Development during Childhood and Adolescence | Psychology

In this article we will discuss about development during childhood and adolescence.

Children occupy central place in family life as they maintain the continuity of family tree, provide psychological satisfaction, and help the family economically. Getting married and having children remains a major concern for a vast majority of the Indians. The structure of socialization, therefore, continues to be “joint family system that is deeply embedded in patriarchy”.

The bearing and raising of children is a main purpose in the lives of women. While the views of urban, modern Indian women and men may differ due to social mobility, there is no deny­ing that such a view continues to form an integral part of the Indian social reality. In this context so­cialization becomes a matter of collective responsi­bility of the whole family.

Thus the child rearing practices in India are predominantly family-focused. With the functional ideal of the joint family, the child enters a vibrant group of adults when she is born. In gen­eral, there is an unspoken acceptance of multiple caregivers, including family, friends, and neighbors.

The family operates as the deep- seated and primary social network for present and future relationships in a person’s life. Unlike Western society, Indian grandparents are actively involved in the care and socialization of the child. In the choice of care arrangements for their young children, mothers favor family care and care in a commercially run center was voiced as the last option.

Although the joint family is a cultural ideal, many structural changes within the traditional pattern to accommodate the impacts of urbaniza­tion and mobility are taking place. For instance, even nuclear families take recourse to the help of close relatives in nearby locations who lend support and serve the purpose of group affilia­tion, particularly for child rearing. Early relationships within the family are more likely to be multiple than dyadic.

The multiparty conversation is quite common in situa­tions where the child and mother may be engaged in a dyadic interaction, through making reference to persons who are not present or only have imagi­nary existence. D. Sharma and LeVine (1998) found that Indian children were active par­ticipants in the world of social relationships from a very young age, and were responded to by multiple caregivers. These early experiences influenced the development of self.

Adolescence, as generally depicted in psycho­logical discourse, is the invention of a Western technological, industrial society “that is marked by a discontinuity between childhood and adulthood”. Undeniably, human development subsumes that in the life cycle the in­dividual will enter puberty, which is a precursor to adult appearance and also adult roles. This physiological stage of the growth spurt is experienced uni­versally between 10 and 19 years.

Traditionally, at the end of childhood, a person in India is supposed to enter the world of adults, since adolescence is only a recent construct from the historical perspec­tive. However, one of the outcomes of moderniza­tion has been the increase in educational periods and the delay of adult responsibilities, thus giving rise to the emergence of the period globally termed as adolescence. The span of adolescence currently ac­cepted has a coverage from 10 to 19 years.

In recent years the stage of adolescence and youth has received increased attention due to the spread of HIV/AIDS, primarily because of the vulnerability of this stage. In India, the economic boom subsequent to the liberalization and global­ization initiated in the 1990s has also become the reason for looking to the younger generation, as it is believed that this generation will transform the future of the country. According to the 2001 cen­sus, 54 percent of the Indian population is below 25 (555 million), while a massive 45 percent is below 19 years.

According to India’s National Youth Policy document, while one-fifth of the world’s population consists of adoles­cents in the age range 10-19 years, in India this group forms 21.4 percent of the more than one billion population. What directions development trends will take in the next 20 years, it is believed, would be determined by the state of well-being of those who are adolescents today.

Concern has been expressed over the neglect by the government of this age group in areas of health (especially re­productive health), nutrition, education, training, and work-force participation in all of which the female is at a particular disadvantage.

In the predominantly patriarchal communi­ties in India, gender emerges as a key dimension in socialization. In a country-wide study of 13,200 girls in the age range 7-18 years, and their moth­ers, drawn from 14 states of India Anandalakshmy (1994) found gender stereotypes and prejudices against the girl in health care, education, and socialization. The analysis points to a complex web of familial-social-cultural factors in the girl’s context that determine the course of her life.

