Bronfenbrenner and Adolescence

My adolescent experience that fits with Bronfenbrenner's description of an ecological transition is really not very unusual. One thing that made it so decisive for my life was that my childhood was also not very unusual. It was a normal American childhood in typical American "nuclear" family. I grew up eating almost every meal with my family, in what is considered a pretty old-fashioned way. There was the extended family visiting back and forth with doting grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The public school system I went to was also perfectly good. We went to church every Sunday and every Wednesday night, and during the late summer my brother and sister and I went to a month of Vacation Bible School during the day. During the early summer, the family went on vacations, always by car, to the destination of the year. Sometimes this would be a national park or camping, and usually it would be on the way t

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the system, and each layer represents a kind of relationship between the child as self and the content of that layer as the other. As the layers move outward from the center, the child's relationship becomes progressively more impersonal (and more institutional/bureaucratic) influences. The content of the relationship at each level seems to be the ecological health of the child's environment; the less healthful the ecology, the more likely the child's development and functioning throughout the system layers is to suffer. At the core of this sphere is of course the child himself, who is not categorized by Bronfenbrenner but who can be thought of as the organism system. Encircling the organism is the first layer, the microsystem, the name given to the "immediate environment," or network of intimate relationships; examples given are family, school, doctors, peers, neighborhood, church group (Bronfenbrenner, p. 643). The divorce of my parents upset the microsystem stability of my life, and it changed my relationships at school and church when I had to get work to help my mother financially. The relevance of the personal transition that I made is best expressed in connection with the fact that because there was no longer any father-br
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Approximate Word count = 2970
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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