Adolescent Psychology

Working with young people? Consider taking a remote learning course that was created expressly to examine adolescent psychology.

Learn more about how the adolescent brain changes and matures.

Anybody who interacts with adolescents at work or home should take an adolescent psychology course.

• Discover the physical, psychological, and emotional changes that teens go through.
• Learn about the issues and difficulties that young people experience.
• learn about moral and social growth.
• Recognize how to give help and direction by comprehending underlying problems.
• Learn more to enhance your ability to positively affect the teenagers you come into contact with.

Adolescent years can be extremely challenging.

• Study the transitions to adulthood that each teen must make throughout their lives.
• Recognize the role transitions and crises that young people experience.
• You will comprehend teen-specific challenges, learn to discern problem behaviour from usual or normal behaviour, and develop more effective communication skills by taking this course.
• Improve your self-assurance and teen-handling abilities.

Anybody who interacts with teenagers or lives with them should have an understanding of adolescence.

• Teachers
• Carers
• Youth Workers
• Foster Carers
• Social Workers
• Youth Employment Officers
• Educational Counsellors
• Law Enforcement
• Sports Coaches

This course will also be of great interest to parents of teenagers and those who deal with teenagers in their daily lives.

Lesson Structure

There are 10 lessons in this course:

1. Introduction
   • Theories of Human Development
   • What is adolescence?
   • Piaget’s theory of Cognitive Development
   • The stages of Piaget’s theories
   • Moral development
   • Erikson’s psychosocial development theory, stages
2. Life Crises
   • Life crisis
   • Problems
   • Puberty
   • Attachment theory
   • Internalised and externalized problems
   • Types of problems experienced by adolescents
3. Physical Development
   • Puberty in females
   • Puberty in males
   • Hormones
   • Physical activity
   • Obesity
4. Intellectual Development
   • Piaget’s formal operations stage
   • School problems
5. Emotional Development
   • Freud’s theories
   • Emotional problems
   • Teenagers and grief
   • Eating problems
   • Depression
   • Emotional problems
   • Typical childhood responses to grief
   • Supporting a grieving child
6. Sexuality
   • Acquisition of gender identity and social role identity
   • Vicarious learning and sexual identity
   • Gender dysphoria
   • Curiosity
   • Sex
   • Sexual behaviour
   • Masturbation
   • Sexuality and nudity
   • Answering questions
7. Social Development
   • Family influence
   • Types of parenting
   • Denigration of parents
8. Moral Development
   • Piaget’s theory of moral development
   • Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning
9. Delinquency and Crime
   • Juvenile delinquency
   • Pathways to delinquency
   • Gangs
   • Crimes more likely in adolescence
   • Behaviour problems
   • Drugs, solvents and alcohol
   • Child abuse
   • Triggers of abuse
   • Stranger abuse
   • How to deal with deviance
10. Adolescents and the Transition to Adulthood
    • Erikson’s later stages
    • The transition to adulthood

Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school’s tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.

Aims

• Describe how the ideas of child development apply to teenagers.
• Provide examples of adolescent life crises.
• Explain the bodily alterations brought on by puberty.
• Identify the intellectual alterations that take place during adolescence.
• Explain the emotional growth that takes place during adolescence.
• Discuss sexuality with your teen.
• Explain the social growth that takes place during adolescence.
• Describe the ideas of moral development as they apply to adolescents.
• Talk about the connections between adolescence and criminal behaviour.
• Describe the changes that take place as a person enters maturity.

A Time When Everything Changes

When we reach adolescence, we are accustomed to being treated like children and to the perks that go along with that status. Then, in a relatively short amount of time, we experience the physical changes brought on by puberty. In addition, we must adjust to the emotional and psychological changes that come with our new role as a young adult. When all these changes are occurring, we must somehow reinvent ourselves and hope that we do it successfully.

