How Adolescents Obtain Their Identity

Adolescence is popularly known to be a very tumultuous stage in a person’s life. In the adolescent stage (also coined the identity vs. role confusion stage by theorist Erik Erikson) bodies are changing rapidly, emotions are unfamiliar and unexplainable, and refraining from succumbing to peer pressure is more challenging than ever.

Teenage years can be a challenging time for many individuals. Beginning at the age of 11 through 20, adolescence is defined as a “transitional period in the human life span, linking childhood and adulthood” (Santrock 2009). At this point, the person is no longer a child, but not yet an adult. This makes it a very critical and sensitive time frame for identity formation.

The life pursuits and subjective judgments of many contemporary young people indicate that the transition to adult roles has become so delayed and prolonged that it has spawned a new transitional period extending from the late teens to the mid-to late-twenties, called emerging adulthood. During the college years, young people often refine their approach to forming their own identity. In these years, young people have left adolescence, but most have not yet assumed adult responsibilities. Many have dreams and those are what guides them in their decision making. In the video, 22 year old Casey describes her dream and comments on her identity development. Casey says that she became interested in Psychology in high school during her junior year when she took a psych course. She knew from then on that was what she wanted to do, but she hadn't picked a career yet. Casey said that she picked a career during her first year of graduate school, when she decided on gerontology. She said her happy and active grandparents had a lot to do with picking a career and wanting to work with the population. Casey thinks her identity was a gradual process and it's only really formed since last year. She feels her parents helped shape her morals and beliefs, but in between her senior year and her first year of graduate school, she started to form her own and integrated some of her own ideas. 24 year old Elizabeth and 25 year old Joel are shown discussing

As young people progress through the adolescent stage they begin to view the world and themselves very differently than as they did a few years earlier. They become more intellectual. In the later stages of adolescence young people become less concerned about their appearance and social acceptance and more concerned about worldly issues and "who they really are." From the required text I have learned that by late adolescence, most teenagers think of themselves in terms of enduring traits, beliefs, personal philosophy, and moral standards. As they get older, children and adolescents define themselves less and less by what they look like and more and more by what they believe or feel (Child and Adolescent Behavior, pg. 196).

One of the theorists to investigate the development of identity would be Erik Erikson. According to Erikson (1968), throughout an individual’s life-span, they experience conflicts. These conflicts arise at certain points in life and need to be successfully resolved for the progression in to the next of Erikson’s eight stages (Sigelman & Rider, 2015). The specific stage relevant to the development of identity formation in adolescence would be the ‘identity versus role confusion’ stage. Identity development involves exploring options and making commitments to obtain a relatively stable self-perception (DeHaan & MacDermid, 1996). In contrast, role confusion occurs when individuals are not able to commit specific life choices (DeHaan & MacDermid,

Every public school lunch room is filled with many tables, every day these tables are the perfect place for a student to find where they “belong”. Like Beverly Daniel Tatum states in “Why Are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”, part of the social groups forming in high schools goes to thank adolescents. Tatum writes, “As children enter adolescence, they begin to explore the question of identity, asking ‘Who am I?’ ‘Who can I be?’”(375). At this point in their life everyone begins to see their own interests and hobbies that makes them a little different than others. Because students are starting to realize their differences, in modern day high schools there are many social groups that students can identify with and feel the most comfortable being themselves.

Culture, ethnicity, family, sexuality, and society are all factors that can influence a person’s identity. A combination of all these elements usually result in the successful discovery of self-identity. Preadolescents and adolescents often find themselves in a constant battle attempting to find who they are or who they want to be. Adolescents are faced with questions like, What do you want to be when you grow up? What colleges are you looking into? What are your plans after high school?. In a normal process of growth, teens experiment with new activities in order to find their identity, but this is not the case for every teen. Some adolescents do not go through the normal process of experimentation for various reasons.

“Identity Development “ Identity is most simply defined as a person's own sense of self; their personal sense of who they are. Identity development is intrinsically linked with adolescence because, according to John Santrock author of the book entitled Adolescence 15th edition, "...for the first time, physical, cognitive, and socio-emotional development advance to the point at which the individual can sort through and synthesize childhood identities and identifications to construct a viable path toward adult maturity.” We often see the results of this sorting process in behaviors of adolescents such as adopting and shedding different personas, including speech patterns, clothing styles and peer groups. Although these transitions

As adolescents go through an identity crisis, they are able to “discover themselves”. They can also discover occupations, religion, etc. by organizing their needs, abilities, talents, interests, background, culture, and peer demands. This allows them to figure out what they like and help figure out their expectations on topics. In doing this, they are able to figure out their identity.

High school is the most important time for teenagers and it is the time where they grow and learn to think differently about their self. If we could recall back to any films that has been made from the past years for example, Cyberbully, Mean girls, Cassi and vise versa, we could see that this these films focus on teenagers concerning about identity and their self; whether popularity that boost their confidence, and bullying. However, this paper will be about the observation conducted at McDonald’s; the first part of the essay will focus on the environment, secondly, the adolescent’s physical characteristic, then social skills, language skills, and behavior. The essay will continue on discussion about some possible programs that should be created to help middle adolescents or teenagers with identity issues; because identity affects all categories of development.

A person adolescent experience shape there identity as a person by the way they are raised. People tend to act different depending on how their parents treated them. If your parents were always their for you and helped you through the hard times, then you will most likely grown up a good well behaved person. If your parents were always there for you, then you might end up as someone who doesn’t care much about life or anything else. It just depends on how you were raised. Some people that are really smart, probably had parents that didn’t put up with B’s or C’s. Average people that you might see working at a business office, probably had parents that just didn’t want to see F’s.

The formation of a concrete sense of self is one of the milestones of adolescence. However, this task is anything but easy. The teenage years are full of turmoil and changes that can have a detrimental affect on a girl's sense of identity and

Identity: At this stage adolescents establish their sexual identity, and their desire to be part of a society and fit in.

In today’s day and age, there’s a common problem that each teenger inevitably faces along the way through adolescence. We try to find out who we are and what we want to become, but this is becoming ever more difficult. Nowadays in the age of technology, we have thousands of people around that rub off on us one way or the other. We have all of these influences around us, most of whom are either non-beneficial or unattainable. These, along with the ever-present peer pressure, make us become someone that’s far away from who we really are, something that we should attempt to move on from. It seems like today the overwhelming question for teenagers is should they put on a fake persona for the sake of being accepted or live every day unfiltered at the risk of being scrutinized?

The challenge to adjust to high school life usually corresponds to other moments of development in the adolescent’s life with such changes taking place which include puberty and related concern about body image, changes in social cognition, increased responsibility and decreased dependency on parents (Santrock, 2016). These changes were observed in my teen through certain reports such as how at 13 she was nervous about the transition to high school and worried that her friendships would change. She also experienced physical changes and concern about her body image as at age 14 she expressed being teased about having a flat chest and requesting new kinds of bras to remedy this. This body concern also came as she began gaining some weight during puberty making her refuse to wear certain clothes that she felt accentuated her weight problem. These reports show that this newfound concern about body image that was developed is so significant to adolescents that it tends to