Question

3. Adolescence is a topsy-turvy time for teenagers and their parents. During this period of development, teenagers have several social influences (ie, family, friends, co workers, etc...) that can have great influence on their behaviors. Please explain three of these influences and explain how much influence research suggest each have during this time. You must cite at least one outside source for your answer.

Answer 1

Adolescence can be described as a phase of transition from the childhood to adulthood. This period generally starts from the age 12 and lasts the age 19. Adolescence can experience a lot of changes in this period of life. Physical and mental changes both occur in this stage of life. There are some influences that are responsible for the mental changes during the adolescence period.

Family Influence

There are some valid reasons for saying that family has a strong influence in the adolescent teenagers. As we know parents are the closest persons of a child so their thinking and perspectives can influence a teenager a lot. Some significant researchers have stated that, the relationship between the parents and the teen has a strong impact in the adolescence development of that teenager. Sometimes parents become over strict for their child so that a teenager becomes unable to discuss his problems with the parents. This kind of issue can hamper adolescence development of the teenagers.(Dweck, 2013)

In other hand, parents lead the role of motivators. A motivating parent can help the teenager to achieve his life goals and can also enhance his development procedure. So we can say that a parent has a great impact on adolescence development.

Not only parents, other family members like sisters, brothers and grandparents also have much influences on the period of adolescence development.

Friends

Friends have a great impact on the teenagers. Because in this stage of adolescence development, a teenager can interact more with her friends rather than her family. So their attitude, thinking and behaviors can highly influence a teenager. Sometimes teenagers adopt some specific behaviors and thinking from their friends in this stage of development.Such as adventures experiments like smoking, drinking can be adopted from the friend’s influence.So we can conclude that friends have a great influence in the adolescence development of a teenager.(Crone and Dahl, 2012)

Environment

Environment such as living environment or school environment also has some influences in adolescence development. A child adopts so many things from her school and neighbors. In this stage of life, lots of questions can arise in the mind of a teenager. Her school environment needs to be enough supportive to answer her all the queries.

In other hand if the school and living environment is over strict then these questions becomes suppressed and the teenager can lose all kind of social activities for this kind of suppression. So we can say that, environment has a great influence on a teenager’s adolescent development.(Hinduja and Patchin 2013)

References

Hinduja, S. and Patchin, J.W., 2013. Social influences on cyberbullying behaviors among middle and high school students. Journal of youth and adolescence, 42(5), pp.711-722.

Viner, R.M., Ozer, E.M., Denny, S., Marmot, M., Resnick, M., Fatusi, A. and Currie, C., 2012. Adolescence and the social determinants of health. The lancet, 379(9826), pp.1641-1652.

Crone, E.A. and Dahl, R.E., 2012. Understanding adolescence as a period of social–affective engagement and goal flexibility. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13(9), p.636.

Dishion, T.J. and Tipsord, J.M., 2011. Peer contagion in child and adolescent social and emotional development. Annual review of psychology, 62, pp.189-214.

Dweck, C.S., 2013. Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Psychology press.