Working with difficult teenagers - advice from a psychologist

Antisocial teenage behavior is a reflection of the mistakes of adults: parents, teachers. The concept of “difficult” is applied to a child if he is a poor student, more often than others enters into conflicts with peers, teachers, parents, is aggressive, and solves problems with his fists. Children are at risk if there have been cases of theft, lying, or use of psychoactive substances.

Quite often, this behavior of a teenager is caused by a feeling of lack of freedom. This is an internal conflict: “I’m already an adult, but I can’t do anything.” But before drawing specific conclusions and determining appropriate corrective measures, you need to understand the causes of deviant behavior.

Physiological disorders:

Disorders of intrauterine development of the fetus, birth injuries.
Central nervous system disorders, traumatic brain injuries, epilepsy.
Mental disorders.
Puberty disorders.
Mental retardation or borderline illness.

Social reasons:

Family conflicts, parental divorce; large families.
Dysfunctional parents - alcoholism, drug addiction, permissive parenting style, abuse.
Psychological and pedagogical neglect; inadequate style of teaching and education at school; difficult curriculum.

Psychological problems:

Violation of the emotional-volitional sphere.
Non-acceptance of a teenager by the social environment: peers, teachers, parents.
Infantility, immaturity of self-awareness.
Personal crisis, conflict of level of aspirations.

What should teachers do?

First, it is necessary to study the family situation, work with the parents and relatives of the child. Next, you need to explore and understand what the social environment of a difficult teenager is. The class teacher, psychologist and social worker must establish communication with the child and find common ground.

All work with the family and the teenager himself is carried out systematically. The entire teaching staff and parents participate in this work. Having identified the reasons, a plan is drawn up and corrective work is carried out. It includes:

Individual and group consultations, both with children and families.
Trainings, conversations, discussions, role-playing games, psycho-gymnastics, elements of psychodrama.
In some cases, psychoanalysis is possible. This work is carried out by a psychotherapist with special training.
You may need to consult a psychiatrist and prescribe medication after diagnosis.

“Convenient” students and quality of education

It happens that the class consists mainly of obedient, attentive students.
They listen to everything they are told, ask questions on time, nod, and understand everything. “Comfortable” children more easily perceive complex, age-inappropriate, uninteresting information. “Inconvenient” teenagers ask uncomfortable questions, for example: “Why are you telling us this?”, “How will this help us in the future?” and others. The teacher has to carefully think through the lessons. And ultimately improve the quality of education. Therefore, if you have to deal with students who do not “look into their mouths”, but have their own opinions, and who are not so easy to interest in an academic discipline, you have the opportunity to improve your skills right on the job.

A teenager and his problems - the view of science

Experts advise starting psychologist work with teenagers from 11-12 years old.

when there are no obvious problems of mutual misunderstanding or complexes. This age is due to the beginning of powerful psychophysiological transformations of yesterday's child.

At their core, they represent a series of changes in all areas of life:

the volume of acquired knowledge and practical experience increases sharply;
more tough character traits appear: uncompromisingness, determination, increased self-esteem;
the “childish” sense of the world is lost - greater awareness appears, the first elements of responsibility fall on a person’s shoulders;
the reaction to the opinions of others about the actions, thoughts, goals of the young person intensifies, the factor of denial of authority appears, the formation of an “I” takes place, as valuable and significant as that of adults;
sexual self-identification occurs, the self-expression of which may acquire more acute features.

All these processes are aggravated by unstable hormonal levels, which cause a feeling of anxiety, uncertainty, and devaluation of abilities. All this continues until the age of 15-16, sometimes until the age of 19.

Leaving a person who has entered the stage of active maturation alone with problems is a huge mistake. You can lose a valuable member of society due to incorrectly built, often simply destroyed, social communications.

That is why the comprehensive work of a psychologist with difficult teenagers, as well as young men who experience problems with self-cognition and self-acceptance, is extremely important.

Help from a psychologist

The main problem of recreating communications and adequate behavioral lines in adolescents is the non-expression of feelings and emotions that arise against the background of interaction with the outside world, with oneself. Misunderstanding, rejection of one’s own aspirations, fear of being misunderstood by loved ones forces tomorrow’s independent individuals to hide their true “I” under a shell of rudeness, aggression, and ignorance.

