Garbage about Teens

The effects upon adolescent development these days seems to be moving faster and more sporadic then all previous generations. In Canada our teens are becoming more engrossed in behavior management through the school systems and a result from the expanding amount of research that has been done since the 1980s, which at that point within the research domain of psychology there was nothing in the literature.

With an increasing amalgamation of technology in the everyday lives of teens, even younger children with their robotic pets and play systems (i.e. Nintendo’s DS and their pet program Nintendogs). Their physical, social, and cognitive development is becoming more augmented with theories and plans for achieving what has been considered “normative” development into the Information Age.

This raises some questions in my mind as to whether these management systems (the Feel-Good Curriculum) that are being enacted are worthwhile as benefits or might lead to newly raised issues in the future. Of course there is the fact that various schools and municipalities apply different strategies so therefore we may end up with more variety among the next generation of emerging adults in their skill sets and aptitudes for emerging useful cognitive skills, such as abstract thinking, conceptualizing new ideas, and empathetic reasoning with limited physical experience to another.

Another interesting factor is the Secular Trend. The secular trend is the fact that adolescent growth has been occurring earlier and earlier over succeeding generations and that there are drastically more pressures and expectations of teens to excel at tasks that used to be applied only to college and university students in the past. Put simply our youth are developing quicker and earlier in their maturation then they might be able to handle properly.

I personally don’t know anything of the specifics in which this had played a role in teachers and teen counselors changing their methods, but on intuition I’ll go ahead and assume that very little has changed since Canadian funding has decrease in the educational systems across the country. There probably are those few examples of dedicated teachers who know and realize the implications of these changes and are adjusting their curriculum to better develop the potential skills and abilities of their students.

There is also the factor of steroid use and extreme pressures for youth to succeed and excel in sports. These roiding teens are being physically abused (either under their own will or the will of their peers and coaches) not only in the now but forward into their futures from the steroids long lasting effects upon their development.

All together, I am just glad that I am not a teen anymore, but jealous of their access to so many more growing opportunities to further themselves and their development with specialized methods and technologies.