| Abstrakt: |
The article focuses on the adolescents' perceptions of time and the effect of age, sex, and social class. Younger adolescents reveal less realistic attitudes about time and especially about the future. Moreover, they show less concern with knowledge of historical time than older adolescents. It is often reported that a major difference between these classes is the latter's inability to delay gratification and hence transform present activities into preparations for some later time. Presumably, by delaying gratification, middle-class persons develop a sense of how the past, present, and future interrelate. By contrast, lower class persons are said to perceive the future as just another present waiting its time. According to sex role differentiation theory, instrumental, upgrading, or achievement orientations require men to de-emphasize interpersonal dependencies and essentially disaffiliate themselves from their families and ultimately their pasts. A real man, at least one from the middle class, learns to make it on his own, while a real woman employs the skills of womanhood learned as a child in the development of her adolescent and adult life. |