The social class (most being from among the poor in this study), level of economic development of the village/district she lived in, parental education levels, her birth order, the number and sex of sib­lings, and her family’s caste influenced her status within the family and in the community. When several factors were aggregated, being able to go to school and remaining there seemed to be crucial in governing her chances for development. On the whole, 61 percent girls were attending school.

Others had either dropped out or never been to school. A somewhat higher economic level of the family, a better developed village/district, not being from the lowest caste, literacy of the parents, being first born and having fewer siblings were positively related to a somewhat reasonable place of the girl in the family. These trends indicate that the niche of girl is integral to her sense of self.

Probing the identity of adolescent girls from Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi, N. Sharma (1996) found that gender identity was the primary feature of the female adolescent’s sense of self. Influ­enced by the ecological setting, socio-economic sta­tus, level of traditionality, and formal education (all of which have interactive effects), the girl’s identity was found to be bound to the sex-role rather than being diffused.

Although formal education gener­ated certain questions about self-worth and future aspirations, it did not seem to overwhelm her sense of identification with her gender role. Clearly, the emphasis on her role as a future homemaker is nev­er lowered even at the highest level of education.

In general, family remains at the center of adolescent lives a feature not unusual in a society where relationships are based on interdependence and dependence. Familial identity has been depicted as an integral element of an emerging female adolescent, whether rural or urban.

In a detailed cross-cultural study of Indian middle class adoles­cents, both girls and boys at the mean age of 13.2 years were compared with middle class European American youth. The Indian adolescents were found to spend much more time with families than their American counterparts and feel positive in doing so, most of the time. Very few of them reported any signs of conflict with their parents and there was no attempt at breaking away.

As part of a multicultural project investigating leisure time use by adolescents in India and other countries like Japan, Korea, United States, and the European Nations, S. Verma and Sharma (2003) examined the adolescents’ use of free time and found that differential gender socialization led to free-time activities that differed in content, dura­tion, frequency, and quality.

Leisure for girls was primarily home-based, such as watching TV, read­ing, cooking, and embroidery, while boys reported more of outdoor activities such as playing sports, going to movies and “hanging out” with friends. Thus in urban areas, although technology has had a mediating role in replacing traditional leisure, time activities among youth with a more western­ized pattern, family time, and community activities seem to play a key role.

Continuity from Childhood to Adulthood:

For the first time in psychological discourse Kakar (1981) invoked the Hindu view of life to remind the academic community that for the major­ity of Indians, the first formal stage in the Ashrama scheme of the life cycle is brahmacharya (apprenticeship) and it includes the period of ado­lescence, wherein competence and fidelity are essen­tial virtues to be acquired.

Reaffirming the notion of continuity rather than the lack of it, Saraswathi (1999) has argued that the absence of the notion of adolescence in any society would be linked to greater continuity between childhood and adulthood and in the similarity in life events across the life span. She also believes that “adolescence as a life stage is both gendered and class based”. Girls and boys are involved by their parents in gender specific household and livelihood chores and their lives are quite comfortably enmeshed with the lives of the adults in the family.

The continuity in transition from childhood to adulthood is clearer in the lower social class than in the upper social class. Yet, during this pe­riod of continuity, there is a brief transitional stage before marriage when the girl is trained in assum­ing greater responsibility for tasks at home so that she becomes a competent member of another fam­ily after marriage. With reference to males, the picture is somewhat ambiguous.

While lower class boys are expected to “earn before they learn,” those from the higher social class are expected to perform well academically. In all cases, conformity to family norms is deemed essential, which according to the author, leaves little scope for the emergence of a distinct adolescent culture.

The only exceptions are affluent youngsters where association with the peer group, permission for al­ternative life styles, and exposure to global television images brings about inter-generational conflicts and some discontinuity in the child adult continuum.

On the whole, the single most significant leitmotiv that characterizes Indian adolescents is their con­stant pull toward the family ethos that encourages them to place individual needs secondary to family needs, and subjugate their decisions to those made by the family to “maintain cohesiveness.”