October 7: Adolescence

In-Class Activities:

1) Neuron Note. You wrote me a new question about adolescence and I answered your questions from the last two classes. We spent lots of time reading these answers since many were interesting.

2) Parenting Styles. We reviewed Baumrind's parenting styles: authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative. We discussed our own parents and their styles and how you might be a parent.

3) Adolesence Notes. We talked about puberty, adolescent egocentrism concepts of imaginary audience and invincibility fable, and what stage you are at with each theorist (Piaget, Kohlberg, Erikson).

4) James Marcia's Identity States. You took a survey of repeating questions about gender roles, religion, politics, lifestyle, dating, occupation, etc. to see what stage of identity you are at.

Foreclosure = you have an identity, you are not searching, it is what you have been raised to be
"I am a Republican, my parents are Republican, my grandparents are Republicans."

Diffusion = you do not have an identity, you are not searching.
"I don't know. I don't care about politics. Whatever."

Moratorium = you do not have an identity, you are searching.
"I'm not sure who I support in the election, but I think I'll watch the debate. I'm curious about the candidates. What do Democrats and Republicans believe?"

Achievement = you have an identity, it is your own.
"I know who I am voting for in the election. I know where I stand on the issues. I can articulate my position and give examples from my own life to explain why I believe what I do."

5) Frontline "Inside the Teenage Brain." We were only able to watch the first ~20 minutes of this GREAT program. We'll finish it on Thursday.

Assignments:

1) Read chapter 4 up to page 188 (or just finish it!).

2) Developmental Activity. You received a detailed explanation of this assignment. You can try to test object permanence or conservation and better understand Piaget. Or you can ask people the Heinz dilemma and analyze their responses using Kohlberg's moral ladder. Or you can analyze a fairytale using Freud's psychosexual stages of personality development. It is due next Tuesday.

3) Test over chapters 3 and 4 is on Tuesday, October 14.