Identity vs Role Confusion in Adolescence

Interview with a Teacher

For this interview, I talked with a teacher I know about the topic of identity formation in the adolescent stage of development. This was an interesting talk, as the teacher’s students are all adolescents, but she also teaches at a community college at nights and gets to meet some older students and even sometimes catches up with former high school students. She has personally seen how people change as they grow, and in her opinion the most successful people she meets are the ones who figure out themselves and their identity before they move into adulthood. Others who are less successful stay stuck in a kind of delayed adolescence that goes on into adulthood as they try to figure out their role in the world. I was put in mind of Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development in which the main conflict of adolescence is identity vs. role confusion. Her statements clearly supported Erikson’s view of what goes on in adolescence and why it is so important for adolescents to resolve this conflict so that they can proceed to the next stage of development.

The teacher and I were pretty much aligned in terms of how we viewed this topic: she saw identity formation as very important at this period, and I agreed with that assessment. I, however, thought that identity has to be authentic—it cannot be some unreal or superficial, because this does not really work to resolve the identity vs. role confusion conflict. A person really needs to have a sense of who he or she is in order to grow into adulthood. I myself see too many instances of young people getting older and thinking they know what they are about but it all being supported by artificial concepts, often derived from media stereotypes and constructs that are not rooted in reality. I think that part of the problem many adolescents face is that they do not receive much character education. I asked the teacher if she thought character education was important and she said very: kids are not being taught what it means to be virtuous, to have character, to have grit, to have the ability to bounce back or do what’s right—and a big reason is that their teachers have no idea about what doing the right thing means. There is no longer any consensus out there, philosophically and morally speaking, about what it means to know the good, the true, and the beautiful. Everyone is simply gunning for himself and trying to get what he can while he can. It is a very self-centered environment and there is a lot of hostility. There is also a lot of distrust and skepticism and cynicism and hopelessness, all of which contributes to adolescents struggling to know their role.

The teacher also put a lot of emphasis on peer relationships and their importance to adolescents as they grow. Her views on the importance of peers in adolescence resonate with Steinberg\\\\\\\'s research. Steinberg notes that peers, rather than parents, become the major determinants of how invested adolescents are in school and what their overall behavior during this period?? is likely to be centered on. The teacher I interviewed told me an anecdote about a young student who drastically changed her academic performance and social behavior after joining a new peer group: putting herself around other people whom she wanted to be like helped make that transformation possible. Her point was that you will be the type of person you surround yourself with. So who you make friends with is very vital. It determines a lot about what type of adult you will be.

Regarding family influence, the teacher acknowledged that peers are influential in a big way, but that still the foundational values and support provided by families are rather more essential on a deeper level. This perspective is also somewhat echoed in Steinberg\\\\\\\'s work, where it is noted that although peers matter, parental influence and authoritative parenting can have a long-term impact on students’ learning and their moral development, too.