Adolescent Psychology Level 3 Certificate Course

There are 10 lessons:

1. Introduction
   • What is adolescence
   • Piaget's Theories of Development
   • Eriksons Psycho Social Stages, etc
2. Life Crises
   • Puberty
   • Attachment Theory
   • Types of Problems, etc
3. Physical Development
   • What is Puberty
   • Puberty in Females
   • Puberty in Males
   • Hormonal Control of Puberty
   • Factors Affecting Age of puberty
   • Obesity, etc
4. Intellectual Development
   • Piaget's Formal Operations Stage
   • Cognitive Development and Behavioural Changes
   • School Problems
   • Information Processing
   • Decision Making
   • Brain Development
5. Assessing Intelligence, etc.
   • Emotional Development
   • Freud's Theories
   • Emotional Problems (Depression, Eating)
   • Role of the Family
   • Grief and Teenagers
   • Typical Childhood Response to Grief
   • Supporting a Grieving Child
6. Sexuality
   • Aquisition of Gender Identity
   • Sex Role Identity
   • Vicarious Learning and Sexual Identity
   • Gender Identity Disorders
   • Curiosity
   • Homosexuality
   • Sexual Behaviour
   • Nudity, etc
7. Social Development
   • Family Influence
   • Denigration of Parents
   • Influence of Peers
   • Popularity
   • Shyness
   • Dating, etc
8. Moral Development
   • Piaget's Theory of Moral Development
   • Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Reasoning
   • Role of Family in Moral Learning
   • Other Factors Affecting Moral development, etc.
9. Delinquency and Crime
   • Pathways to Delinquency
   • Gangs
   • Case Studies
   • Behavioural Problems (Drugs, etc)
   • Child Abuse, etc.
10. Adolescents and the Transition to Adulthood
    • Transition to Adulthood
    • Career Development, etc.

Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school's tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.

Your learning experience with ADL will not only depend on the quality of the course, but also the quality of the person teaching it. This course is taught by Iona Lister and your course fee includes unlimited tutorial support throughout. Here are Iona's credentials:

Licentiate, Speech and Language Therapy, UK, Diploma in Advanced Counselling Skills.

Iona has been a clinician and manager of health services for fifteen years, and a trainer for UK-based medical charities, focusing on psychosocial issues, mental health disorders, and also the promotion of communication skills for people in helping roles. She tutors and facilitates groups via workshops and teleconferences, and now specialises in Sight Loss. As a freelance writer, she contributes regular feature articles for magazines, has written five published books, as well as published courses relating to personal development and counselling skills.

Iona has aslo written published books, courses and articles across a wide range of subjects, mostly in the areas of health, counselling, psychology, crafts and wildlife.

She has drawn experience from clinical and managerial experience within the NHS as well as medical and humanitarian subjects. She has been a regular feature writer and expert panel member of a national magazine for six years.

Her books include: A Guide to Living with Alzheimer's Disease (and associated dementias), The Psychology of Facial Disfigurement; a Guide for Health and Social Care Professionals, When a Medical Skin Condition Affects the Way you Look; A Guide to Managing Your Future, Facing Disfigurement with Confidence, Cross Stitch: A Guide to Creativity and Success for Beginners.

Courses written include: Mental Health and Social Work, Counselling Skills, Understanding and Responding to Substance Misuse, Journalling for Personal Development, Guided Imagery, Stress Management.

Current work includes: Tutor: Courses associated with Creative Writing, Counselling Skills, Psychology, Holistic Therapy, Certified Hypnotherapist and Hypnotension Practitioner.

Facilitator of Teleconference Groups: Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB)

Trainer (Skills for Seeing): Macular Society

Reviewer of Books/Information: Macmillan Cancer Support

Fundraiser: Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Embroidery/Art Groups Facilitator, Board Member

Website Manager: The Strathcarron Project, Coordinator (Delaware & Tennessee) Human Writes

Excerpt from the course

What is Adolescence

Adolescence can be simply defined as the period of a person’s life between puberty and
maturity (adulthood) generally the teenage years. For humans, it is not merely something
discussed in scientific terms, but rather an important social phase in a person’s life.
Sooner or later after puberty, a person will be expected to take on adult responsibilities.
The time that this occurs will depend on the culture in which he/she lives. Adolescence is
a universally recognised phase often marked by instruction and ceremony throughout the
world. Formal ceremonies tend to be rarer today, but they still occur. For example,
certificates for leaving school.

