems of this age group. Excessive freedom, beyond the individual's knowledge and ability to deal with it, leads to license or panic. He is not prepared to deal with the intensity of internal drives and the pressure of external demands without assistance. His experiences with freedom should be within a framework of wisely determined limits. What these limits should be differ from individual to individual and from one situation to another. They should be flexible—broadened as the individual indicates a capacity to handle a problem, narrowed when the capacity narrows. Rules established by adults for the adolescent are important if they strengthen his impulse toward mature behavior rather than bind him to infancy. 4. Adolescents need a relationship with an adult who has handled relatively wisely his own maturation. Such an individual should be sufficiently comfortable in his own approach to life that he will not fear to expose it to the critical analysis of the adolescent and yet will not need to compel him to follow it. 5. Adolescents need parents. They may offer criticism of their parents and the criticism usually makes sense. The temptation to those working with the adolescent is to identify with him and reject the parents. Such identification may lead to one of two solutions. The adolescent may wish to abandon the parents but fears the step. The parents have had too many positive values in terms of some modicum of security to make the abandonment seem safe. Frightened by the stimulus from another person for emphasis on rejecting the parents, the adolescent in acute anxiety reverts to greater dependency upon the parents to negate the temptation that seems too fraught with danger. On the other hand, the verbalization of rejection of the parent may have arisen from some specific episode. This verbalization may be, however, only the tip of a deeply submerged, broad iceberg. Too early encouragement of emancipation from the parents in minor details may mean encouragement to abandon all that the parents represent. Such abandonment is not safe except as new standards replace those of the parents. Adolescents must emancipate themselves from their parents, and they need support in doing so, but the emancipation will be most constructively handled if encouraged to occur by evolution rather than revolution. 6. The adolescent group rather than the individual is perhaps, in most instances, the most fruitful point of focus for the support of adults. Group leadership that provides constructive patterns of behavior and a usable philosophy of life is the most constructive force for a normal adolescent. This is not meant to imply that individual relationships or psychiatric treatment for adolescents is not often indicated. In many instances, however, the adolescent defends himself against either of these approaches but can accept the guidance of his peer group. Adolescence is a stage of emotional growth. It cannot be avoided if adulthood is to be attained. Many conflicts dormant since early childhood return to be solved or finally to fail in solution at this age. Adolescents need support, encouragement, and guidance, but above all they need time before they are forced to crystallize their final pattern.