Adolesence

Adolesence

It is a stage of life that generally begins at the onset of puberty, i.e. by 11 years and lasts till around 19 years. This stage is generally believed to be the most notorious stage of life. At this stage we are knowing and exploring the world afresh with new insights and experiences. This stage is a transition from childhood to adulthood, neither are we child enough nor are we mature enough. This is the stage in which we are almost always in conflict with our parents, it seems they don't understand us!

So what is actually changing or happening in us psychologically that make this stage so different and adventurous.

The major change we all know is biological, which burst us with new hormones and lead to the development of sexual characteristics.

But apart from it there are also occuring psychological changes, i.e., cognitive changes and moral changes.

Cognitive Changes
Cognitively we are maturing and start thinking in abstract terms. That means we can thing of something that is not present but exist in our thoughts.
This is the time, we start taking perspectives, of others, therefore we develop something called imaginory audience. Audience which is present just in our imagination, and we start believing that we are the center of  their attraction and that everyone will be looking at us when we will go out and thus we get this intense feeling to look good, look perfect, act perfect. This is the reason we spend so much time in front of mirror!

Not only this, we create personal fables around us, create lots of stories in our minds. For instance, what if I would be the Prime Minister of India, I would have done this change, brought this scheme, etc.

So it is these, abstract thinking, imaginary audience, personal fable that are our major cognitive development and are source of our imagination!

Moral Changes
Concept of morality is learnt in the childhood itself when we learn to follow our parent's instructions. But at this stage there comes a change where we start fabricating our own rules and morals. Now these newly formed morals might not match with those of our parents and as a result there arises clash between us and our parents.
Also this is the time we become idealistic also and start judging everything from our new idealistic parameter. As a result we start crticising everything more.

So we can say that such biological, cognitive and moral developments lead us to think, feel and behave the way we actually do at adolescence.

And as the time passes, that means after afolescent years pass, generally these behavioral patterns start fading and we become more realistic, tolerant, accomodative, less concerned about our looks and actions. ☺