During adolescence, peers become increasingly important and parents become steadily less important. Adolescents strive for independence and autonomy from their parents – cutting the apron strings. This can be a very stressful time as Blos claimed that adolescents tend to overreact to parental authority and as they are at pains to assert their individuality. This involves a shift from parent-oriented relationships to pee-oriented relationships. Blos’ view that separation is needed for healthy development has been described as out of date by Wade et al. This criticism is supported with evidence. 65 mothers- daughter pairs in the USA and Britain and found that most adolescent girls said that the person they felt close to was their mother. Minor quarrels did exist but they were actually to build on relationships not to break them. Paikoff and Brooks- Gunn found that the number of arguments about dress and …show more content…
This gives us an indication of whether all cultures experience adolescence in the same way. If this is the case it would tend to indicate that the storm and stress experienced at adolescence is something that is purely down to nature, while if differences are found between cultures then it would indicate that nurture is what determines whether it is storm or stress or something less turbulent. This notion was introduced by Shaffer (1993) who claimed that in some cultures there is no adolescent period. For example, the St Lawrence Eskimos have no prolonged phase of development. There is just a moment of change when a child becomes an …show more content…
He studied the Samoan’s in the 60’s/ 70’s. Freeman claimed that Mead only saw what she wanted to see as she hadn’t actually been that close to the Samoan people. She may not have developed a trusting relationship between herself and the tribal members. E.g. the girls may not have trusted Mead enough to tell her about their sexual experiences. However, Freeman argues that some of the girls lied about their sexual experiences to Mead as found out later by interview. But due to society’s openness on sexual issues such as virginity the tribe had labelled these girls as virgin and would have known if the girls were