Ai FM: Exploring Teen's Growth and Maturity

The founder and consultant psychologist of Azon, Ms. Lee Li Li, has been invited to share about "Exploring Teen's Growth and Maturity" on Ai FM on 18th August 2020 (Tuesday) at 10 a.m.

Mentality refers to our perception and behaviour, while mental model relates to our emotion, cognition and behaviour. Cognition generally refers to one’s mode of thinking, which relates to our growing process and environment. For example, if the teen was instilled with selfishness thoughts at the young age, it would contribute to the idea of "Everything has to be mine". Thus, they will not have the concept of "sharing" and gradually presents “immaturity” in their adolescence.

"Social relationship", "ability to face challenges", and "ability of decision-making" are crucial to teen's development, as it also reflects their maturity. Nowadays, the teens often surround themselves with co-curricular activities, tuition, and etc., which have restricted their development due to less opportunities to meet and explore the outside world. Besides, adolescence is the critical period for the teens to develop their self-consciousness. Celebrities often become “models” for the teens who are trying to become like someone, thus it contributes to the change of behaviours as they grow up.

On the other hand, parents also need to be more cautious in considering the factors that caused the drastic change in behaviour, such as turning into sensible from disobedient. Parents may reflect that whether the teen is presenting such obedient behaviour to gain affirmation from the parents. For example, parents requested the elder sister to supervise the behaviour of her younger brother in school, and she also showed effort to complete the task. This is not an encouraging situation as the teen is mainly following orders to gain affirmation, and it will negatively impact his/her social relationships too. In addition, teens will gradually lose their own judgements due to habitually being obedient and to fulfil the expectations of others. In adulthood, they may suffer from the discrepancies between their perceptions and reality of society. If we want the teens to develop their mental maturity, we need to encourage them to face and overcome challenges instead of promote avoidance. With persistency to breakthrough life challenges, the teens will be able to know themselves better, which eventually leads them one step closer to the road of mental maturity.
Parents can examine whether the thoughts and behaviours of your teen are mostly positive or negative. Parents are advised to communicate with the teens if they often have negative thoughts and complaints such as "You always don't like anything I did", "Whatever I did was useless", "Do you even care about me? You are always busy." and etc. A positive perspective is the teens are still willing to share their honest thoughts with parents. However, parents must not doubt the teen's expression, which may lead them into having more negative thoughts. Other than through communication, parents may show them that you do care about them by spending quality time with them through family activities, such as house chores, family trip, sports activity, and etc. Meanwhile, parents may also reflect your own thinking model and whether it brings positive impact to the teens as well as provides them the opportunities to learn. Lastly, the teen may exhibit some extreme behaviours, show avoidance or even self-harm if they struggle to find a way to deliver their thoughts. When these negative thoughts accumulate in the teen’s mind, it will have a negative impact on their self-esteem and affect their daily living too. Parents have to keep in mind that the process of nurturing teens has a lot of challenges, similar to the process of steelmaking, which is full of high "pressure" and high "temperature", however, by doing it right is able to build their character and grow up to be a person who is able to contribute to the society. After breaking through those life challenges, the teens is then able to become more independent to live a healthy and successful life.

Please click here to find out more, and to watch and listen to the full sharing.


Note: The above content is adopted from the AiFM live sharing session: "Exploring Teens' Growth and Maturity" on 18th of August 2020 (Tuesday). For more information, kindly contact our office for more information and further assistance. Thank you.