Antidepressants Blog

It is obvious, from what I have written, that parental authority is weakened and parental decisions are questioned during adolescence. But in spite of much publicity, adolescence is not a period of turmoil and chaos, rather it is a period of minor rebellion, bickering, and questioning.

In today’s rapidly changing society, parents have to accept that they have to learn from their children, and can hope that their children will continue to learn from them, to trust, and to love them.

It is perhaps unfortunate, too, that the child’s adjustment to adolescence may coincide with the parents’ adjustment to middle age. The youth wants to expend energy, his parents feel a need to conserve energy. The adolescent looks forward to an exciting future, the parents may be looking back to a romanticized past. The youth is enthusiastic, impulsive, and impatient, his parents have become cautious and compromising. The adolescent is uncertain about his awakening sexuality, the parents may be concerned about their (as they believe) waning sexuality. The youth is anxious that his decisions will make his parents unhappy, the parents are anxious because they know that the youth must learn to manage his own affairs, but they want to protect him from harming himself and from the unpleasant realities of life.

*44/16/113*

By the end of the first year of life a child’s birth weight has tripled and by the end of the second it has quadrupled. After this, both height and weight increases settle down, in both sexes, to a steady annual gain of about 5 to 7 cm (2 to 2J in) a year in height and 2.25 to ²-75 kg (5 to 6 lb) increase in weight.

This steady progress is interrupted by a sudden pre-puberty spurt of height and weight. The spurt in height begins at about 10 or 11 years of age in girls and about 12 to 13 years in boys, and it lasts about two years in both sexes. During the spurt girls add about 16 cm (6 in) to their height and boys add about 20 cm (8 in), mostly because of the growth in the length of the trunk. The spurt in weight lags behind that in height in both sexes and starts later in boys.

The two growth spurts change the shape of the bodies of the sexes, so that boys and girls become different physically.

In both sexes, the size of the hands and feet increases first, then the forearms and calf; this is followed by the chest and hips, and then, in boys particularly, by the shoulders. The child is becoming an adolescent! Last of all, the trunk lengthens and the chest

deepens. In girls, the chest growth is masked, to some extent, by the development of the breasts. During this period of unequal growth, the child is relatively ungainly and often embarrassed by his or her appearance.

*35/16/113*

There is one important difference in parental behaviour towards boys. Boys are taught, quite early in life, to avoid showing emotions and to refrain from touching and cuddling. To show emotions, to cry, or to want to cuddle and be cuddled is ‘sissy’ in our culture. How much these learned restraints damage men’s ability to relate to other people, to communicate properly with their sexual partner, and to enjoy mutual sexual pleasuring (which is essentially a touching enjoyment) is unclear, but the psychic damage could be considerable.

James Prescott, an American neuropsychologist, believes that male adult aggression and violence are due (at least in part) to a lack of cuddling and of bodily pleasure in the early years of a boy’s life. He recalls that studies in the University of Winsconsin Primate Laboratory showed that baby monkeys which were prevented from touching any other monkey in childhood (although they could see, hear, and smell the others) became violent when adults. He also recalls that psychiatrists have found that parents who physically hurt their children invariably had themselves been deprived of physical affection and touching during their childhood. Dr Prescott’s strongest support for his theory came from a study of other societies. He found that those societies which gave their children the most physical affection (by cuddling, by touching, and by letting the child show its emotions) during infancy and early childhood had less violence, theft, and assaults than societies which treated their children harshly and disapproved of physical affection.

He says, ‘we seem to have a firmly based principle: physically affectionate human societies are highly unlikely to be physically violent’, and he argues that we should encourage touching, holding, and body contact with and by our children, especially our boys. Dr Prescott’s opinions are supported by Dr Richard Leakey, who for many years has been studying primitive societies and the fossil remains of societies long since disappeared. He says that man is not innately aggressive, but co-operative. Aggression only began when man ceased to be nomadic and settled in areas to grow crops. In other words, human aggression is due to the way in which society evolved; it is not inborn.

*25/16/113*

John Money reports an illustrative and fascinating case which supports this view. Two identical male twins were circumcised at the age of 7 months. During the operation an accident occurred and one infant’s penis was inadvertently amputated, flush with his abdominal wall. Over the next year the parents consulted many authorities and pondered over what was best for their sexually damaged boy. Eventually, they made a decision: the boy would be treated by plastic surgery and reared as a girl. The first reconstructive operation was undertaken when he was 21 months old. This consisted in removing his testicles. The second operation, that of making a functioning vagina, would be delayed until puberty when the child would be given female sex hormones to produce breast development and the female distribution of fat.

Following the first operation the parents changed the boy’s name to that of a girl, and began to treat him as a girl. Dr Money has now followed up this family for twelve years and the rest of the story is based on his reports.

Within a year of sex reassignment, the child, now treated as a girl, behaved in a way which was markedly different from her brother’s behaviour. She became neater and cleaner. She preferred ‘feminine’ dresses, and preferred helping her mother in the home to helping her father. As time went on, she copied her mother’s behaviour to her father, while her brother copied his father’s behaviour to his mother. At Christmas she preferred girls’ toys, which emphasized a feminine maternal role, rather than the boys’ toys chosen by her identical twin, which emphasized a masculine work role. The only real difference between her and her girlfriends was that she sought to be dominant in the group, had a high level of physical energy activity, and was classified by her teacher as stubborn and tomboyish. These are characteristics Dr Money believes are due to pre-natal conditioning by testosterone.

Dr Money’s report, and many others, confirm that parents have different feelings to their children of different sexes and reinforce, both subconsciously and consciously, the sexual role the child is expected to play. A boy would be criticized for being unadventu-rous or unaggressive, while a girl would be criticized if she were.

*16/16/113*