The State Duma will prepare a bill to toughen punishment for minors for torturing children, as well as their peers. The reason for the innovations was an incident that occurred in one of the districts of Moscow, when a schoolgirl kicked a child while recording a video. The information appeared in Telegram channels and quickly spread across the network. Later, the girls deleted the account, and the capital’s investigative committee opened a criminal case on this issue.
The director of the Institute of Clinical Psychology and Social Work of Pirogov University, Doctor of Psychology, spoke to aif.ru about teenage aggression and what measures can be used in such situations. Sc., professor Vera Borisovna Nikishina.
The pursuit of popularity at the intersection of digital and non-digital reality
According to the expert, the motives of power and fame are powerful regulators of human behavior. These stimuli have a greater impact on the unformed psyche than on an adult. We know dozens of sad stories when teenagers threaten their own lives and health because of the desire for popularity, and, unfortunately, it is even easier to commit such actions in relation to another person. Vera Borisovna emphasizes that it is not only a matter of motivation for such behavior, but also the absence of social boundaries. This is not so much a problem for teenagers themselves as it is for adults who must help children set these boundaries. Another nuance is that now the psyche of children and adolescents is formed in the interaction of two realities – digital and non-digital. A long stay in the digital environment changes the level of awareness: a teenager considers only what is recorded in the content to be real. It turns out that the actions to form this content are practically not amenable to critical processing. If the goal is something that makes it possible to stand out and express itself, then the teenager does not apply critical thinking to his actions, this is the main problem.
Disproportionate aggression in adolescence
The aggression program and the fear program are two competitive programs that are built into our brains at a basic level. They are present in every person from the earliest stages of development in varying degrees and degrees. The basic regulations for their existence are determined by two strategies. The first situation is when a child lives in a lot of fear, and this program is highly activated. Then the inevitable consequence will be a transition to a program of aggression. Children and adolescents who are afraid a lot are stimulated by this program from the social environment, which leads to aggressive behavior. The second strategy occurs in cases where there is no fear program. This is pseudo-social fearlessness, which is justified by the widespread attitude: nothing will happen to you for this, because you are a minor, you are a child, and you can do anything. Such suppression of the fear program leads to involuntary aggressive forms of behavior of adolescents in the digital social environment. The aggression program begins to control behavior not only in situations that do not exclude the possibility of such a reaction, but also in those cases where no negative response is expected.
Relationships between brothers and sisters within the family
Reliable statistics on the prevalence of aggressive and violent methods of interaction between siblings – children of the same parents – especially in the elder-younger hierarchy do not currently exist. However, the main condition for the emergence of such relationships is the lack of social control on the part of adults, conniving behavior and ignoring children’s complaints. The methods of aggressive influence that parents themselves use also play an important role. Here we encounter the following attitude: if a parent shows aggression towards a child, then he will receive an aggressive response initially to the one who is nearby and weaker – to the younger brother or sister. Only then will this transfer manifest itself in child-parent relationships.
Recommendations for parents
Vera Borisovna emphasizes that in such situations, it is very difficult to give general recommendations, because they do not take into account specific situations. However, the fact that parents bear full responsibility for the quality of their children’s relationships in the family is an indisputable fact. It is adults who control the factors that influence the nature of relationships. For example, it is important to maintain a constant equal distribution of adult attention between children. In this case, priority may vary during the day or over a certain period, but with obligatory comments on why the parent is now paying more attention to one child than to the other. The value of the attitude towards each child should be spoken out many times. If an adult believes that he shows the child his value by saying the word “I love” once and by what he does for him, this parent is in illusion and delusion. This form is not always obvious to children.
Source: aif.ru