In Western society, pre-adolescent children expected to be cared for by their parents or
caregivers, whilst post-adolescent children are expected to be more responsible for their
own physical, emotional, intellectual health and their own legal responsibilities.

Adolescence is often a period of crisis for the young person and his/her family.

Adolescence and the idea of teenagers is a relatively new concept. Prior to education for
all, people were adults or children. However, since the 1950s, the idea of a teenager has
developed. Adolescence is a time of great transition, physically, mentally and emotionally
for a child, as they move from childhood to adulthood. We will consider more on these
changes in future lessons. In this lesson, we will consider the different theories in relation
to human development, particularly focussing on adolescence.

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Piaget was a Swiss biologist and psychologist who developed a highly influential model of
child development and learning. His theory was based around the idea that children build
mental “maps” or cognitive structures, schemes or networked concepts for understanding
and responding to their environments.

Schemes are the patterns of behaviour which children and adults use when interacting
with objects. Schemes may be behavioural or cognitive. These schemes are used for
dealing with the world. All behaviour patterns are considered to be schemes.

He argued that as a child develops; their cognitive structures become more sophisticated,
moving from innate reflexes, such as sucking and crying to complex mental activities.

Using cognitive games and mental exercises, he was able to infer certain patterns
concerning the way that children think at different ages, or different cognitive stages. He
believed that children pass through four distinct stages, each one with new abilities.

Piaget’s Stages of Development

Briefly, the first three stages of his theory are -

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 years)

Emergence of the concept of ‘object permanence’ i.e. knowledge of the existence of an
object when it is out of sight.
Change from reflexive to goal directed behaviour.
During this stage, there is a close interplay between the baby's motor activity and its
sensory perception.

During the Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years), play is primarily "exploratory". Some basic
symbolic acts also occur after the first year. It is however mainly half way into the second
year before symbolic play becomes prevalent. During symbolic play, a child learns that
one thing can represent another (e.g. sitting on a log, a child can pretend that they are
riding a horse).

After the second birthday, a child becomes like an "actor" in his own theatre. This is called
"pretend play", and it is largely through such play that a child moves towards becoming
socialised. For instance, a girl may begin to play nurse with her doll. Later on she might
act as the doctor and her friend as the patient.
It is not surprising that at the age of two, the child begins to understand social relationships
a little more, instead of being self involved and egocentric like the younger infant.
Egocentrism (Egocentric) is the sense of being the centre of everything, that our own
view is the most important.

Play is not an idle pass time for children; in fact, it is essential to a full and balanced
development of the person. Moreover, child therapists claim that play can be a very
healthful way for children to deal with stress, which explains the use of dolls and toys
during remedial therapy. Play can represent a kind of language that the child uses, in
place of verbal language that has not fully developed. Anyone who frequently deals with
children should encourage a variety of play, and should be receptive to what the child is
learning through play; or even what message the child is trying to convey though play.

Pre-Operational Stage (2 to 7 years)

The child develops the ability to use symbols to represent objects in the real world.
Their thinking is self-centred or egocentric.
The child has the "new" skill of language, and this ability to use words allows development
in a way that was not previously possible. Language allows the child to learn that an object
can represent something that it is not (pretend games can become more feasible). At a
latter part of this stage, conversation skills will develop rapidly.
Piaget did make a further sub division in the first stage.
The Pre-conceptual Period (2-4 years). Focus is on symbolic substitution (e.g. a child
substitutes a block for a car);

The Intuitive Period (4-7 years).

Focus is on classifying things into categories (e.g. apple
is a fruit, carrot is a vegetable). Child develops an understanding of certain principles of
conversation.

Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 12 years)

At this stage, children begin to learn about rules and relationships between people and
things around them. They then learn to manipulate or operate according to these rules or
restrictions. They begin to be able to use reversible operations and their thinking becomes
more logical and less self-centred.

