Talking about boys and girls.

1. RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN BOYS AND GIRLS

2. What is adolescence?
Adolescence is a stage of discovery, mistakes, thought,
and back and forth development.
How do adolescents interact?
Their sociability patterns depend upon social status or gender
issues.
Nowadays, adolescents clearly show new thinking as compared
to those of other times, but they both have some common
features.

3. What happens in adolescence?
It is a stage of contradictory behaviour: desire to be
independent and refusal to take responsibility for the
own actions; refusal of adult values, demands for
freedom at times disproportionate, mood swing, etc.
Parents often feel puzzled and lost, let alone the
adolescents themselves.

4. What happens in adolescence? (2)
Parents set the role model to their
children for dealing with their own
affective relationships. Adolescents
are inexpert and passionate when
they deal with their relationships
and need to experiment, especially
in their first love relationships.
While wishing to be “different” to
their parents, they still recreate the
role models they have been seeing
in their family without even
realising it.

5. Myths adolescents still believe in
Domestic violence is also present in teenage couples. The myth
of romantic love fuels the perception of gender inequality within
partner relationships and adds to the submissiveness of girls.

6. Romantic love myth
• Total surrender to the partner .
• The partner becomes the only reason for living.
• Extreme feelings of happiness or suffering.
• Dependence upon the partner and self-alienation for the sake of
adapting to them.
• Forgiveness and justification of everything
in the name of love.
• Devotion to the partner’s well-being.
• Regard of the relationship as
the most cherished thing.
• Despair at the only thought of the
partner’s disappearance.

7. Myths spreading romantic love
Cinema, television, songs, videogames, advertising or
the Internet fuel the idea of romantic love, persuading
us that non-romantic relationships are not true love.

8. Lack of education in affective relationships
• It is normal to love and be loved, but nobody teaches
us what a relationship should look like.
• We learn by means of observing our environment:
the way our parents and friends interact with their
partners, etc…
• As adolescents and young people, we are learning
how to mingle in an affective relationship...

9. Types of relationships between adolescents
School relationships:
At school, we adolescents go through many situations, from extreme
popularity to bullying or harassment, the latter referring to any kind of
physical, verbal or psychological mistreatment. In this case, the victims are
usually children approaching adolescence (12-13 years old), with a slight
prevalence of girls.

10. Friendship relationships
Friends give adolescents the opportunity to develop problem-solving skills.
Friends promote fun and thrill with their company and amusement.
Adolescents with no friends tend to feel more lonely and unhappy, and they
usually show worse academic performance and lower self-esteem. As they
grow older, they are more prone to drop out of school and engage in criminal
activities.

11. Love relationships
As a result of their sex drive and the imitation of adult
behaviour, adolescents begin to interact in affective
relationships.
This also has some positive consequences for their development,
such as learning to interact with people of the opposite sex,
having fun hanging around with new people, or experimenting
new things.

12. Same-sex couples:
• Despite the recent progress in gay and lesbian rights in
countries like ours, many woman still hide their lesbian
relationships away from society, in a private sphere of
intimacy and desire.

13. Problems with the Internet and their impact in
teenage relationships
IT devices, including smartphones, develop at a vertiginous pace.
Little by little, without even realising it, we are leaving SMS texts
behind in favour of one of the most popular activities among
teenage smartphone users: WhatsApps. Adolescents have given
up hanging around in the streets and they now kill the time with
their computers, consoles or smartphones.

14. Problems with the Internet (2)
Cyberbullying implies intimidating an individual or a
group. It is an internet adaptation of well-known
bullying, with the purpose of causing emotional anxiety
or concern.
Sexting refers to sending erotic or pornographic
contents through mobile phones. The term started
referring to sexual SMS texts.

15. Sexism in adolescence
Six out of ten girls receive messages with sexist insults from their
boyfriends and friends through calls, WhatsApp and Tuenti.
The age of the first partner relationship has dropped to 13 in
Spain, which is one of the factors that can explain the rise of
mistreatment of ever-younger girls.

16. Problems to mingle with
others
Usually, this kind of problems start at an early
age. What we have learnt of relationships as we
grew up, the way we have been treated and our
observation of attitudes eventually resulted in a
given behaviour. We take this as normal and
struggle to change.

17. Sex-role education
From an early age, men and women are brought up
differently according to their gender, which comes at
a cost. In adolescence, it almost always causes
problems in teenage relationships. Boys will treat girls
in a superior and controlling way, and girls will
consent to it or even think they could be happy that
way. Thus, sexist early upbringing results in the sexist
society we are currently living in.

19. Videos about the topic
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Iq4dooOEQGI
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=0y9zJ5J2bWA

20. Goal: EQUALITYEQUALITY