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Unit 6 Discussion
Your active participation in Discussion Boards is critical to the development of your understanding of the main concepts studied in this unit. Further, posting detailed responses allows your professor to guide your thinking and your classmates to respond to your ideas. Please participate as early in the week as possible, and be sure to share your thoughts and ideas as often as you can throughout the unit.
Respond to the Discussion topic below. Your original response should be at least 350 words and should reflect the fact that you have completed the assigned Readings for the week. Remember, this is your chance to illustrate not only your understanding, but also your mastery of the materials for the unit. Use your words wisely so the posting has substance and includes examples and explanations. Limit the use of direct quotes, and do your best to critically evaluate and synthesize the literature in your own words wherever possible. Make sure to include in-text citations and a reference list as appropriate.
In this unit’s Discussions, you will work to integrate developmental theory to practice by exploring typical adolescent development and the issues faced by them.
Discussion Topic
Read the scenario below and use your understanding of adolescent social, cultural, and cognitive development to respond to the questions. Try to evaluate the main problem in the scenario and then use any of the theories or concepts from your Reading to support your response. Be sure you have read the article by Dahl before responding to this Discussion Board.
Scenario: Manny
You work as a psychologist in a substance abuse agency and treat adolescents who are alcoholics. Your new client, Manny, is a 14-year-old Hispanic male who lives with his grandmother in a two-room apartment in a poor section of the city. He is physically small for his age and seems to struggle with academic skills (he is functionally illiterate according to the intake assessor). When asked why he drinks, he simply looks at his shoes and shrugs. In fact, he really does not provide much information about anything, which you know is typical of most adolescents. You have noticed that he does become animated when you ask about his grandmother, music, and cars. He was arrested for public drunkenness and assigned to your outpatient treatment program as part of his rehabilitation.
In this session, he finally tells you more about himself and his troubles. He tells you that he has not attended his classes at the high school (he is a freshman) in over 2 weeks. Now, he is afraid to return because he thinks that he will be in trouble and that they may not allow him to return. He says that he realizes that getting an education will help him to leave his neighborhood someday for a better life. He wants to know what to do.
- Given what you know about adolescent development, assess Manny’s main problems. Predict which of the problems might worsen without proper intervention and support your ideas using the concepts/theories from your Readings.
Create a short dialogue of what you would say to Manny to help him to identify his real problem. Then, guide him towards understanding what the real problem for him is, focusing on how his biological development might be interfering with his social development
