PSY 280 Middle Childhood and Adolescence Development

Middle Childhood and Adolescence Paper

PSY/280

During childhood and throughout adolescences changes can occur that can either positively or negatively affect the youth and future relationships, as well as how the develop. A good example of this is children that are born to teen mothers. The mother has not fully developed and is not able to make tough life choices without a negative impact. Furthermore, the teen mom is influenced not by other adults but other teens that are her peers. This greatly affects her newborn child as they look to the mom for advice when she is getting it from the wrong places. Changes that happen at school and home affect the child because how they handle situations when young will determine how they cope with adult decisions that they need to make.

In terms of family there is a huge gap when looking at a dysfunctional family versus how a functional family works. The idealistic functional family has the parent as the leaders, and they are in place to raise the children and keep them on a promising belief system. On the opposite end of the spectrum a dysfunctional family does not have parents as leaders leaving the kids the fend for themselves and they have to pull emotions from each other and strangers. They grow up thinking that absenteeism is ok as a parent. When a parental figure is not active in a child’s life, they learn the wrong traits and values that they receive from their peers. The most common traits of a dysfunctional family are signs of abuse, kids hat always want to be perfect, lack of communication, addiction fear and the need to be in control. The underlying factor of this is children that grow up in this type of environment not only harbor these bad traits but the pass them on to their children think it is ok and the 0process continues. Also, various forms of anxiety form, social anxiety is one that prevents interaction between persons because one or both are worried about what the other will think about them. Relationship anxiety directly affects how a child handles different relationships, is there is anxiety in relationships when a child is young there is a real chance the child will not know how to handle adult relationships.

The difference in how a child handles relationship is greatly determined by if they grow up in a dysfunctional family or if they are able to have full family functions. One of the advantages of having a functional family is when there are peer issues and peer pressure is involved there is a better chance that the child will be able to mentally handle what is happening and make better informed decisions. Adversely a child that grows up in a dysfunctional family will accept the unhealthy relationships and give in to peer pressure. When in the teen stage peer pressure becomes a huge part of life. To ease the transition from teen to adult and help combat some of the negative peer pressure out there it is important the teen have some positive family members to fall back on and usually in a functional y family that role goes to the parents. A big decision that some do not realize that affects you later in life is if you commit a crime as a child, depending on with crime it came stay with you and directly affect you as an adult. Values that are taught at an early age tend to be more ingrained I the child and they continue to use those values as they grow., Morale values are really a good set of guidelines to live by. These guidelines will set the stag3e for the new adult and will also be passed down to their children. Children who were not taught with a good se to guidelines have anything to grow with and this leads to them making the wrong decisions. Sometimes a child is in a lost situation and with one or more missing parents and they end up having to either earn from various persons the right and wrong way to do things or worst-case scenario they never learn, and they end up having bad consequences. When I was growing up, I had parental figures that even though they were not my biological parents they still instilled good guidelines with me early on that lead to good values and ethics. I still follow these ethics in everyday life and when I’m at work dealing with others. I hope to pass those values on my kids and hope that the value will guide them through their middle childhood and adolescent life. It is important to note that sometimes bad things happen to good people, sometimes as an individual you are able to grow and come out of a really bad situation. other times there is an emotional need for some help and sometimes outside guidance is needed for those that have no guidance and are looking to make themselves better. When these situations occur, there are several programs out there for at risk youth. The programs help the teen get on track with life and reinstall guidelines that were missed or just forgotten. The program provides other choices for teens who think they have no choice but to do the wrong thing and continue to make the wrong choice. The programs take away the excuse that no one cares about the lost child and gives the child hope.

References:

• Shipman, K. L. (2001). Regulating Emotionally Expressive Behavior: Implications of Goals and Social Partner from Middle Childhood to Adolescence. Child Study Journal, 31(4), 249.

• Sørlie, M.-A., Idsoe, T., Ogden, T., Olseth, A. R., & Torsheim, T. (2018). Behavioral Trajectories During Middle Childhood: Differential Effects of the School-Wide Positive Behavior Support Model. Prevention Science, 19(8), 1055–1065. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-018-0938-x