After these three stages, the child moves into the Formal Operational stage, when they
would be in adolescence.

Formal Operational Stage (12 years and older)

In this stage, the child develops the ability to think in abstract terms about philosophical
and ideological issues. There is the development of abstract thoughts.

Theories of Moral Development

Piaget also developed a theory of moral development, which we will discuss further in later
lessons.

Erikson’s Psycho-Social Stages

Erik Erikson was born in Germany in 1902. He is a post-Freudian or Freudian egopsychologist.
This means that he accepts Freud’s ideas as basically correct and other
ideas on the ego added by other Freudians e.g. Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann.
However, Erikson is more culture and society oriented than most Freudians. He based
his theory on the recognition that we are social beings, so our psychological attributes
cannot be treated as isolated phenomena. Erikson is most famous for refining and
expanding Freud’s theory of stages. He argued that development functioned by the
epigenetic principle. This principle is that we developed through a predetermined
unfolding of our personalities in eight stages. We progress from each stage depending
on our success or lack of it in previous stages. We develop at a certain time in a certain
order which is determined through genetics. If we interfere with this natural order of
development, we will ruin our development. Imagine our development as a flower –
genetically, the flower will develop at a certain time in a certain order. But imagine that
we try to make the flower grow a petal before it is ready, the flower may be ruined. The
same can be said of our personalities and development. Try and make a baby walk
before they are ready and we could cause physical harm.

In his view, therefore, each stage of a person’s psychological development involves an
aspect of relating to others, and the way in which we cope with each theme has a
profound effect on our general social being for the rest of our lives. Unlike Piaget’s and
Freud’s stages, Erikson’s eight stages extend from the cradle to the grave. For each of
Erikson’s stages, there is a dominant social theme or psycho-social crisis which the
individual is challenged to resolve, before continuing a healthy pattern of development.

Each stage involves developmental tasks that are psychosocial in nature. Erikson calls
these tasks crises. For example, a child at senior school has to learn to be industrious
and this industriousness is learned through the social interactions of the family and
school. The tasks are usually referred to by two terms. For example, infants have a
task called “trust-mistrust”. They must learn trust and not trust. This is a balance we
must learn.

At each stage there is an optimal time. It is useless to try to rush children towards
adulthood, which can happen. Also, it is not advisable to slow down their progress to
protect them from the demands of life. There is a time when each task is optimal. If a
stage is well managed, we will carry away from that stage a virtue or social strength. If
we do not do so well, we may develop malignancies or maladaptations, which can
endanger our future development. A malignancy is the worst of the two and involves too
little positive and more of the negative of the task, for example, a person who can’t trust
others. A maladaptation involves too much positive and too little negative, for example a
person who trusts too much.

Freud argued that a child’s parents influence his/her development dramatically. Erikson
also felt that there was an interaction between generations, which he called mutuality.
Erikson argued that children can influence their parents’ development as well. When
children arrive, this will change a couple/person’s life quite considerable and moves the
parent(s) along their developmental path. Also, we may be influenced by grandparents
and great-grandparents and they can be influenced by new additions to the family also.

An Example of Mutuality

A teenage mother is still an adolescent. She may cope well with having a child, but she is
still finding out who she is and how she fits into society at large. She may have a
relationship with the father, who may also be a teenager, so is again struggling with how
HE fits into society. The baby will have straight forward needs that infants have. One of
these is that his parent(s) will be mature enough to look after him/her and that the mother
will have the social support she needs. The mother’s parents may help. They may then be
influenced on their developmental tracks, as they are suddenly back caring for a baby,
when they had thought they had moved beyond that stage, but were not yet ready to
become grandparents. So they may find the role demanding. So their lives are all
intertwined in a complex way. But to ignore the way they mesh together can be to ignore
vitally important changes in a person’s personality and development.

Therefore, Erikson’s potentially greatest innovation was to have eight stages which start
from birth through three stages of adulthood. We do not stop developing, so it seems
right to extend theories of development to cover our later ages.

Briefly, the first stages relate to ages prior to adolescence and are........................cont -