Adolescent therapy for parent-adolescent crises regarding personal freedom - Essay Example

2), and as he/she also encounters other unexpected life events such as sudden change in family structure, changes in the school or in schooling, and accidents that can impinge on his/her well-being. (Dumont & Provost, 1999, p. 343) As adolescents undergo this transitory stage, “many features of their social world are transformed” (Brown & Huang, 1995, p. 151), of which the most dramatic is no other than peer relations, wherein the teenager establishes his/her standing among peers. (Brown, 1990, p. 171). “They begin to spend more time with and value their friends more than they used to.

Thus, it might seem as if they are starting to cut ties with parents and reject their ideals” (Guzman, 2007, p. 1751). Previous research by Berndt (1979), Hunter & Youniss (1982), Selman (1980) has linked the decline in parental authority over adolescents to the dominance of the peer group (as cited in Smetana & Asquith, 1994, p. 1148), which “have been found to assume greater importance in adolescence than in middle childhood” (Savin-Williams & Berndt, 1990; Youniss & Smollar, 1989, as cited in Ibid) With this, some theories suggest that adolescents become more independent as the power of family to control them weakens.

(Adelson & Doehrman, 1980, Blos, 1979, Freud, 1965, 1969, as cited in Peterson, Bush, & Supple, 1999, p. 431; Freud, 1958, as cited in Brown & Huang, 1995, p. 151) However, a significant number of empirical researches show otherwise. Researches by Baltes and Silverburg (1994), Baumrind (1991), Collins and Repinski (1994), Cooper, Grotevant, and Condon (1983), Grotevant and Cooper (1986) Hill and Holmbeck (1986), Offer, Ostrov, and Howard (1981), Peterson (1995), Sebald (1986), Steinberg (1990), Silverberg and Gondoli (1996), and Youniss and Smollar (1985) revealed that “adolescent autonomy emerges within a family context in which the young expresses admiration for, seek advise from, and