Approaching adolescents: why & how?

By Gianna Suppa
College of Education
Long Island University, C. W. Post
January, 2011

Adolescents are young adults from the ages of 10-18, that can often be defined by maturity level, biological change, and independence. Adolescents occur during the period in development between the onset of puberty and adulthood. Often times during this period, the individual undergoes extensive physical, psychological, emotional, and personality changes.

In a perfect world, often time parents and teachers believe that adolescents should be well behaved, enthusiastic about learning, and scared to explore their environment. Instead often times adolescents are the exact opposite of this, they are risk takers, often misbehaved because they are acting out, and not motivated to learn just care about what their friends think of them and went they are wearing to school the next day.

Parents, teachers, and any adult in contact with adolescents, I feel need to be sensitive to these characteristics. Parents should definitely have control over their children but to a certain degree, they need to let their children be able to have their own opinions and also allow them to create an identity for themselves. At the end of adolescents, the individual should begin to know who they are or have an idea towards what they want to be.

Teachers on the other hand should have control over their students in school, they should not be involved in their personal lives but at school they should not let adolescents lash out and be rude and disruptive in class. A teacher should also be there for the student if the student wants to maybe talk to them about stuff that is going on at school or at home, but then should make sure that they refer that student to speak to someone else of higher power. The adolescent years can be a tricky time for the individual, parents, and teachers; if it is handled properly I feel it can avoid a lot of problems among adolescents that we hear about today.