Adolescents and Secrecy

You know (referring to all three of my readers), every so often I run across an article that gets my mind going. The reason I say that it's only "every so often" is because much of what I read seems to be repetitive; therefore, when I come across something that really catches my interest I like to talk about it.

In my job for the University I have the unending privilege to review dozens of student responses per week online. Most of them include article reviews. Today, I read one that reviewed an article on the correlation between parent invasion with adolescents and adolescent secrecy. It indicated that there is a positive correlation between the two behaviors. In other words, the more parents pry with their adolescents, the higher the chance that the adolescent will engage in acts of secrecy. Now, I did not follow through with reading what types of secrecy, so in the case of my comments that will not be addressed. It wasn't so much the results of the study that intrigued me or got me thinking. It was more the idea of why an adolescent feels or believes that secrecy must be used when a parent asks "what is going on?" Moreover, I would want to know what type of interaction the parents had with the child long before they progressed into adolescence and how that interaction played into the adolescents' perceived need for secrecy? What was being taught in the home? What kinds of principles were encouraged and modeled for them? Now, I do understand that a child, once they grow into an adolescent is trying to build an identity. Erik Erikson was very clear on that with his psychosocial stages of development. I am also not implying that if a child is taught principles of transparency and integrity that they won't "experiment" when they become an adolescent. That happens! I am simply curious what happened before the child became an adolescent and what would be considered statistically significant if deeper research were done.

My thoughts may seem archaic and maybe even a little outdated, but as a mental health clinician, and as a father myself, I prefer the idea that if you teach children and even adolescents correct principles to live by, then the likelihood of inter and intrapersonal integrity is increased. I do know that there are those out there that follow evolutionary and developmental models who might disagree with me. They may say that it is part of an adolescent's developmental and genetic make-up to experiment and make mistakes and that it is only by those mistakes that they will learn. Because I have only three readers or maybe even three-hundred, I argue that it is not necessary, but it does happen. One can learn how to live with integrity without the need for secrecy. Those are just my thoughts.

Dr Law