Reading Reflections - Social Development

           I found the Developing Adolescent link to be very informative about an adolescent’s social development.  It is interesting though that even with how much our society stresses the importance of recognizing the differences between ethnicities and races, the majority of the information for social development is based off of white, middle-class adolescents.  I guess that is a just a reminder as to how much further we need to go in accepting and learning about our differences.  Even with this slight bias, I found the information to be interesting.

            One of the main points which struck me is how although adolescents strive for acceptance in their peer group and rebel against their family unit, they still desperately crave the acceptance and love of their family.  As stated in the Developing Adolescent link, “It is important to note that this decreased frequency of contact with family does not mean that family closeness has assumed less importance for the adolescent”.  I think as children turn into teens and the hormones start to rage it is easy for parents and family support to believe they are not need as they become easily frustrated and annoyed with their teenage.  However that could not be farther from the truth.  Adolescents rebel against their parents because they are trying to see how far they can push the new boundaries they learned about with the development of their cognitive abilities.  This does not mean that acceptance from their family is no longer needed as it may seem to the parents that the peer group has taken over that role. 

I think it is fair to say that for almost every adolescent there is a time in their life when they realize their peer group won’t always be there to support them, but their family will be.  It is vital that parents realize this and ‘hang on for the ride’ so to say while their teen also comes to this realization on their own.  I can still remember the moment when I realized this during my junior year of high school.  The events surrounding this realization were far from pleasant to say the least.  But ever since then my mom and I have been best friends and I, nor she, would change that for the world even though it was not an easy road to get there.  The social development of an adolescent is greatly connected to their peer and community groups, but when it is all said and done they realize that their family and honest support groups matter more than anything.

I found the section relating to school to be very applicable as we are all studying to be teachers.  Of course peer relationships, family relationships, work, and communities will greatly affect an adolescent’s social development.  But it is a nice reminder that teachers do as well and can be just as important, if not more important, than some of those other groups and networks.  People often don’t realize that most adolescents spend more time at school with teachers than anywhere else.  A teacher can create a positive relationship with an adolescent that they might not have in any other setting.  Teachers can provide students with a strong sense of attachment, bonding, belonging, and a feeling of being cared about which they might not be getting from any other avenue for their social development. 

I also liked the idea expressed in Developing Adolescents that an adolescent’s perception of teacher fairness has been found to be associated with positive adolescent development.  What I love about this is that it is not the actual reality of whether the teacher is being fair or not; it is the adolescent’s perception.  Students have to perceive that the teacher is treating everyone fairly for them to have a more positive social development.  In other words, we as teachers need to look at situations from the student’s view point to see if they will view it as being fair or not.  This can often be difficult to do…especially when what they view as fair is far from being fair.

Overall the social development of an adolescent is messy and there is no one mold that will fit all.  However, every adolescent is seeking to find themselves in an environment where they feel safe and loved.  That is something we as teachers can make sure they have in their lives in one form or another.   Whether it is getting a student involved in a healthy after school activity or finding a positive mentor for a student, a teacher is in a position to help ensure each adolescent has that support during that time to ensure positive social development. 

 The sections and links on gangs in adolescents I found to be sad and depressing.  The hot topic of gangs has been around since who knows when and it doesn’t look to be going anywhere soon even though it does ebb and flow.  The Gangs: A growing Problem in Schools link really disturbed me almost more than the others because it states that educators often believe the problem of gangs exists in the community but not in the school.  Do educators really believe this and if so why?  To have a gang problem in a community and to believe that problem is not at the school would be like believing if you have cancer in your leg it will not affect your body.  It is simply insane!  Of course the violence and gang activities from the community are going to overlap within the school.  I think it is impossible not to.  Even if the students themselves are not involved in those gangs, they are affected by them because they live in that community and therefore it will play into the school.  I also like how this link emphasized that young people often join gangs because of lacking social and economic elements to give them a sense of belonging which the gangs provide for them. 

            The other two links, the National Youth Gang Survey Analysis and the US Gang Problem Trends and Seriousness, 1996-2009, had a lot of saddening statistics.  I did find it interesting though that the prevalence of gang problems increased around 2001 once people started to feel to the effects of the recession.  Money is a funny thing which affects a lot of different aspects, one of them being a sense of security.  As this started to go, more teens turned to gangs for that security.  Gangs consist of drugs, firearms, and theft which seem to offer security in the eyes of an adolescent.  What they don’t realize is that these same things also offer violence, death, and jail.  The US Gang Problem Trends and Seriousness, 1996-2009 link was very informative and some of the information astonished me.  According to this link in 2009 50.3% of homicides in Los Angles were gang related…over half.  That simple blows my mind. 

There was also a table in this link which had the ten counties with the highest gang homicide rates listed for 2002-2009.  What grab my attention to this were the counties listed as number six and seven; Saginaw and Oakland Michigan respectfully.  I grew up in a town thirty miles from Saginaw and one-hundred miles from Oakland.  I have heard about both of them and am very familiar with the horror stories from Saginaw related to gang violence.  I remember being escorting into the school gyms in Saginaw by police when we went there to play basketball and I remember being told what we could and could not do once we entered that gym.  This was all due to gang violence in Saginaw and at those schools.  You could feel the environment change when we entered their schools, their turf.  For some of those girls on the basketball teams, basketball was the only thing keeping them out of gangs and the team itself had a gang mentality.  I was really surprised though to see Saginaw up there on the list because of how closely I grew up to that county.  It was just next door.  The different though is that I had the positive peer groups and positive environments which enabled me to have positive social development and stay out of trouble.  Amazing how such simple things relate to one another.