Miscommunication In The Family

Miscommunication In The Family

Camila Villouta Lavín

Universidad Andrés Bello

All along our lives, we go through several stages: childhood, adolescence, youth, adulthood and old-age.  The life of all human beings requires to complete each stage of the life cycle normally. The developmental psychology is the field which focuses on describing and explaining the psychological changes that human beings experiment during their development, that is to say, from birth to death. However, during these processes, adolescence is one of the most unstable and it is described as a period of transition between childhood and adulthood. Even though it is a consuming and complicated stage, there are several psychologists that promote a good communication between parents and children and they propose new ways to manage possible conflicts. In order to understand why family communication plays a fundamental role in adolescence, we must understand the real meaning of it.  It seems that nowadays, families do not know how to do it in a manner that can work, especially with difficult adolescents so they give up and the conflict turns into a war of words. Why is this happening? Are we losing the ability to communicate with others?

Undoubtedly, adolescence is a period of physical and psychological changes; where they develop not only as individuals or independent people but they also strengthen their relationships with others and family; it is a critical period where a teenager can take different roads, regarding the education they received from their parents. Adolescence is a stage that starts at age twelve and lasts until the age of eighteen, being a period of transition from child to adulthood where they face significant changes in social life and create emotional bonds with their partners; they start to look for their own identity, they have now proper ideas and personal attitudes. However, during childhood, the family is the most important support and the only social reference they have. While in adolescence, they face a new world with plenty of possibilities and family is not primordial for some of them. The space where social interactions can be possible is significantly expanded, while family communication is weakened, because they are more likely to be interested in the process of acquiring proper autonomy. Moreover, the adolescent realizes that he/she is no longer a child; he/she wants to become an adult but they are aware that they are not. That is the main reason why problems arise; they try to fit in a “grown-up” society, so they try to compensate this thought by adopting a new position with themselves and others.

While they try to be seen as a strong/secure person, parents often do not understand their personality, so problems start to appear. In “Parent adolescent conflict”( Pickhardt, C.E. ,2009.), The author of the book proposes three stages for understanding teen’s growth: separation, differentiation and opposition, but each of it may lead to a problem. Separation”is the process of pulling away from parents and family to create one's own independent social world of friends·”( Pickhardt, C.E. ,2009, para n.3).Differentiation “is the process of experimenting with one's own individuality, trying on and off a host of interests and images to sort out the authentic person one wants to become” and opposition “is the process of actively and passively challenging parental authority in an effort to become more self-determined”.( Pickhardt, C.E. ,2009, para n.4). These three stages lead to conflicts. The first one, because teenagers do not want to tell everything to their parents; the second one, because they act differently as compared to when they were child and the third one, because they disobey their parents’ rules. Moreover, teenagers are now more critical with their parents, while they expect from them to be more independent but they also maintain conflictive attitudes that do not help improving the relationship. Adolescence is a difficult phase and miscommunication arrives when parent-children do not respect each other. For example, in an authoritarian family, they have rules to follow regardless of what children think or feel, and there is no space for conversation or exchange of different points of view.

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