Human development has several stages, one of which is adolescence, also recognized as a vital stage that allows the transition from the child to the adult stage. The period in which we are teenagers is between the ages of 10 and 19. During all this time, children go through a lot of changes both physically and psychologically, so at the end of this period, we will recognize an adult in whose thoughts we will find a degree of maturity instead of the innocence of childhood.
The changes in adolescence
Among the major changes teenagers go through are in the following directions: biological, cognitive, social, and emotional.
Biological changes relate to body consistency, hormone levels, etc. In cognitive matters, adolescents acquire other skills for assimilating information, processing and using it. At the level of social changes, they gain knowledge and skills about social contracts, social responsibility, and interpersonal relations. The last class of changes, however, concerns the management of emotions.
One of the biggest changes in teenagers has to do with emotional maturity. During adolescence, children mature emotionally, meaning that they build tools for understanding and managing emotions.
Emotional maturity
Emotional maturity describes the ability of adolescents to stabilize their emotions, including emotional independence, social adjustment, emotional stability, personality integration, and so on.
Emotional maturity is considered crucial in the construction of the adult profile, as it contributes to shaping behavior and attitude, creating social relationships, and increasing self-respect. At a slightly more complex level, emotional maturity describes the individual’s ability to integrate into society. This guides his ability to initiate and maintain friendships, a family, and a job. As each interpersonal relationship requires some level of stress that accumulates due to human interpersonal differences, in order for these relationships to persist, it is necessary for a person to be able to control his emotions and process information in a logical way.
Emotional maturity in the 21st century
A 2020 study conducted on 100 teenagers shows that at the age of 17 to 18 when they should have already reached an advanced stage of emotional maturity, they find themselves at a very immature emotional stage. The participants were both from families with a good economic income and from families receiving state aid, from both urban and rural areas, from both public and private schools, single-parent families, and traditional families, with only one child but also with more.
The results show that 74% of the participants are extremely emotionally immature and that only 10% are emotionally mature at a moderate level.
The ability to interpret information
When a teenager is not emotionally mature, he tends to act impulsively and exaggerate the reactions to the information he receives, be it joy, sadness, upset, or trust. Not having cognitive and emotional methods of processing information and managing emotions, they will act impulsively, which will affect their ability to respond effectively to social challenges.
An example in this direction is the 2022 study by Katarína Greškovičová, Radomír Masaryk, Nikola Synak, and Vladimíra Čavojová, which shows that 41% of teenagers cannot differentiate between false and reliable information disseminated in the online health environment.
Although the new strategies in education orient teaching and training towards critical and analytical thinking, it is necessary to teach young people to make connections between the knowledge they accumulate at school and the information they receive in real life. This type of skill is called scientific rationalization, which involves something more than critical thinking. It involves the creation of logical links between the basic information accumulated at school in subjects such as biology, geography, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and others with real-life information. Even more, if the information is going to affect the lifestyle, then it must be verified in reliable sources such as the official pages of the authorities, scientific journals, and in the case of health-related information, people may also reach the doctor’s advice.
Although the researchers made this study on teenagers, informational manipulation is a widely encountered phenomenon among adults as well, not related to emotional maturity but to cognitive mechanisms and the contemporary ability to filter and process information.
From the point of view of emotional maturity, when we talk about teenagers, we must refer to the high suicide rate among teenagers, who responded immediately to messages from games or from different communication platforms. The vulnerability of adolescents to such actions increases the less they are emotionally developed.
Emotional immaturity allows teenagers to act quickly on received information without processing and controlling emotions, and this does not allow the cognitive process to take place and the young person to distinguish between false and a piece of true information, between a joke and a threat, between a real threat and a virtual one.
The best environment for emotional development
Our society has established different trends of cognitive and emotional development. Although childhood traumas represented a strong reason for new generations of parents to change their educational approach, researchers show that the overly positive way of responding to some situations, but also the lack of optimism in others, creates adults who are emotionally immature and dependent on the feedback of family members.
Furthermore, socialization is also a key element in emotional and cognitive development. This involves both family members, as probably the most influential source of development, but also social institutions such as religious, educational, mass media, government, and neighboring institutions. The adolescent’s interaction with all these institutions creates a set of personal experiences, which contribute to shaping responsibility and later as models and levers of action.
Conclusions
To ensure a good environment for a great emotional development of adolescents, it is first of all necessary for family stability, increased attention from the family members on the actions and tasks of the adolescent in everyday life, the empowerment of the adolescent, the creation of a sense of responsibility, training him in family activities and above all, an open and rational dialogue.
Sources
Mridula Jobson, 2020. Emotional maturity among adolescents and its importance. in Indian Journal of Mental Health, vol 7, no.1, pp.35-41, Available at: https://indianmentalhealth.com/pdf/2020/vol7-issue1/10-Original-Research-Article_Emotional-Maturity.pdf
Katarina Greskovicova, et al. 2022. Superlatives, click baits, appeals to authority, poor grammar, or boldface: Is editorial style related to the credibility of online health messages?, in Frontiers in Psychology, Available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.940903/full