Hi Shela
Nice meeting you via email. I am a year 1 student of the PsyD program taught by Dr Zelm, and in my early thirties. Currently I am doing research with patients who first experience psychosis in a teaching hospital. I am very happy to have got your email so soon! I was intended to email you yesterday but Dr Zelm said wait a while until your professor has announced about this first.
The idea of talking to real people from a different background on the other side of the world is very exciting indeed!
How would you describe / consider the impact of (i -> iii) in your adolescence?
i) your intellectual growth: any important decision made during your adolescence that you still feel a great impact now?
ii) your parents
iii) your peer (white and black Americans)
Instructions from Dr Zelm:
"Below, you will see that you have been paired with a USA “partner” for this assignment. All students are in the PsyD program, and most are in their first year. They are also taking Lifespan Development on-line with another instructor. They use the same textbook but they have different readings and assignments. They are of all ages (25 to 55 years), level of clinical experience, ethnicity (Caucasian, African American, Asian) and many live far from California, so they are a fairly diverse group. We ask you and your USA partner to initiate e-mail contact during the week of 6 November and to discuss your adolescent experiences, based on your assignment from last week. Both classes have read the same article on the stages of adolescence, and both classes completed the same assignment. "
a. What did you learn about the adolescent experience of your partner?
b. What similarities and differences do you note with your own?
c. If possible based on what you have learned from your partner, consider what might account for these differences, such as: nationality, age, ethnicity/race, gender, socioeconomic status, family relationships.
d. Please comment on this experience – interesting/not interesting, useful/not useful, fun/stressful? Any other comments?
My first partner is an Indian American who was born in India and immigrated to America with her parents when she was one year old. She was raised in America and grew up with Americans peers (White and Black) and had very few Indian peers.
Our parents were quite involved in both of our lives from childhood through adulthood. She experienced this importance in her strong attachment with her parents. She also experienced this importance in her choice of interest and subjects to take during her adolescence. She would rather have a good relationship with her parents and so after a few fights , she gradually grew out of it without their support. Her parents later on felt quite guilty of not being supportive of her in her early teens about drama.
My parents have also been very involved in my life from childhood through adulthood, and in much similar ways as hers: during my adolescence, in my choice of interest and academic subjects that had great implication on my future career. The key difference was that I experienced this as their authority as parents over me as their adolescent child, rather than a sense of strong attachment like my US partner.
I also did not fight much and maintained a harmonious relationship with my parents as much as possible, however, I continued or persevered with my choice quietly, secretly, and delayed its expression until years later. After from those 2 areas, and about religions, my parents did give me much freehand as well regarding choice of friends, and how to spend my time, and can happily tolerate separation for the sake of better education during my adolescence like my US partner.
Both of us were not rebellious in our adolescence, even though due to difference reasons, and this may be due to our cultural background that stress a lot on the importance of family in one’s life. I guess, for my US partner, she is getting the benefits of both cultures, a tradition of close family-ties from Indian culture, and the willingness to overtly express love and affection between family members in the American culture, and that forms her basis of strong attachment with her parents.
For me, my Chinese cultural background formed the basis of me trying to keep a harmonious relationship in the traditional power structure of a Chinese family: parents have the authority as seniors in the family, and children’s role is to obey. That was why I did not rebel overtly with my parents. However, as emotions or affections were not usually expressed between family members, I experience more distance and hierarchy in my child-parent relationship, and so less attachment than my US partner.
I have never realized my lack of attachment with my parents in the midst of such harmonious and trusting relationships within my family. Not until I have this assignments and when I talked with others. I got this impression too from my comparison with my other US partner too. And that is why this has given me a profound impact. I have to re-think again about the impact of my few struggles with my parents and also I have never realized that I am in a child-parent hierarchy inherited from my cultural background and that it does have an impact on my emotional feelings and relationship with my parents.
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My second partner is of English and Irish descent and grew up in a rural community’s lower-middle class family.
I shared with her independence from peer pressure because we both felt not being part of our peer groups, only for different reasons. She felt indifferent to her peer’s existence and like more in her private world. I, too, stayed in my private world, part of it like her because of not being understood, did not share our peer’s interests, like popular music, but I was more because of the alienation I felt from my peers who were mostly in the upper socioeconomic class. My US partner did not felt the impact of social class in social relationships in US.
My alienation also came from the superiority in academic achievements of my peers who came from the upper class family. While there was neither little competition nor challenging work involved in my US partner’s school years, academic merits meant a lot to the students at my secondary school. I felt left alone while my US partner felt indifferent to her peers. I developed my own reliance system, struggling hard to accept my weakness academically but that I had other strengths in more subtle ways, and gradually stayed out of the competition among my student peers. Some of my peers built up strong friendships with me because I came from a different part of the world from them and so there was no obvious competition between us and we can stay quite independent of each other and yet trusting and harmonious with each other.
The difference in our puberty experience is firstly physical, and secondly cultural, I guess. I just happened to have a late, smooth and physically insignificant puberty as compared to my US partner. Diet and genes may contribute to that difference. But the impact of the physical change on our psychological well-being might be very different if I were to go through her traumatic change.
It could be that I came from a cultural background that stress a lot on academic merits and personal achievement, competitively, and where physical appearance, although important to any adolescent, can at most come second, after achievements. I might have less of an impact on my self-perception given my social background and expectation. Personal excellence did had a high impact on my peer relationships during my adolescence, much more than my US partner. I guess this might be better understood as the difference between rural and cosmopolitan upbringing, plus that Asian parents usually put more emphasis on academics than American parents, than purely cultural.
One very nice surprise in this exchange is that I run into somebody who loves Ballet as well. I also danced over 15 years, quitted very reluctantly and felt such a lost of personal identity and emotional attachment too when I quitted it. I have never shared with anybody regarding this lost, as I have always thought that it was a bit obscure and sounds obsessive to me. We wrote at length about the lost and the emotional imbalance we went through. I also found running as a substitute too. In recent years, I tried Flamingo dancing, and she has recently restarted Ballet. We felt more at peace with some kind of dancing even after we had quitted for over a decade now. It brought me such a great relief regarding my lost of Ballet as I can talk with her without the fear of being obscure or what. Only when I put this in writing and have a listening ear, an echoing person, I experience a relief that I had never known of. I never know that I still feel the lost of it, not until I talked with her.
Thank you for the very insightful assignment. It was indeed unexpectedly insightful for me.
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