Adolescent Friendships: Social and Emotional Growth

Adolescence

• During adolescence, teenagers want to spend more time with friends.
• Adolescents choose friends primarily for psychological closeness and loyalty.
• Friends share similar interests, personality, and ethnicity.
• Adolescents become less possessive of their friends than they were as children.
• Mutual affirmation and faithfulness increase during this time, and adolescents depend more on friends for companionship and intimacy.
• Intimacy allows individuals to share personal knowledge, feelings, and thoughts.
• Adolescents confide in friends with fears, hopes, and innermost thoughts rather than parents or family.
• Adolescents describe friends with intimate, understanding features.
• Girls have more intimate relationships with friends.
• Girls rate friendships as higher in helpfulness and affection and are more likely to say they trust and feel close.
• Friendships are also important to boys, but not to the same extent as for girls.

Benefits of Adolescent Friendships

• Close friendships provide opportunities to explore the self and develop a deep understanding of another.
• Adolescents become sensitive to each other's strengths, weaknesses, needs, and wants due to intimacy.
• Friendships support the development of self-concept and identity.
• Close friendships help young people deal with the stresses of adolescence.
• The intimate nature of friendships during adolescence increases sensitivity and concern for others, fostering empathy and prosocial behavior.
• Teenagers with supportive friends feel less lonely, have higher self-esteem, and experience a sense of well-being.
• Close friendships can improve attitudes toward school and lead to better performance.
• Teenagers who enjoy friendships at school view all aspects of school more positively.

Parenting

• Parents play an important role in a child's development.
• How parents communicate, discipline, and punish varies widely. and Parenting styles are practices related to beliefs.
• Research consistently points to two dimensions: demandingness and responsiveness.
• Demandingness is the degree to which parents set standards and demand compliance.
• Responsiveness is the degree to which parents are accepting, sensitive, and express love and concern.
• Diana Baumrind's four parenting styles are well-known and widely used.

Classic Parenting Styles

• Expectations and control and warmth and sensitivity are key components.
• Authoritative parenting respects child's opinions but maintains boundaries ("Firm but flexible.")
• Permissive parenting is indulgent without discipline.
• Authoritarian parenting is strict and disciplinary.
• Neglectful parenting is defined as emotionally uninvolved.

Authoritative Parents

• These parents are high in demandingness and responsiveness.
• Parents set reasonable expectations and enforce them by setting limits.
• They explain the reasons for expectations, express love and affection, discuss discipline issues, and listen to their children's point of view.

Authoritarian Parents

• These parents are high on demandingness and low on responsiveness.
• They value obedience from their children and are unresponsive or reject children who disobey.
• Discussions like authoritative are not present, and demands must be followed without.
• Failure to obey leads to punishment.

Disengaged or Uninvolved Parents

• Parents low in both demandingness and responsiveness.
• Show little commitment as caregivers, minimizing time and emotion.
• They make an effort only for required feeding and clothing.
• Often emotionally detached, rarely correct misbehaviors, set clear limits, or show concern.

Permissive Parents

• These parents are low in demandingness and high on responsiveness.
• Believe that children need unconditional love.
• Parents avoid making demands and clear expectations.
• They give their children great freedom, who make decisions for themselves no matter the age.

Jean Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory

• Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development dominated the study of child development in the early 1960s
• Piaget's ideas were influenced by his own history and background.
• Piaget said everything that we know and understand is filtered through our current frame of reference.
• New understandings of the world based on what we already know, are developed.
• Piaget's approach is labelled as a constructivist approach which depicts children constructing their knowledge.

Assumptions of Intelligence

• In order for children to know something, they must construct the knowledge themselves.
• Piaget described children as a constructivist—an individual who interacts with novel objects and events to gain understanding.
• Children's constructions of reality depend on available knowledge.
• The more immature a child's cognitive system, the more limited their interpretation of events.

Scheme

• Piaget proposed basic unit of understanding; structure that underlies organization of actions/ representations.
• Schemes make up our frames of reference through which new information is filtered.
• Everything known starts with the schemes we are born with.
• The basic schemes are reflexive actions like sucking, looking, and grasping.
• As children grow they use schemes based on mental representations rather than physical activity.
• Mental schemes are called operations.