Forming the acceptance of the true “I”, the ability to be oneself, to defend one’s interests within the framework of socially acceptable variations are the main tasks of a psychologist or psychotherapist.

What does he teach a teenager:

accept feelings, consider them a normal manifestation, even if they have negative connotations;
express feelings objectively, calmly, without impulsiveness;
understand the motives of parents, accept their feelings and experiences;
take responsibility for actions, feelings, reactions.

Thanks to the methods used, parents and difficult children get the opportunity to look at the situation in the family from the outside. At specialized trainings, they learn to talk about their feelings, desires, express emotions, accept the emotions of other people as they are, without “remaking” the environment to suit their needs.

It is important to understand that correction is required not only by the behavior of the teenager, but also by his parents. In a conflict, both parties are always to blame, therefore, intra-family relationships can only be “cure” by working together on one’s “I”.

Parents must be ready to change themselves, and not just change the child’s character to suit their needs and habits. Thus, a psychologist’s work with a teenage girl prone to aggression will be completely unproductive if parents do not get involved in the process to find the triggers for the child’s inappropriate behavior in themselves.

How to work with difficult teenagers

The origins of juvenile delinquency and delinquency are behavioral deviations that are observed in early childhood. And under a combination of unfavorable circumstances, the child’s growth and development ultimately lead to persistent indiscipline and educational lag. Delayed development, the rule of conformity of behavior, the inability to obey the requirements of relevant activities (play, study) over time grow into an unwillingness to take into account social norms.

The personality characteristics of a child characterized by contradictory development are: firstly, unproductivity, difficulty in educational activities and relationships; secondly, behavioral features:

imitation of negative examples:
reaction of compensation or replacement of one’s failure in activities and relationships with others;
reaction of passion for playing or satisfying other interests and needs to an unreasonable extent;
the reaction of conforming to or submitting to the opinions of others;
reaction of leaving care, deprived of independence;
the presence of an unfavorable family environment.

Thirdly, the dominant negative emotional state disorganizes the child, making him pedagogically difficult.

The most common methods for diagnosing the mental development of children with learning and behavioral difficulties are the following: observing children during school hours, studying each child as an individual in the context of his life conditions, carefully recording various forms of behavior indicating the child’s poor adjustment to school.

The most important thing in diagnosis is to obtain not just a fixation of “lag zones”, the structure of the defect, but a structural analysis of the dynamics of personality formation, in the context of which the place and significance of the defect is determined.

Depending on the main reasons causing negative manifestations in the behavior of school students, psychocorrectional work is carried out.

The first group is represented by adolescents whose educational difficulties are caused by deviations in the development of the emotional-volitional sphere. To identify children requiring medical care, work is carried out based on preliminary hypotheses arising from the analysis of psychological and pedagogical observations and the analysis of relevant psychological and diagnostic techniques.

When working with children who have behavioral deviations for medical reasons, consultations and explanatory work with teachers, parents and classmates are carried out. Correction of individual forms of behavior is also carried out as part of the overall process of treating the child. The class teacher is assisted in finding appropriate ways to include the sick child in the life of the class group.

The second group consists of adolescents whose resistance to the teacher’s demands is caused by incorrect forms of influence of the teacher on the student. Difficulty with education of this kind is situational and adolescents in this group do not need special educational measures. As for the teacher, he needs to reconsider his position and find a way out of the current situation. That is, the teacher needs to take into account when interacting with a teenager:

age characteristics of the student;
the level of family well-being of the student;
show tact to the student;
pay attention to the emotional state of the student;
do not violate the boundaries of what is permitted in the teacher-student relationship;
take into account the student’s status in the class team.

The third group consists of pedagogically neglected children, whose behavior is due to significant gaps in mastering moral and ethical standards and lack of development of moral behavior skills. Such teenagers, due to the lack of control and connivance of adults, violate norms and rules of behavior not because they deny their value, but because:

have not learned to control their behavior;
cannot give up immediate desires for the sake of the need to perform the required action.

