Understanding Adolescence: Parental Challenges and Psychological Growth
It is not easy today to perform the “profession” of a parent, and when stated by a psychotherapist, it certainly carries weight and significance. This was clearly reaffirmed in his speech directed at the parents of middle school students in Lazise and Bardolino by Professor Giovanni D’Agostini, a doctor and director of the psychiatry department at the Bussolengo hospital and of Asl 22.
The Complexity of Adolescent Education
Today, parents are guardians of a child who changes primarily during adolescence, a period of life that is increasingly extending. Nowadays, young people experience adolescence until their early 20s, making it more crucial than ever to properly address the challenges of adolescence, since a child can only navigate this phase well if they have thoroughly passed through childhood.
This is an uncontestable fact and an equation that has been confirmed with precise and certain data. During adolescence, children tend to become more elusive, and it is precisely in this period that conflicts between children and parents tend to intensify.
Despite everything, parents remain a point of reference even when children oppose the family and its various members. The body also transforms, as D’Agostini pointed out, becoming dissonant; there is mental growth and a newfound openness to new systems of reasoning, leading to hypothesis-based thinking.
The Psychological Development of Adolescents
The young person experiences psychological growth and begins to be aware of pain and joy, reflects on the meaning of life, and feels a sense of responsibility and guilt. Their emotional state changes, characterized by alternating behaviors and attitudes.
They therefore need coherence between what is said and what is done. The example and consistency in gestures and initiatives that the parent undertakes within the family and society are therefore essential.
Often, the impatience that parents have in their daily lives irritates the child, who does not understand the sense of it and perceives time differently. For teenagers, having a free afternoon signifies not just two or three hours, but an entire day.
The Value of Vacations and the Growth Path
For example, Christmas holidays seem endless for them, almost unrecordable in memory and the calendar. Thus, adolescence is a tumultuous period of life during which, having left the reassuring protection of the family, we must fight against everyone and everything to carve out our role as adults.
Psychological explanations of so many “whys” of this age provide teenagers with an extra chance to better overcome a difficult period. These concepts are very well explained in the book “Psychology of Adolescence“, recently published by Professor D’Agostini with Giunti Industrie Grafiche di Prato, which contains the best approach to reaching the threshold of adolescence.
Sergio Bazerla