RELATIONSHIP WITH FAMILY,

PEERS, AND ADULT SOCIETY

Adolescent Rebellion• Pattern of emotional turmoil characteristic of a minority of adolescents that may involve conflict with family, alienation from adult society, reckless behaviour, and rejection of adult values.

• Contrary to popular belief, most adolescents are not ticking time bombs. Those raised in homes with a positive family atmosphere tend to come through adolescence with no serious problems.

Changing Time Use and Changing Relationships• One way to measure changes in adolescents’ relationship with the

important people in their lives is to see how they spend their discretionary time.• Cultural Variations in time use reflect varying cultural needs, values, and

practices.

• Ethnicity may affect family connectedness

Adolescents and Parents

• Relationships with parents during adolescence – the degree of conflict and openness of communication – are grounded largely in the emotional closeness developed in childhood; and adolescent relationships with parents, in turn, set the stage for the quality of the relationship with a partner in adulthood.

• Individuation and Family Conflict IndividuationIndividuation - Adolescents struggle for autonomy and personal identity.

- The process of forming a stable personality. As a person individuates, he gains a clearer sense of self that is separate from parents and others around him.

Adolescents and Siblings

Adolescent and Peers

• Adolescents spend more time with peers. Although 1-to-1 friendships still continue, cliques – structured groups of friends who do things together – become more important.

• A larger type of grouping, the crowd, is not based on personal interactions but on reputation, image, or identity. Crowd membership is a social construction, a set of labels by which young people divide the social map based on neighborhood, ethnicity, socio-economic status or factors.

The Crowd:

The IT crowd(“IT” or Mean

Girls)

The Nerds

The Stoners

Romantic Relationships• Romantic Relationships are a central part of most adolescents’ social worlds. It tends to become more intense and more intimate across adolescence.

• Early adolescents think primarily about how a romantic relationship may affect their status in a peer group.

• Middle adolescents have at least one exclusive partner lasting for several months or a year and the effect of the choice of partner on peer status tends to become less important

• In late adolescence, romantic relationships begin to serve the full gamut of emotional needs that such relationships can serve and then only in relatively long-term relationships.