Growing Pains

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 68, 11 October 1940, Page 5

Growing Pains

AFTER having considered adjustments to the opposite sex, let us turn now to the second set of adjustments that the adolescent has to make -adjustments, or better readjustments, to his own relatives. To some extent the adolescent is outgrowing the narrower world of the family. I am not suggesting that he has to break right away

from the family group, But undoubtedly his relations with his parents have to be readjusted. I have already mentioned the fact that there is a tendency for the adolescent to turn to the parent of the opposite sex as the object of affection. The boy, that is, often turns to his mother and the girl to her father. There is nothing abnormal in this, but the parents have to realise that

at this stage the adolescent is seeking a new kind of companionship here. He is groping towards a new relationship. He is feeling his independence, and seeks to meet his parents more as an equal than as their inferior, Up until this stage his parents have stood for the final authority on most things; even now he often has a highly idealised picture of them. But there is, as well, a tendency to be more critical of things that he has accepted for years. He ventures to question the authority of the home; he does not always agree with what is said. He begins to realise, even if he has not found this out before, that his parents do not know everything. It is not always easy for parents to accept what is going on. Years of watching and guiding the boy or girl have got parents into the habit of regarding this developing being as still a child-still the little being who has to be helped over the rough, ascending path to adulthood. They cannot realise that now he wants to do some of the climbing for himself. If this parent-child relationship can be re-formed on the basis of mutual respect-on a basis more of equality-it will be a lasting influence for good. But (and it is a big but) lose the confidence of youth at this stage, pry unnecessarily into what he is doing, treat him with suspicion, besmirch his fine dreams and his healthy companionship with the other sex by your baseless suspicion-do these things, and you may easily lose his confidence, or, worse still, even set him doing the very things: you seek to protect

him against.-

A. B.

Thompson

"The Adolescent

Child: Social Problems of Adolescence," 1YA Sep-

tember 12).