An Essay on Adolescents and Adult Adolescents

Throughout history, adolescence has always been criticized, blamed, disliked and dismissed as the bleeding wound of the generation. Parents and some educators have attempted to read the future of young people with the judgment that they are “doing their own thing, they can’t get anywhere with this mindset”. Adolescents who have not yet stepped into adulthood have had to overcome the barriers set up by people called adults before all the difficulties of life. Let’s start with a few real-life dialogues to make it more understandable:

- “Don’t ask, even though our daughter got such a high score in the high school entrance exams, she insisted that she would take the talent exam and go to a fine arts high school without us knowing. She was going to study drawing. In fact, she ranked in the top 3 in the talent exam, but we and her father wanted her to go to a science high school, but it didn’t work out” (a mother).

- “Are you sure, teacher, this student is very unsuccessful in all main subjects (math, Turkish, science, social studies). You are saying that he has great potential in art class, let’s direct him to fine arts. You must not have gotten his name mixed up. Because I see serious learning difficulties in this child” (classroom teacher).

- “He studied in another department because his father didn’t want him to. He dropped out of there and went to another university and then dropped out of that one too. And at this point, he constantly blames us. What did we do? Everything for her sake” (a mother).

Instead of growing up with the support and unconditional love of our parents, our young people are wasted away in our prejudices, our stereotypes that we cannot change, and worst of all, our efforts to realize our dreams about ourselves through them. We are left with individuals who hate what they do, people who return home unhappy and dissatisfied, and lives that are rapidly heading towards depression. And such a life that it is as if it never happened...

Yes, we are going to talk about our children’s adolescence and adults who have not yet completed their adolescence. Although we parents think that we are raising and educating our children, there are actually two periods when they mature us, break our prejudices and push our limits;

One is the first childhood years when we are stunned by the arrival of the baby, which we call the first birth. The other is adolescence, which we call the second birth, the intermediate bridge between childhood and adulthood...

Let us first remember our own adolescence and youth. I believe that remembering ourselves in order to understand our children will be very useful in understanding them and ourselves by stripping us a little from our adult and parental identities.

What kind of a period did you go through? Did you grow up with your family? Did you have siblings, and if so, what was your relationship with them? Your friendship relationships, your school life, your dialog with your teachers? How did you feel when the changes started in your face and body, how did your family and your environment react? Let’s think about these things first...

Then let’s move on to a worldwide survey. The topic of the research is “who would be a great devastation for you if you lost someone in your life?”. Parents from different countries responded to the question and the answer of the parents in our country was “a child”. People in America, on the other hand, stated that it would be a great devastation for them if they lost their spouse/partner. As we can understand from this research topic, the meaning attributed to children and young people in our country is quite high and accordingly the expectations of parents towards their children are also quite high. Unfortunately, we parents want to realize ourselves through our children and this increases our expectations from them. It is an undeniable fact that we make the difficult and painful process even more difficult by comparing our children with ourselves, our past, the conditions we have and don’t have.

Again, let’s continue our journey to our own adolescence instead of useless rote expressions such as “7 ways to get along with your teenager”...

Where and in what kind of geography did we grow up? What were the cultural balances, myths, judgments, sexual roles and identities, customs and traditions, and what impact did they have on us in our childhood? Who was there with us that we could/ could not call a parent?

What difficulties did we have as our bodies developed? Was there a wise adult there to guide us through the first signs of adulthood, such as ejaculation in boys and menstruation in girls? Or were we condemned and shamed for these experiences?

If we have a sibling, what kind of a process did we go through with him/her? Have we ever been compared to our brother or sister? And friends... Are there any frames where we blame ourselves? Or what do we remember about our family that we wish they hadn’t done this/that?

And how do we feel now that our child is going through adolescence? Do his/her behavior remind us of things from the past? In which situations does our child’s behavior take us back to our past and trigger us? What are the wrong behavioral patterns that we take from our parents and pass on to our child? Are we aware of them?

Our excitement... Our dreams... Our fears... Where are the moments when our heart flutters? Our fights with our family or what we can’t swallow and say... Why our anger/reaction now when our child is going through similar processes with us? Why do we consider him/her ugly, disrespectful, callous when his/her body is developing just like ours, when he/she wants to hide and disguise himself/herself? Are we with him/her while he/she is trying to discover himself/herself and trying to be patient against his/her strong hormones or are we pushing him/her without realizing it...

In the most difficult and painful time of growing up, when we should be patient with open arms, we say “go away, you are not the child I loved so much when I was little”.

