Gender identity examples of adolescents deprived of parental care

Ideals or summarized images that influence on the process of self-determination, development of one's own identities are an important element of self-consciousness in adolescence. Comprehension and experience by the individual of his/her sex identity supposes having ideals, etalons of masculine and feminine images, models of masculinity and femininity. Parents and family play a huge role in gender identification of the adolescent. Children deprived of parental care experience double trauma; on the one hand, this is negative experience of family upbringing, on the other - the fact of separation from the family. Non-critical perception of similar patterns of behavior in absence of significant examples of a positive system of values in close environment of the child complicates development of appropriate gender identification. For an adolescent brought-up without a family, in the conditions of orphanages, it is impossible to create conditions for identification that fully reproduce family identification. The knowledge about home the child gets and examples of behavior s/he is given are often formal and cannot cause emotional subjective attitude. We attempted to model these images from re-sponders of two age groups: 1) 11-13 y.o. adolescents, 2) 14-15 y.o. teenagers. To reach the aim of the research, we used the method ''Island'' directed at distinguishing the referent group of persons who the children see as ideals, examples for identification. The analysis resulted in the following conclusions: age differentiation of examples, reflection on ideals in the surrounding social life and culture show that consciousness becomes more complex, reaches the level of values, which may be considered as possibilities for adolescents deprived of parental care of conscious self-determination and construction of their own identity. In transition from sense to value consciousness in the social situation of development, the role of referent persons for assessment and identification of gender behavior is reinforced. For adolescents deprived of parental care such persons are representatives of show business, authoritative adults, and friends. Difficulties of development of ideas about gender examples for social orphans are conditioned by their figural consciousness, their narrow cognitive sphere, limited access to the world of culture and social relations, insignificance of gender problems. Girls have more varied, less stereotypic examples of gender identification than boys, which indicates their flexible perception of gender roles. Girls are more oriented at adults as bearers of cultural variants of gender behavior than boys. For many boys authoritative examples of masculinity are friends, which promotes limitedness and stereotypization of their gender behavior. Boys demonstrate reflexive possibilities less than girls . Their ideas about examples of masculinity and femininity are stereotypical and reduced, which may indicate material consciousness, their limited meaning sphere where gender meanings are not significant. Children had difficulties answering questions regarding accepted and refused examples of feminine and masculine behavior, which may be caused by insignificance of gender differentiation in the value space of children and adolescents, by negative experience associated with qualities of masculinity and femininity or its absence in lives of adolescents. It has been identified that space of social relations and culture for identification of gender behavior of social orphans is limited and spontaneous, which indicates a necessity of development of specially organized psychological-pedagogical conditions with account for features of consciousness at the stages of transition from material to sense and from sense to value in development of gender ideas.

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