THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CHANGES: INFLUENCE OF PARENTS

For most adolescents, however, the influence of parents and of peers overlaps. In most cases the values of parents and peers are not very different, and the differences tend to be superficial. The adolescent may dress and behave in a bizarre, unconventional way, but he continues to hold many of his parents’ values, rejecting only a few. But if the parents are authoritarian, or ignore him, he may reject their beliefs and adopt those of his peers.

The psychological adjustment to adolescence is complex, and often difficult, both for the adolescent himself and for his family. The adolescent has to adjust to the physical changes in himself and to the demands of his culture and the society in which he lives. As well as this he has to make decisions about whether he will conform to his parents’ expectations or reject them.

He has to decide who he is, what he wants to be, where he is going, and how he can get there. In this age of uncertainty, of corporate and governmental dishonesty, of instant television images and influences, of unresolved problems and conflicts, it is not surprising that the adolescent appears to be more ready to reject than to accept many conventional values. Most adolescents, in fact, accept many of their parents’ beliefs and behaviours, but this generation is more concerned than their parents’ generation with such qualities as tolerance, honesty, friendship, and love, and less with status-seeking, acquisition of money, and competition. Many of them believe that only through a critical reassessment of conventional wisdom, rather than its uncritical acceptance, will mankind survive in the unstable world of today.

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