Reading this very scientific article, I couldn’t help but make many personal connections; as such, with your permission, this blog post will make occasional references to my life.
The first MVP to capture my attention was:
“Maturationist models assume that a period of diminished closeness and heightened conflict accompanies adolescent maturation and that these perturbations continue until parent-adolescent relationships and roles are renegotiated” p. 4
A middle school girl carelessly used the phrase ‘sexual assault’ in a class I was teaching last week. Startled by the presence of this phrase in the classroom outside of a specific context, I was struck by its placement in children’s vernacular by our current political circus. When ‘sexual assault’ becomes a commonplace phrase of adolescence (much in the way ‘gay’ was before its reclamation), young people become desensitized to its seriousness. Young girls are not discovering their own subjectivity, instead, its possibilities are being foreclosed around them.
“Thick culture explanations reveal, furthermore, that our blindness to boys’ friendships as well as to why they lose their close relationships is due to the fact that we live in a culture that does not place much value on friendships.” (Way, P 27) Continue reading Does American culture value friendships?
“[…] the pregnant teenager is seen as having overstepped the boundaries of appropriate reproductive practice. Not yet an adult and typically pregnant out-of-wedlock, she finds her body the focus of moral concern and the target of public outrage. Pillow identifies the paradox inherent in this construction—the pregnant teenager is fulfilling her ‘feminine’ responsibility by bearing children, yet in a fashion that is not deemed acceptable by the public.”
An excerpt from Proweller’s Re-Writing/-Righting Lives: Voices of Pregnant and Parenting Teenagers in an Alternative School Continue reading “Bless her heart, but…”
“In a way, I think of it like being Spider-Man, you know? Like he’s so strong and brave, but he can’t really identify as Spider-Man because he knows it will hurt everyone he loves. And I think I war between that. You know, like a part of me wants to be, you know, the person, that my mom wants me to be, but then I realize that I’m a greater person when I’m not the person she wants me to be. So it’s kind of like a war between myself. ‘Cause I know if I don’t go through with the hormones and the surgery, I know I would just be miserable. But my mom and my family would be happy. You know, it’s just kind of like a war…” (Sadowski, 2008, p.139)
It is a touching story. When Matt, a female-to-male transgender youth, (by 2004, he was still biologically female) told her mom that she wanted to become a guy by doing hormone surgery, her mom’s first reaction was shocking, then angry, and finally turned to be very sad. She tried all kinds of methods to stop Matt from doing the surgery. She even said that Matt was too selfish that she made her family sad. In order to make her mom happy, Matt postponed her surgery plan but subsequently she became very depressed. Matt said that she was not that selfish to make her family sad; instead, she was just brave enough to stand out as a herald of transgender group. Continue reading Still Love Your Kid if He is a Gay?