Inquiring Adolescent Minds Want to Know: "What Is Happening to Me?"

Montessori Life, 2007 by Cichucki, Penny HildeBrandt

The minds of young adolescents are filled with questions; questions dealing with daily challenges are often mixed in with questions about long-term aspirations and concerns. Who am I? How am I unique? How am I like others? Am I smart? How does my brain work? Do all brains work the same? Why can't I remember how to do this problem? Why are some things so hard to learn? Why are my feet so big? What's happening to my body? Am I normal? Why didn't I get invited to the party? What can I do to be liked by others? Should I really say what I'm thinking? What kind of person do I want to be? What am I going to do with my life? Am I important? What can I do to make a difference? Am I the only one who has these thoughts and feelings?

Maria Montessori had deep respect for adolescents and the challenges of this age:

From the psychological viewpoint . . . this is a critical age. There are doubts and hesitations, violent emotions, discouragement, and an unexpected decrease of intellectual capacity. The difficulty of studying with concentration is not due to a lack of willingness, but is really a psychological characteristic of the age. . . . The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence. . . . For success in life depends in every case on self-confidence and the knowledge of one's own capacity and many-sided powers of adaptation. (Montessori, 1948, pp. 63-64)

Physically, early adolescents are growing faster than at any other time in their lives except infancy. They experience significant increases in weight, height, heart size, lung capacity, and muscular strength. Their feet and hands begin to grow first, then their limbs, and finally the trunks of their bodies. Often bone growth is faster than muscle growth, causing "growing pains" and awkwardness. Frequently, surprised by their increased muscular strength, adolescents unintentionally damage objects or hurt friends. The adolescent's nose and ears grow faster than the rest of the face, often causing considerable consternation. Adolescents have ravenous appetites and need additional sleep to support their extensive growth. Sexual characteristics change. The fluctuation of hormones can cause mood changes and unexplained emotions. Girls tend to be taller than boys for the first 2 years of early adolescence and are usually more physically developed. Boys are sometimes perplexed and embarrassed by the changes in their voices. For both boys and girls, it is not an easy task to adjust to all these changes, and they may feel anxious when the changes do not take place as promptly as anticipated.

Intellectually and cognitively, early adolescents are making the transition to abstract thought processes. This opens up all kinds of possibilities. They love solving reallife challenges, arguing, convincing others, and exhibiting independent, critical thought. They are intensely curious, and they prefer active learning involving peers to passive or isolated learning. They are much more interested in personal-social concerns than in academic pursuits. They want meaningful, real-life experiences, which they can easily identify as useful to their lives. They are egocentric and interested in revisiting previously unquestioned attitudes, behaviors, and values. They understand larger concepts, generalizations, ideologies, nuances, metaphors, puns, mathematical-logical ideas expressed in symbols, and have the ability to project thoughts into the future, to anticipate, and to visualize future possibilities. They can imagine occurrences from history and prehistoric times in a more comprehensive way. At the same time, they often exhibit what David Elkind has termed "pseudo-stupidity":

Adolescents, particularly young ones, have trouble making decisions. It is excruciating trying to decide what to wear, what to eat, sometimes even what to say. Teenagers' ability to think in a new key is the cause of this indecisiveness. Now that they can keep many choices in mind simultaneously, they have trouble choosing among them. . . . To adults, young people's difficulties in making decisions often resemble feeblemindedness. But this is really a pseudo-stupidity because it is a product of young people's enhanced mental capacity, not the lack of it. (Elkind, 1998, p. 48)

Psychological and social developmental characteristics are frequently intertwined with the cognitive characteristics as both are affected by this increase in mental capacity. It can be quite problematic for adolescents as they struggle to contend with their new ability to comprehend abstract thoughts and the insights, aspirations, and apprehensions that this new asset can bring. They develop a greater awareness of themselves and their relationships. They believe that others are looking just at them. They may test different behaviors, language, clothing, hairstyles, makeup, music, friends, interests, or study habits.

Challenging authority is a well-known psychosocial characteristic of this age. Adolescents may rebel against parental authority, yet they are still very dependent upon family values, and those values are critical factors in decisionmaking despite their desire to make independent choices. It is a time of mixed messages: seeking autonomy yet wanting the reassurance that significant adults, such as teachers and parents, will love and support them. The negative impact of their behavior and feelings of rejection from adults drive them to seek the acceptance and relative security of their peers. They are greatly influenced by their peer group; media heroines and heroes are instrumental in shaping their fashion and behavior. They may experience traumatic conflicts due to differences between peer group and family expectations.