Importance Of Social Maturity

According to Menninger (1999), emotional maturity includes the ability to deal constructively with reality. Emotional maturity is a process in which the personality is continuously striving for greater sense of emotional health, both intra-physically and intra-personally. Raj (1996) defines social maturity as a level of social skills and awareness that an individual has achieved relative to particular norms related to an age group. Social maturity is a term commonly used in two ways like with reference to the behaviour that conforms to the standards and expectation of the adults and secondly, with reference to the behaviour that is appropriate to the age of the individual under observation. Thus, social maturation permits more detailed perception

Havighurst (1950) has emphasized the importance of attainment of social and emotional maturity by adolescence through his proposed major developmental tasks for adolescence viz., achieving new and more mature relationships with age mates of both sexes, achieving a masculine or feminine social role, achieving emotional independence from parents and adults, preparing for an economic career, and desiring and achieving socially responsible

It is a composite of ideas, feelings and attitudes a person has about him. It includes one 's self esteem sense of personal worth, and one 's sense of who or what one would like to be or one 's ideal self.
The Western concept of the ' 'self ' ', as an individual, entirely separate from its social context and relationships, is relatively a recent development. This does not mean that social influences can be entirely discounted. From the very beginning, psychological theories of the self have recognized how important other people are in influencing the ideas, which we develop of ourselves.
Self-concept reflects how an adolescent evaluates himself or herself in domains (or areas) in which he or she considers success important. Problems and difficulties can lower self-concept; but low self-concept can also cause problems. An adolescent can have a positive self-concept in some domains and a negative self-concept in others. Research also suggests that each individual has a global (or overall) self-concept that reflects how the individual evaluates his or her self-worth as a