Adaptation

• Piaget proposed two innate processes to explain how children modify their schemes
• Organisation involves grouping observations into knowledge, occurring within and across development stages.
• To adapt to demands individuals need new ideas.
• Adaptation is composed of assimilation and accommodation that work together to drive development.
• Infants/children assimilate new information by incorporating information into existing schemes.
• If a child believes all furry four-legged animals are 'dogs' and they see a breed of dog they have not seen before (application to scheme). If a child believes all furry four-legged animals are 'dogs' and they see a cat for the first time; (application to scheme).
• A child then sees a cat for the first time and may apply a 'dog' label to the cat, if the child is told the cat is not a dog new scheme will develop.

Equilibration

• Piaget's Processes of assimilation and accommodation comprise the process.
• People are motivated to assimilate and accommodate fully to reach cognitive equilibrium.
• Major reorganizations in our thinking happen resulting in new levels of thinking.
• These shifts are new levels of thinking stages.

Stages of Cognitive Development

• Piaget identified four major stages which include: the sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years), the preoperational stage (2 to 7 years), the stage of concrete operations (7 to 11 years), and the stage of formal operations (11 years and beyond).
• These stages represent different levels of functioning; An invariant developmental sequence in which all children progress through the same order.
• Stages cannot be skipped Successive stages build on the accomplishments of previous stages.
• Although the sequencing is fixed as they grow, there are individual differences in the ages at which children enter or emerge.
• Cultural and environmental factors can influence a child's intellectual growth rate.

Sensorimotor Stage

• The period from birth to two years, divided into six substages.
• All that infants know is derived from sensory information and motoric actions
• Derived information through the senses and the motoric actions that they can perform
• Reflexive schemes substage (birth to 1 month); Innate reflexes (sucking, grasping) are used to explore the world.
• Primary circular reactions (1–4 months); Coordination between senses and motor behavior increases showing infants voluntary control of behavior.
• Secondary circular reactions (4 to 10 months); Infants become more aware of external secondary behavior.
• Coordination of secondary schemes/reactions (10 to 12 months); Goal-directed behaviors achieved through deliberately combined schemes.
• Tertiary circular reactions (12 to 18 months); Novelty explored through experimentation and causal relations consolidate their knowledge .
• Beginning of thought/symbolic problem solving (18-24 months); Mental representations form that guide future conduct and internalize behaviors.

Deferred Imitation

• Deferred demonstrates the ability to engage in imitation.
• Deferred imitation is to imitate another person's behaviour some time after the behaviour was observed.
• Enduring mental representations mean children can mentally experiment by performing the actions in their minds and have no trial error.
• Notable achievements include the development of object permanence: the idea that objects still exist when they are no longer visible or detectable.

Symbolic Substage

• (2 to 4 years), children acquire to mentally represent an object not physically
• There’s an ability to engage in representation of a new kind to stimulate senses. Evidence of symbolic.
• Symbolic and Pretend play.
• However time that use external props that.
• Discuss Piaget on preoperational childs ability.
• The most that are symbolic functioning are and animism tendency to perceive.
• Animism is like inanimate objects, have thought like, feeling and indeoendent.

Intuitive Thought Substage

• Consists of 4–7 span as well as a shift in children's reason.
• And systematises the mind
• Piaget stage intuition even carry out.
• Awareness and underlying operations.

Concrete Operational Stage

• From 7 to 11 years, children's thought processes change.
• The are able to set strategies called operations.
• Piaget called these terms concrete.
• Thought is more logical and flexible.
• Reasoning is tied to concrete situations.
• Demonstrate and complete tests of concrete operational level.

Deductive Reasoning

• Formal operational children can arrive at the correct conclusion if they are provided with the proper “facts”.
• In addition to the development of reasoning abilities children are presented to what one can observe broad.

Formal-Operational

• In short the formal is more rational systematic and concepts ideas ones self
• Which has become to learn.

Sociocultural Theory

• Describes the cognitive and social contexts of culture and beliefs.
• Lev Vygotsky emphasized that children's development.
• Children’s mental functions develop during the first years of life.
• Vygotsky agreed with piaget in young children, but Vygotsky, however, unlike with zones of children’s own.
• According to Vygotsky the skills above and development with levels.
• Vygotsky is also a key cognitive scaffolding such expertise in learning.