I love the adolescent development in interpersonal context because there are so many interesting points! My major is early childhood education, which seems has little to do with the adolescent, but this article reminds me about how important is the parent-child relationships, as it is always consistent in a longitude matter.

I have this boy in my classroom who comes from an Asian American family. He is doing excellent in so many aspects but meanwhile, he is super hard on himself. He always hesitated to do his work, and keep asking what should he do during math, literacy and arts center. I am concerning that he might have this issue because of his family but has no idea how to support him and his family. I myself is a Chinese, and I’ve been seeing this issue going on among Chinese community all these years, but not willing to give up this traditional relationship with their children–they are tending to model a normative behavior to the children and always give very limited autonomy to them. On the other hands, this article also shows that some minority ethnical group young people tend to be more willing to support and help their family, which also means potentially, they are more willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of family harmony. Then they would have even less chance to have autonomy. I am wondering as teachers, how can we support this type of children and their family.

“Theory and research recently have shifted toward the idea that emotional autonomy results from a progressive negotiation between adolescent and parents over issues related to the granting and exercise of adolescent autonomy” (Collins and Steinberg, 2008, p563)