Puberty refers to the period during which an individual becomes capable of sexual reproduction. It is a collective term to refer to all the physical changes that occur in the growing girl or boy as the individual passes from childhood into adulthood.
The physical changes of puberty are triggered byhormones, chemical substances in the body that act on specific organs and tissues. In boys a major change incurred during puberty is the increased testosterone, a male sex hormone , while girls experience increased production of the female hormone estrogen. In both sexes a rise in growth hormone produces the adolescent growth spurt, the pronounced increase in height and weight that marks the first half of puberty. These details of these changes are given in coming forth lessons.
Cognitive transition:
A second element of the passage through adolescence is a cognitive transition. Compared to children, adolescents think in ways that are more advanced, more efficient and generally more complex. This is evident in five distinct areas of cognition:
Adolescent’s thinking is more advanced because they can think abstract concepts and ideas where as during late childhood their thinking is limited to concrete concept and ideas. Adolescents are able to consider what they observe against a backdrop of what is possible.
They can think hypothetically. For example adolescents find it easier than children to comprehend the sorts of higher- order, abstract logic inherent in puns, proverbs, metaphors and analogies. The adolescent’s greater facility with abstract thinking also permits the application of advanced reasoning and logical processes to social and ideological matters. This is clearly seen in the philosophy, religion and morality topics that involve such abstract concepts as friendship, faith, democracy, fairness and honesty.
Improvement in meta cognitive abilities(an increased introspection and self-consciousness)preoccupation with the self. Acute adolescent egocentrism sometimes leads teenagers to believe that others are constantly watching and evaluating them. Psychologists refer to this as the imaginary audience. provide important intellectual advantages, one potentially negative byproduct of these advances is the tendency for adolescents to develop a sort of egocentrism or intense
Thinking tends to become multidimensional, rather than limited to a single issue. Whereas children tend to think about one aspect at a time, adolescents describe themselves and others in more differentiated and complicated terms and find it easier to look at problems from multiple perspectives. They are able to understand that people's personalities are not one-sided or that social situations can have different interpretations, depending on one's point of view, permits the adolescent to have far more sophisticated and complicated relationships with other people.
They see things as relative, rather than absolute. They are more likely to question others' assertions and less likely to accept “facts" as absolute truths. This makes the parents feel that their adolescent children question everything just for the sake of argument.
Social Transition
One of the important aspects of the social transition into adolescence is the increase in the amount of time individuals spend with their peers. Although relations with age-mates exist well before adolescence, during the teenage years they change in significance and structure. There is a sharp increase during adolescence in the sheer amount of time individuals spend with their peers and in the relative time they spend in the company of peers versus adults.
Secondly, during adolescence, peer groups function much more often without adult supervision than they do during childhood and more often involve friends of the opposite sex.
Finally, children's peer relationships are limited mainly to pairs of friends and relatively small groups-three or four children at a time. But adolescence marks the emergence of larger groups of peers or crowds. Crowds are large collectives of similarly stereotyped individuals who may or may not spend much time together.
One of the most important social transitions that take place in adolescence concerns the emergence of sexual and romantic relationships. More adolescents have experience in mixed-sex group activities like parties or dances than dating and more have experience in dating than in having a serious boyfriend or girlfriend.
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