The Normative Development of the Adolescent

This chapter discusses the normative development of the adolescent. As members of a society, adolescents are confronted with values, norms, usages, traditions, customs, and religious beliefs. Society also lays down guidelines, principles, rules, and norms expressing its conceptions of right and wrong, proper and improper and good and evil. One of the main tasks of adolescents is to develop a personal value system. The cognitive ability of adolescents to formulate, examine and draw inferences from hypotheses, and to think abstractly, enables them to reflect on and form a rational opinion about alternative values and religious practices. Normative development is a core element of an adolescents' overall development and it involves their conative life. Adolescents become increasingly competent at focusing their will on the initiation and completion of intentional actions in an independent and responsible way. Normative maturity is based on consciously applied religious principles according to which good and evil are evaluated and behaviour is regulated. It is immaterial whether the religious sensibility underlying a person's behaviour is centred on or directed against godhead.