Analyzing Developmental Stage of Adolescence

Developmental Stage: Adolescence Physical Psychosocial Cognitive Moral Hormonal changes trigger puberty, and it often affects behavior and moods. Puberty lasts for about four years, girls experience it earlier as compared to boys, and stops when an individual can reproduce. A global trend with regards to early attainment of sexual maturity and height in adulthood started more than 100 years ago, possibly due to the improvements recorded in standard of living. During puberty, a growth spurt in adolescents is experienced by both boys and girls.

Major sex behaviors emerge and the reproductive organs get bigger and fully mature accompanied by the appearance of the secondary sex organs. The major signs of sexual maturity for males is sperm production, while that of females is menstruation. Sperm-ache takes place at the age of 13 while Menarche takes place between the ages of 12 & 13 in the U.S. The psychological impacts of late or early maturity mainly depends on the way adolescents and the others give interpretation to the changes that accompany the process of maturity.

During the adolescence years, establishing an identity is the main goal of most of the teens. Identity: Means a reliable definition of an individual defining himself/herself as a unique entity, regarding roles, beliefs, attitudes and aspirations. Establishing the integrity of the personality involved should form the basic step in the process of identification-that means, to align thinking, emotions, and behavior to remain consistent irrespective of the time, place, social relationships, and circumstances. As they attempt to build identities, adolescents experience Role vs.

Identity Confusion: The Erickson's fifth developmental stage where the individual tries to answer Who am I, but experiences confusion with regards to which of the several roles to choose. All through adolescence, more than a single identity status may be experienced by a teen: Identity Achievement: The terms used by Erikson for the attainment of the identity which is established ideally by reconsidering the values and goals set by the culture and parents, then choosing which ones to accept and which ones to reject.

Four major areas / aspects of identity achievement follow: Sexual, Religious, Political, Gender, Ethnic, Vocational (Carr, 127). Negative Identity: When adolescents choose an identity that opposes what their society expects from them. This mostly happens when these adolescents see the roles the society and their parents expect them to play are either unappealing or infeasible, it is hard for them to come up with any viable alternative that can be truly called their own. The adolescent period is the period between from childhood to adulthood.

The term cognitive development is the process of improving the way one thinks as one grows from a child's way of thinking to an adult's way of thinking. There are three major cognitive development areas that occur mostly during adolescence.

Firstly, adolescents are known to develop a more advanced thinking skills, which include the ability to think hypothetically, the ability to think over a wide range of possibilities found in a given situation, reason out about contradictory facts in a hypothetical way, and make use of a logical way of thinking. Secondly, adolescents find it easy to develop the ability to reason in an abstract manner.

Adolescents change form thinking in a concrete way, who think about the subjects they have good knowledge of, or direct contact with, to the abstract thinkers who have the ability to imagine things they never saw or experienced. This makes it possible for adolescents to be able to love, think of spirituality, and take part in a more advanced level of mathematics (Shaffer & Kipp, 82).

As the cognitive, social, emotional development of the youths gain more maturity, the way they understand and interpret morality will expand and their behavior will become aligned more closely with their beliefs and values. Thus, moral development provides a description of the evolution of each of these guiding standards and is established by the ability to make.