From the author: This article was written for the website of the Psychological Studio of Elena Skripka. Psychological neoplasms are psychological and social changes that appear in a person over a certain period of time; as a rule, the periods are age-related stages of development. “It’s a difficult age, unbearable, conflicting, incomprehensible...”..... “He has become completely different”, “this is not my child”…. You most often hear these sad definitions about teenagers... My experience at school showed one interesting thing. Every day I heard phrases about the difficulties of teenagers, their inability to learn and, oh horror!, uncontrollable independence. … Every day, out of professional necessity, I plunged into the teenage world in order to emerge from it and help them build a bridge to the world of adults, parents and teachers. I remember a conversation that time with a mathematics teacher. She was sitting in the teachers' lounge on a leather sofa, wrapped in an Orenburg scarf, reminding me of the heroine of Soviet films. After another lesson with eighth-graders, sadly looking ahead, a teacher with many years of experience said in a depressed voice: “I’m so tired... I absolutely don’t understand how to behave with them.” It should be noted that her contact with children was objectively good. But it happens - even if you have experience in living, raising or simply teaching teenagers, communicating with them at times feels like walking through a minefield. And if you try to look into the soul of a teenager from the position of an outside observer and try to understand what makes a teenager the way he usually is does he introduce himself? The word “perestroika” is well applicable to adolescence (11-15 years old). The body is rebuilt, the intellectual sphere develops and the social situation of development changes radically. Serious transformations of the inner world accompany a high school student throughout the entire age period. The central psychological new formation of adolescence is the emerging sense of adulthood. He already refuses to perceive himself as a child, defending the right to be considered equal to teachers and parents. Latently feeling material and psychological dependence on them, the teenager fiercely demands sovereignty, respect for personal territory and acceptance of his values. He still does not have enough resources for real adult activities, so he compensates for his desire with “external adulthood” - clothes “a la adult”, excessive interest in topics of sex, alcohol, smoking, demonstrative behavior in the hope of covering up his immaturity of personality. A teenager is different. looks at the world like a child. Abstract thinking is rapidly developing, and yesterday's junior high school student begins to analyze the situation in a new way. A characteristic feature is the separation of content and form; in other words, the teenager operates with cause-and-effect relationships regardless of the specific task, discovering patterns and beginning to think about possible options for the development of events. It turns out that it is possible for him to construct life plans and goals. Continuing the topic of neoplasms of adolescence, I would like to draw attention to the change in the social connections of a teenager at this time. Parents cease to be authorities, and the influence of the family is replaced by the influence of a group of peers who act as carriers of the criteria of social norms and rules of behavior. The community of peers appears as a model of society in which the desire to take a worthy place is more valuable than relationships with relatives. A teenager’s self-esteem largely depends on the perception of himself through the prism of his immediate environment and the correlation of his recognized qualities with external criteria. All this, coupled with a sense of adulthood, pushes him to an important change in self-awareness. At the end of adolescence, having gone through the dark times of personal instability and searches, he forms a system of ideas about himself - the “I-concept”. A teenager can already answer the question about his social role - who am I? Thus, based on the developing».