Who are teenagers afraid of?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

As a result, they do not know how to occupy themselves, avoid meeting with themselves, from which, in turn, they do not know and are even afraid of their inner world.

Under the terms of the experiment, the participant agreed to spend eight hours (continuously) alone, with himself, without using any means of communication (telephone, Internet), not including a computer or other gadgets, as well as radio and television. All other human activities - playing, reading, writing, craft, drawing, modeling, singing, playing music, walking, etc. - were allowed.

During the experiment, the participants, if they wanted, could make notes about their condition, actions, and thoughts that came to mind.

The very next day after the experiment, they had to come to my office and tell me how everything went.

If severe tension or other disturbing symptoms occurred, the experiment should be stopped immediately and the time and, if possible, the reason for stopping it should be recorded.

In my experiment, mostly teenagers who come to my clinic took part. Their parents were warned and agreed to provide their children with eight hours of solitude.

The whole idea seemed completely safe to me. I admit I was wrong.

The experiment involved 68 adolescents aged 12 to 18 years: 31 boys and 37 girls. Brought the experiment to the end (that is, we spent eight hours alone with ourselves) THREE teenagers: two boys and a girl.

Seven survived for five (or more) hours. The rest are smaller.

The adolescents explained the reasons for the interruption of the experiment in a very monotonous way: "I could no longer", "It seemed to me that I was about to explode," "My head would burst."

Twenty girls and seven boys showed direct autonomic symptoms: hot flashes or chills, dizziness, nausea, sweating, dry mouth, tremors of the hands or lips, pain in the abdomen or chest, and a feeling of “wiggling” the hair on the head.

Almost all of them experienced anxiety, fear, which in five reached almost the severity of a "panic attack".

Three of them developed suicidal thoughts.

The novelty of the situation, interest and joy from meeting with oneself disappeared for almost everyone by the beginning of the second or third hour. Only ten of those who interrupted the experiment felt anxiety after three (or more) hours of loneliness.

The heroic girl who completed the experiment brought me a diary in which she described her condition in detail for eight hours. Here already my hair began to stir (with horror).

What did my teenagers do during the experiment?

cooked food, ate;

have read or tried to read, did some school assignments (it was during the holidays, but out of desperation, many grabbed their textbooks);

looked out the window or staggered around the apartment;

went outside and went to a store or cafe (it was forbidden to communicate by the terms of the experiment, but they decided that sellers or cashiers did not count);

put together puzzles or Lego constructors;

drew or tried to paint;

washed;

cleaned up a room or apartment;

played with a dog or cat;

exercised on simulators or did gymnastics;

wrote down their feelings or thoughts, wrote a letter on paper;

played the guitar, piano (one - on the flute);

three wrote poetry or prose;

one boy traveled around the city on buses and trolleybuses for almost five hours;

one girl was embroidering on canvas;

one boy went to an amusement park and went to the point of vomiting in three hours;

one young man walked Petersburg from end to end, about 25 km;

one girl went to the Museum of Political History and another boy went to the zoo;

one girl was praying.

Almost everyone at some point tried to fall asleep, but none of them succeeded, “stupid” thoughts were obsessively spinning in their heads.

After stopping the experiment, 14 teenagers went to social networks, 20 called their friends on their mobile phones, three called their parents, five went to their friends' home or yard. The rest turned on the TV or plunged into computer games. In addition, almost everyone and almost immediately turned on the music or put headphones in their ears.

All fears and symptoms disappeared immediately after the termination of the experiment.

63 adolescents retroactively recognized the experiment as useful and interesting for self-discovery. Six repeated it on their own and claim that from the second (third, fifth) time they succeeded.

When analyzing what happened to them during the experiment, 51 people used the phrases "addiction", "it turns out, I can not live without …", "dose", "withdrawal", "withdrawal syndrome", "I need all the time …", "get off with a needle, "and so on. Everyone, without exception, said that they were terribly surprised by the thoughts that crossed their minds during the experiment, but failed to" examine "them carefully due to the deterioration of their general condition.

One of the two boys who successfully completed the experiment spent eight hours gluing a model of a sailing ship, with a break for food and a walk with the dog. Another (the son of my acquaintances - research assistants) first disassembled and systematized his collections, and then transplanted flowers. Neither one nor the other experienced any negative emotions during the experiment and did not notice the emergence of "strange" thoughts.

Having received such results, I, frankly, got a little scared. Because a hypothesis is a hypothesis, but when it is confirmed like this … But we must also take into account that not everyone took part in my experiment, but only those who became interested and agreed.

Ekaterina Murashova

Protecting children's rights or nurturing selfishness

I met this demotivator on the Internet and I remembered that one of my colleagues, when accepting families with "difficult" children, always asks the same question: does the child have any household chores? General household chores do not include cleaning your room or completing school homework. It is about working not for oneself, but for the good of the whole family. The answer is most often perplexedly negative. In families in which everything is more or less well, the picture is exactly the same.

“He's already busy all the time. School in the morning, swimming in the evening,”the parents say. They can be understood, they want the child not to strain for unnecessary reasons, they are ready to give everything for the sake of his development, his future success. And the child, meanwhile, gets used to living only for himself.

After all, all his activity is aimed only at improving the quality of his life.

I remember when we were kids we all had our responsibilities. Someone washed the dishes, someone had to clean the apartment. It was not only in my family that way. So it was in the families of my classmates and friends in the yard.

But now, household chores have suddenly become something that children need to be protected from. The reason for this is the new ideology of “protecting the rights of children” that has already come to us on the planet. Our parents were very confused by this meme. We began to use this expression so actively that we forgot that children should also have responsibilities.

Meanwhile, work - one that is not for the benefit of oneself, but for others - is one of the most important factors in moral education. For example, the famous domestic teacher Vasily Aleksandrovich Sukhomlinsky believed that if a child learned to work for other people and this brought him joy, then he could not become an evil person.

“Childhood should not be a constant holiday; if there is no labor stress that is feasible for children, the happiness of labor remains inaccessible to the child … the wealth of human relations is revealed in labor,”he said.

If a person is not accustomed from childhood, does not know how to take care of someone, then how will he take care of his children?

The Japanese proverb speaks, of course, not only of material poverty, but also of spiritual poverty. The words from it echoes with the words of another great Russian teacher Konstantin Dmitrievich Ushinsky, who wrote that "education, if it wants happiness for a person, should not educate him for happiness, but prepare him for the work of life." He believed that one of the most important goals of upbringing is the development of a child's habit and love for work.

The habit of work will not appear on its own. As well as the ability to feel responsible and care for others. All these things are acquired only through education. From early childhood. And who can be raised according to the patterns of our child defenders (who mainly protect children from their parents)?

Here is a story I heard recently from a mother. She also brings up her children in the spirit of protection from all kinds of stress. Once she, having completely wrapped herself up with her one-year-old child, with despair turned to her eldest fifteen-year-old daughter with the words: “You see how tired I am, because I work and with the child all the time. Didn't you ever have a desire to help me somehow, to do something around the house ?!"

The daughter replied: "Mommy, you know, it's not in my nature." When Mom finished her story, she had a bitter smile on her face.