2. MILESTONES DURING ADOLESCENCE
Physical
• By the end of their teens, your adolescent is fully sexually and reproductively
mature, and they’re also physically “adult” mature.
Emotion
• Emotions become unstable during puberty, partly due to hormonal changes
and partly due to neurological changes. This, along with the desire for
personal autonomy, increases parental and sibling conflict, but emotions
typically stabilise by the end of the teen years.
Cognition
• Formal operational thinking means that teens can think about abstract and
hypothetical situations and can develop ideas creatively.
• Risk taking is heightened as the promise of reward is more salient than the
perils of pain, and when combined with the emotional and social changes a
teen is going through, their “hot” emotional states can lead to impulsive,
sensation-seeking behaviours that may be unsafe, unhealthy, and unwise
3. Social Development
• Peers, not parents, become the focus of a teenager’s life. They look to them
(friends and those they follow on social media) as models to follow, and
exemplars of how to act.
• Same-sex friendships expand to include many more opposite-sex
relationships (where sex is binary).
• Maintaining status in groups of friends requires high levels of conformity
and fealty, but as school ends and adolescence is concluded those groups
tend to deteriorate and dating/couplehood become primary.
Personality
• Our teens develop a sense of identity and make big leaps in moral and ethical
reasoning. As they resolve their identity “crisis” through exploration, they tend to
experience greater confidence and resilience, but going through the identity
resolution process (or failing to finalise it) can be associated with less optimal
outcomes.
4.
5. ADOLESCENCE
Is there a time more anticipated and more dreaded than adolescence? The
teen years are both celebrated and maligned. It is a time, like infancy and
toddlerhood, of enormous change for our children, physically and
psychologically. Puberty’s impact on our children lead to new cognitive
capacity, increased social demands and expectations, sexual realities (and
opportunities), risk tolerance, identity development, and so much more. It is
impossible to genuinely consolidate adolescent milestones into an article
this brief, but this summary provides something of a snapshot.
Ironically, adolescence wasn’t even recognised until the early 1900s. Pre-
20th century young teens were often sent away from the family home to
become an apprentice, learn a trade, or complete schooling. If they stayed
home they would be expected to work on the farm or be hired out to help
on other farms (depending on how successful the family was at running
their own property).
6. It is a period of transition between childhood and adulthood.
A time of rapid physical, cognitive, social and emotional maturing as the
boy prepares for manhood and the girl prepares for womanhood.
Adolescence is generally regarded as the psychologic, social, and maturational
process initiated by the pubertal changes.
lt involves three stages
• Early adolescence(11-14yrs)
• Middle adolescence(15-17yrs)
• Late adolescence(18-20yrs)
7. BIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
By the time children reach their teenage years the number of synapses
actually halves from early childhood, from one thousand trillion to five
hundred trillion in a process called neural pruning. People often say the
brain is under development and still has growing to do. In some ways this
isn’t quite accurate. The brain is pretty close to full size now, but there is a
great deal of maturing to take place, and while a good deal of that relates
to new neurological connections and new cells (particularly in the
prefrontal cortex), much of the brain maturation process - through to the
mid 20’s - is in pruning. The brain starts to do away with connections and
cells that were created but not used often.
Because the prefrontal cortex is still underdeveloped (a lack of myelin, or
white matter, which helps brain signals travel efficiently), some teens
struggle with wise decision making. Our teens are capable of intelligent
decision making, so long as we help them go slow, think it through, and
avoid those “hot” moments where impulsivity takes over.
8. PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT
The word pubescence derives from a Latin word meaning “to grow hairy”.
But this is not where puberty starts: with the emergence of body hair. The
physiological changes of puberty are well documented. Sex organs
develop. Pubic hair appears. Voices deepen. But before that, there are
growth spurts and weight gain. Secondary sex characteristics like breasts,
wide hips, facial hair and so forth emerge later.
Girls tend to commence puberty around 2 years ahead of boys; obvious
signs are typically becoming visible around age 10. And research shows
that pubertal timing is becoming earlier and earlier each decade. Menarche,
the age of a first period, is a simple way to measure this. Some girls’
monthly cycle commences with sporadic periods from as early as age 8,
although somewhere between 11 and 13 is more common.
9. SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT
When it comes to sexual experience, the overwhelming majority of boys
(over 90% depending on which data you look at) and a significant
number of girls (around 70%) have consumed explicit content
(pornography) by the age of 15. Sexual experience increases with age,
as the National Survey of Secondary Students and Sexual Health (2018)
involving 6327 Australian students (3469 females) shows:
BEHAVIOUR Year 10 Year 11 Year 12
Deep Kissing 66.3% 77.4% 80%
Touching Genitals 55% 65% 72.5%
Oral Sex 39.1% 51.6% 61.7%
Vaginal Sex 32.8% 44% 52.9
10. SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Teens steer away from parents and towards peers. As they experiment with
identity questions and personal preferences, and as their neurological
maturation takes its course, teens also experience higher levels of conflict.
This process is known as individuation or differentiation.
They’re becoming their own person and sometimes they see the easiest
pathway to that goal as conflict and enmity towards parents. Friendships
become deeper and more meaningful during the teen years, built on
shared values and experiences and a desire to meet needs (which can
sometimes lead to clinginess and machiavellian relationships).
11. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
A significant shift in thinking occurs as concrete operational thought gives
way to Piaget’s final stage of cognitive development: formal operational
processes. While younger children can classify by shape and size and can
understand quantity conservation, they tend to be primarily focused on the
here and now. Abstract concepts are too much for them. Counterfactuals
and hypotheticals (such as an earth where ice is hot and fire is cold) make
no sense. But now that adolescence has arrived, a new capability to think is
in the grasp of our teens.
In the teen years thinking becomes more obtuse. Future-focused
orientation is more real. Hypotheses can be thought through. Deductive
reasoning makes sense. The mind becomes capable of thinking through
endless permutations and possibilities, and it can keep track of much of
this brainstorm. Negotiation becomes nuanced. Politics, economics,
identity, and issues with global ramifications become salient - and our
teens care about these issues a lot. And the ability to reason logically
becomes part of the everyday experience, much to the frustration of many
parents!
12. WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR TEEN
Stay close and connected.
Invite your teen into your world and step into theirs regularly.
They need to feel comfortable with you, but they also need to know that
there are behavioural expectations and standards.
Invite them to work through hypothetical scenarios ahead of time so they
can develop a sense of their values and morality. (Ideas might be asking
them how they’d react if their peers were looking at pornography, drinking
alcohol or using other drugs, bullying, smoking, bragging about non-
consensual intimate contact - that is, sexual assault - cheating at school,
and so on.)
Encourage them to have their friends visit so you can monitor what is going
on, and know who they are with.
Conversations about identity, occupational or academic goals, and future
orientation become important. But mostly, offering autonomy support in
the context of gentle encouragement and belief as your teen matures and
you step back will be one of the best things you can do for your teen.