Early theories of adolescence promoted the idea that it was a period of constant difficulty. Teenagers were anticipated to undergo emotional disorders, mood swings, and temperamental behavior. But recent theories have refuted this conventional wisdom, and it is now generally acknowledged that many teenagers transition through this stage without too much difficulty. Teenagers frequently grow closer and more meaningful relationships with their parents and other adults during this time, and they may start to trust them more.

Attachment Theory

A significant person in psychology, particularly child psychology, is John Bowlby. Bowlby worked with juvenile offenders and youngsters with special needs. He was curious to know if actual family contact patterns played a role in both normal and abnormal child development. He concentrated on attachment and how problems there could be passed on from one generation to the next. In the 1940s and 1950s, when Bowlby was working, attachment was not seen as being all that significant. For instance, it was discouraged for parents to take their children to the hospital because it was thought that doing so would disturb them.

Attachment Theory is a scientific theory that Bowlby created. According to him, the infant’s protection from damage was an evolutionary strategy for survival that attachment behaviour served. According to him, attachment connections were essential for eventual healthy growth.

According to Bowlby’s hypothesis, a healthy mother-child or primary caregiver-child attachment develops throughout the first two years of life. A significant emotional tie is what is meant by an attachment. Throughout the first five years of life, it can be challenging for the kid if they are taken away from their primary carer. In order to understand behavioural issues in adopted children, psychopathology, juvenile delinquency, and other things, the attachment theory has been applied.

A normal, healthy personality and the capacity for forming healthy emotional connections both depend on attachment. The foundation of social interactions and emotional well-being is attachment. It enables us to learn how to establish mutually beneficial connections, trust others, and feel safe and secure as children. It enables kids to grow their empathy, consciousness, and other faculties. Adopted children who were younger than six months old may have issues with attachment. During the first two to three years of a child’s life, normal attachment develops. This normal growth can be hampered by any issues with the mother-child or child-primary carer relationship at that time, such as separation from the primary carer. Attachment will not develop naturally if the child’s needs are not satisfied in a loving, nurturing way, and this can cause a number of underlying symptoms.

Why might attachment not occur?

Many things can go wrong in the relationship between the kid and the primary carer, which makes the attachment less solid. Such instances include

• The mother is depressed after giving birth.
• The parent might not know how to establish a solid relationship since they may have experienced trauma of their own, such as abuse or inappropriate parental behaviour.

Genetic factors

• The provision of care might be interrupted.
• The kid might end up in the hospital.
• defects in development
• The carer could feel overburdened and unable to handle the child, making it difficult for them to meet the child’s requirements.

When a typical attachment bond does not develop, attachment disorder may manifest. This may have a variety of repercussions on the child, some of which may be more severe than others. This does not imply that all children with attachment disorder have these issues; some, all, or none may be present.

Possible problems:

• False behaviour that appears pleasant on the surface.
• keeping their eyes closed.
• a lack of affection on both sides.
• affectionate behaviour with complete strangers.
• Self-destructive.
• damaging to people or things.
• animal abuse.
• weak connections with peers.
• preoccupied with death and/or destruction.
• making absurd inquiries.
• little ability to control chattering.
• inappropriate clinginess
• erroneous sexual behaviour.
• lying in the presence of truth.
• lack of self-control.
• Delays in learning
• an absence of conscience.
• inability to recognise cause and consequence.
• abnormal dietary habits.
• aversion to closeness.
• lack of faith.
• false perception of oneself.
• a sense of shame.
• feeling that you are unlovable.
• You can tell they’re awful.
• difficulty in seeking assistance.
• a lack of motivation
• inadequate academic performance
• having trouble leaning on others

Why You Should Study This Course

Whether you are a parent or a worker, this course will help you better understand adolescents and your interaction with them.

• Read about the transition from being a child to becoming a young adult that occurs during the adolescent years.
• Learn the rationale behind why adolescents act a certain manner at a certain period.
• Know how to support teenagers as they deal with issues.
• It will be easier for you to spot when anything is off if you are familiar with typical teenage growth in areas like social skills, identity, and sexuality.