Phychosocial development in teenagers.

What I knew

Before looking for information about psychosocial development my knowledge about this topic was that during this period the teenager goes through many emotional changes and they experience things very intensely. Also, I knew that teens tend to be more sensitive to social approval and what other people think and say about them really matters. Likewise, peer pressure it is an important issue for teenagers because friends are important and as far as I know peer pressure is critical for the teenager development that is why teens are always looking for acceptance from friends and from themselves.

After Reading

I have found pretty interesting information about this topic and I am going to start by saying that “Physical development is linked to the hormonal and neurodevelopment change”(World Health Organization, 2005). This means that, the intellectual and emotional changes are taking place during this period.

Erick Erikson described this process as identity versus identity confusion; so as a result, teenagers are in search of their identity, goals and beliefs to be accepted in the society. Apart from the search of identity there are two important aspects to mention and take into consideration, the number one is sexuality and the second one is the relationship between family and friends.

According to the book “Human Development” sexuality can be influenced by the environmental factors or it can be partly genetic as a result, teenagers tend to have a sexual behavior, so for that, it is important to know that teenagers have a great risk of pregnancy or even worse a sexually transmitted disease.

The second aspect that the book point out is the relationship between family and friends. The first thing that we need to know it is that the relationship between family changes, teenagers want to have more intimacy as a result, conflicts with parents become more frequent. Second, the relationship with peers has a negative or positive influence. Also, in this stage teenagers worry about the physical appearance and they may think that if they break stereotypes they cannot be accepted in society.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, I can say that during this stage teenagers have to deal with emotional, personality and social changes and, all this factors affect the family and school environment. So, as a future teacher I need to be aware of these changes and find suitable activities to apply in the ESL classroom. Also, we teachers have to keep their self-esteem high by saying students that mistakes  are allowed so in that way teens do not have to feel nervous or frustrated about what other people are going to say about them, something to take in consideration is that teenagers hate embarrassing moments so we need to avoid that in class.

References

Diane E. (2016) Human Development.

World Health Organization (2005) Adolescence: Phychosocial and Social Developmet.