In relation to the Ⅲ group of educationally neglected children, work is carried out on the basis of requests regarding children who are suspected of substance abuse, a tendency to alcoholism, leading early sexual activity, participating in informal associations of a criminal nature - noticed in theft, vagrancy, hooliganism.

In each specific case, an analysis of the causes of deviant behavior is carried out in the following areas:

characteristics of the family environment, school;
influence of informal groups;
psychological features of the phenomenon;
as well as the pathopsychological nature of the disorders (Observation chart by D. Stott, Eysenck’s method of express diagnostics of characterological characteristics).

Analysis of the causes of deviant behavior of school adolescents allows us to formulate appropriate mechanisms of pedagogical influence on offenders, conduct consultations with teachers and parents, diagnose the degree of rejection of an individual, identify psychological reasons for isolation, and conduct communication training with their inclusion in a peer group.

If the above methods for correcting a teenager’s behavior do not produce the desired results (for reasons beyond our control), we combine our efforts in the fight against illegal behavior with the juvenile affairs inspectorate.

The fourth group includes adolescents who are actually difficult to educate, whose resistance to pedagogical influences is due to personality changes associated with a distortion of the idea of their relationships with others, a violation of interpersonal relationships. When working with children of this group, a restructuring of moral ideas and personality qualities is required, i.e. re-education.

Teenagers in this group do not accept the teacher’s comments and demands, no matter how fair they may be. They are always confident that they are right and always find justification for even their most unsightly actions. Such teenagers, as a rule, look for the reason for their failures in external circumstances: excessive study loads, unfairness of teachers. As a result, an inadequate attitude of these students towards their educational results is formed, which becomes the reason for their increasing resistance to pedagogical influences aimed at increasing academic performance.

This inadequacy is primarily due to students’ claims to a high assessment of their personal qualities. Difficult-to-educate teenagers do not recognize that they belong to the “bad” category, subjectively equating themselves, in terms of their personal qualities, with good students. The fact that a teenager does not see confirmation of this image of himself from others causes him to feel a sense of protest. Considering himself to be undeservedly underrated (“I am good”), the student begins to show aggression towards those who evaluate them this way. Stubbornness and opposition of one’s behavior to generally accepted norms is a consequence of the inability to achieve the position of a good, fairly successful student. As a result, such a student generally ignores all educational influences that contain negative feedback about him by not accepting what is offered to him, or by directly avoiding communication (truancy, running away from home).

In relation to difficult-to-educate adolescents, it is very important to carry out early diagnosis of deviant behavior in schoolchildren (sociometry, observation chart, personality self-esteem, etc.), which makes it possible to prevent the occurrence of deviant behavior, and also gives the student the opportunity to improve. Otherwise, advanced forms of deviant behavior can lead to personality degradation.

The essence of re-education is not to break the mechanism of psychological defense against negative evaluations, but to help neutralize it. We need to start by changing the student’s system of relationships towards himself and others.

First of all, it is necessary to create an atmosphere of goodwill and emotional support around such a student. This will reduce the student’s tension and wariness in relationships with teachers and classmates, and will also relieve him of the need to turn on his psychological defense mechanisms against negative emotions.

Secondly, it is necessary to include the difficult-to-educate student in the multilateral assessment system (2-3 weeks after the start of re-education work). The essence of the multilateral assessment system is that the student evaluates himself and others himself and is evaluated by others with varying degrees of objectivity, which gives him the opportunity to choose the most adequate assessment standard. All this allows the student to create the impression of freedom from restrictions on the part of an adult, the illusion of independence from the negative assessment of the teacher. For a difficult teenager, the position of the evaluator is unusual and prestigious, which provides an opportunity to encourage him to analyze the results obtained.

Thirdly, it is necessary to organize individual assistance for students who need it, who are lagging behind in their studies in any subjects.

It is best to provide this assistance to chefs - high school students, which turns additional classes into prestigious and attractive ones.

The application of the above system of work of teachers with difficult students within six months makes it possible for a teenager to form an adequate attitude towards his successes and failures, and to establish interpersonal relationships.

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