“I try to understand the youth of our time. It is a very different generation. It knows nothing about the past. It is as if there is a huge gap between us. There used to be a generational conflict. Today there is not a conflict, there is mutual indifference and miscommunication. I think the parents are to blame.” (Bertolucie, 68’)

For centuries, people have used similar expressions about the generations that came after them. The blame for communication accidents has sometimes fallen on adolescents and sometimes on parents. Let’s approach the issue from a different perspective.? What if puberty is not over for us adults? In recent years, adolescence has been prolonged and is expected to be completed around the age of 21, but it is possible to come across individuals who are still experiencing adolescence at the age of 40-50 in society. The individual grows physically and physically, but not emotionally and spiritually. They can get stuck in some periods. One of these periods is the pre-school age of 2,5 years and the other is adolescence. The main problem in adolescence is identity, personality, self, ego, self. The identity we think of when we think of adolescence represents our social aspect. We have various identities; I am Funda with my friends, I am a psychological counselor at work, I am a mother and wife at home. I am whatever ROLE is assigned to me when I am with various groups in society. Thus, we have many different identities that we use in our communication in society (such as woman, man, spouse, child, teenager, student, professional identity). Adolescence is a process of acquiring an identity and if the individual has not acquired a healthy identity, he/she is in a constant search for an identity. To put it more clearly, some people are not able to underline their self-identity and continue their lives with the pathological identities of adolescence (reverse identity, identity ambivalence). They may tend to constantly change jobs, places and friends.

When there is no patent identity, omnipatent identity (all, strong identity) develops. He/she starts to dictate his/her existing identity to the other party but is not accepted by anyone because everyone wants to protect his/her own self and identity. For example, he often discusses political and ideological issues with people and may shout slogans to strengthen his identity without respecting anyone’s opinion. He defends his political opinion intensely. In this way, he establishes a place for himself by communicating with society only through a political identity.

If one’s capacity for self, one’s ego is underdeveloped, one starts clinging to one’s own identity. Everywhere he goes he talks about being a psychologist, observes and diagnoses people as if he were in a clinic. If the identity of a psychologist gives us serious power, then we tend to live with this identity everywhere. Even in meetings with friends, we say, “Your problem is this” and try to solve it. This is exactly the way of clinging to the omnipatent identity because the individual feels that if he or she does not cling to this identity, there will be nothing left for him or her. Again, clinging to a certain influence, a commodity with material value (diploma, status...) in order to gain a place in society shows that our core self is very weak. The person is happy with people of his/her own ideology and feels threatened and anxious when he/she meets people with different views. Where are each of us in relation to our adolescence? Are we still in the unfinished process of identity construction, trying to prove and show ourselves? What is left of us when we put aside our gender, gender identity roles, nationality, profession, diploma and the many other roles we find ourselves in society?? In short, do we tend to attack when there is a tiny threat to our profession, ethnicity, gender because of these identities we cling to?

When we look at epigenetic development, the period when we cannot separate from our parents is effective behind our overloading of social roles and identities. Especially when the parent (this person can be a mother or a father) is overprotective, emotional and does not give space to the child, does not allow the child to make decisions about his/her own life from an early age, the child cannot dissociate and has difficulty in individualization. If there is no dissociation, the individual suffers every time he/she is separated from his/her parents. Our identities are also like this in a way. There may be times when we confuse our identity with our social roles.

We can say that adolescence is the last exit point before the bridge and in a way, it is a second opportunity to restructure oneself.? Therefore, it is very important that we, the parents, make good use of this period. If there is a psychological symptom that we notice in our child, if there are often intense conflicts within the family, starting treatment to compensate for this can prevent possible problems that may occur in the future.

Psychiatrist Masterson noticed that when adolescents who had committed extortion and had alcohol and substance addiction were admitted to the clinic, depression began to develop in these young people. It was found that they became depressed when their actions were prevented. The opportunity to take a positive action is very important for adolescents in terms of life. Self-activation occurs through action. At this point, the adolescent should have a goal, be oriented towards this goal and be given the opportunity to put it into practice. Young people who are restricted in their legitimate areas of interest and orientation either develop a contradictory identity with their families and oppose everything, or they draw a profile that is damaged day by day with a serious identity confusion. It is quite normal for young people to experiment with roles in order to find their potential, and to change their minds constantly about being a soccer player, a painter, a truck driver or a photographer. Socially accepted roles remain as identities, the ones that are not socially accepted fade away. If a child holds on to one of these roles, this comes with social acceptance; you are a very good soccer player, you play the piano very well, you are very good at math, etc.

Even if the parent wants to realize through the adolescent the tools of life that he/she cannot do himself/herself, this is an invasion of the adolescent’s self and identity, even if it is done with good intentions. If there is something he wants to do, we need to see his orientation and the action he wants to do. Maybe we can ask him to prove how serious and willing he is with his determination to work and strive. Apart from this, young people whose innate self is not damaged will definitely progress in line with their own abilities and skills and will complete adolescence in a healthy way. Most importantly, they will develop commitment, not dependence, to the roles they assume in society as adults. In summary, being aware of what we impose on our children and seeing the connection between this and our own development process will be the turning point of our lives.

Author: Funda Gul Toman