Using Psychosocial Theories on Life Stories

Introduction

Jamie is a thirteen year old boy who has joined a neighbourhood secondary school. During the first two months in school, he has exhibited positive behaviours and enthusiasm in class and mixing well with his classmates. In the first few class tests, he had done pretty well. From the third month onwards, he started to not to hand in his homework and results slipped as well. Teachers also began to complain that he had been rude, disturbing his classmates during lessons and occasionally had minor outbursts of anger when being disciplined by teachers. When these happen, he would throw a tantrum and sat at his seat refusing to talk or do any work until the teacher’s lesson is over. With the disturbances made in class, sometimes he will raise questions on lessons or the mistakes of his work but always he refused to accept teachers’ explanations and insisted that his answer was correct as well. One of major clashes which he had was with his Chinese language teacher. As he was doing his journal during Chinese lesson therefore the Chinese language teacher kept the journal and read what he was doing. Jamie was upset as the journal was to be only read by the form teacher and he talked back rudely to her. In subsequent months, Jamie refuses to communicate to the Chinese teacher and apologise for his rudeness.

Due to Jamie’s small stature, sometimes he would be bullied by other boys. The first few times he had retaliated and the bullying stopped. Now, Jamie would often do name calling, taunting or bullying other classmates and they would turn into arguments or nearly physical. Such ‘naughty’ acts gradually escalated into fights and once was caught fighting in class by the discipline master. The final straw was Jamie was caught playing with a lighter behind a particular classroom block during recess time. He insisted that he did not intend to set a fire.

Subsequently, the form teacher called Jamie’s mother and found out that actually Jamie’s father left the...