Skeletal growth is marked in long bone and joint plates. Bone and skeletal attachment damage can easily occur, suggesting less zealous sports would be appropriate.

Hormones change the body's ratio of fat to muscle and providing of sense of strength.

If physiological change is rapid the child will feel clumsy and awkward - may be.

Boys take divergent paths with self care. Athletes tend to be conscious of diet and health, even consumed at times, while others may see attention to diet as being "babied".

Girls also have a change in food consumption. A slim body is a national mental picture and many girls embark upon poor eating practices interchanged with crash diets and pills.

This age marks a new tension in harmonizing the past with hope for the future.

Dreams may be so portent that reality and being real seem shadowy and unimportant.

Boasting of prowess - especially around peer becomes a typical way to mask inadequacy and feelings of insecurity.

The child might be be summed up as "I am what I imagine myself to be."

The student is often overwhelmed with the chaos and restructuring, so rules and expectations become onorous and area negated as "nothing but social notions."

The ideological pursuit for personal belief system is littered with parental parameters and demands, peer belief and a sense of powerlessness to change life.

Often this leads to actions of overthrow or unwilling adherence to "shoulds " and "oughts."

Simple expectations, worked out with the student and adhered to consistently give the most safety and provide ritual as a safety net.

The peers are the important referent fore a youngster.

Belonging and being accepted take on looming proportions.

The "pre-adult" child tends to resent parental limits and frequently rebels.

Running away or escaping becomes commonplace. It may be a symbolic tuning out, a physical act, substance or sex abuse.

Preoccupation with and oversensitivity with self, appearance and others' possible awareness of self may literally plague the youngster.

Mood swings and goals may appear to be erratic and out of control.

During the initial period of early adolescence the child is too fractionated to really add depth here.

The latter part of the stage should see a new ability to add dimension to ideas, to think in greater depth and with more "power".

The student often has the ability to construct a formal or logical theory for events which:

1. stands independent of one specific concept
2. considers the addition of new concepts