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Personal Narrative: The Identity Of Adolescents

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Looking back at how my own mother raised me, she encouraged a large amount of independence with my siblings and I. She instilled within us the general expectation that the only individual that will ever be responsible for our lives is us. She could only hold our hand and guide us through so much, when it came to getting a job, being successful and figuring out who we are, that was completely up to us. This was a method very similar to the way that she was raised, and also to how my grandmother was raised. Based on these principles, I walked through life with the idea that this was how everyone was raised. However, I was to discover later in life that this was not the case. In an almost opposite spectrum in which I was raised, there emerged …show more content…

Patricia Somers and Jim Settle offer some insight to the potential causes for helicopter parents and what has taken ahold of this generation to cause this ugly problem to rear its head up. They indicate that it is due to a cultural change that occurred during the time of most young college students parents or grandparents were born, known as the generation of, "baby boomers" (3). It is during this time period that there was a psychological change in the perception of the identity of adolescents, pushing them into a situation where a key role to the individual's identity was by making their parents proud. It is this switch, along with our societal view that a post-secondary education is required for a growing individual's health and success, that has provided the greatest attribution to the significant increase in the amount of involvement and control that parents now have over their …show more content…

Unfortunately, that is not the case. I know that from my own experiences with classmates that were raised, or for a want of better terms, weren't raised, often times uninvolved parents are equally disastrous in producing capable children. Most students either don't even go on to college, or they are more likely to not be as successful as students that had a form of parental involvement and support within their lives. One excellent example comes from the movie, Dead Poets Society. One of the main characters, Todd Anderson, is a boy that is basically shuttled away from his parents to a prestigious school for the general reason of being out of his parents way (Dead Poets Society). His character is portrayed as being reserved and as facing difficulty in establishing relationships and communication with his classmates, most likely a result of being ignored by his parents. This, as well as many other complications result from a lack of an involved and concerned

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