The traditional adage is that it takes an entire village to raise a child. In my case, this expression has a certain degree of validity. As I reminisce about my adolescence, there are a number of different experiences I have had which are directly related to my environment or surrounding ecosystem at the time. The best way to categorize this environment is in accordance to Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which includes a number of different stratifications for a child’s milieu.Contextualizing my teenage years through this psychological lens, as well as others such as social learning theory andPiaget’s childhood cognitive development theory, I am able to clearly explain certain facets of my behavior and personality traits.

The crux of Bronfenbreener’s ecological systems theory is that there are a number of subtle layers to the overall ecology which influences people as they mature and age. The first of these is the immediate environment in which they live, which is termed the microsystem or micro level (Neal and Neal, 2013, p. 722). My microsystem was largely stable and included a home with my brother and parents—all of whom were older than me. Other than living in an apartment when we were first born, I always dwelled in a house. However, microsystems’ also encompass other aspects of living, such as the schools and daycare centers I attended. Other than these aspects of life, my microsystem also included all the time I spent playing soccer—both during practice, at games, and traveling with my teammates to tournaments to play.

Perhaps more than any other aspect of my microsystem, my identity formation was forged by my time on the soccer field. Soccer was not just my favorite sport, but rather a primary point of identification between me and the external world. Part of it was my indoctrination into the outlaw culture which typified the lat 20th century America in which I was reared. Soccer was not nearly as popular as the three main sports in this country (which included football, basketball, and baseball), so I felt I was at variance with the mainstream in this respect. Moreover, within the actual competitive soccer field, my teammates and I were definitely pariahs. We did not all dress alike, wear the same warmup clothes before and after games, or even wear conventional clothing and name brands the way players on the other competitive teams did. We looked extremely disjointed during our warm-ups and, truth be told, we lost a fair amount of games. Still, no team...

We prided ourselves for stemming from the inner city, and reveled in our visual rebellion within the sport. Furthermore, as we transitioned from pre-adolescence to our early teens, we actually began winning games which added to our mystique and helped solidify my identity as somewhat of a social pariah.
My experience playing soccer not only was a critical component of my identity formation, but also reflective of some of the core principles of social learning theory. This theory is focused on the social factors which contribute to learning, and is partly predicated on the notion that people can learn from one another in social settings (Deeming and Johnson, 2009, p. 204). This theory can partly explain the camaraderie that formed between my soccer teammates and I. For instance, there were certain aspects of the outlaw motif which I learned from some of my teammates. What is extremely noteworthy about what I learned relates to the notion of modeling, a concept discussed at length by Banduras. The behavior that I learned from teammates I did not necessarily model. For instance, there was one of our team members who would drive a motorbike (prior to the age we could drive cars) to practice. I never aspired to drive a motorbike, have never ridden one in my life, yet I still appreciated the aesthetic. He looked cool mounting and dismounting the bike, and I certainly was better looking than waiting for one’s parents to come pick up one from practice.

Thus, although I did not model this particular facet of behavior, I still learned from it simply through observation and used it to reinforce my high valuation of a counter-cultural, outlaw type of motif to which I still readily identify today. There were other aspects of behavior during my adolescent years spent with my soccer team which produced a similar effect—one which not only tied into the notion of identify formation, but was influential in my conception of alcohol and drug use. During a tour of Europe in which we partook in many tournaments (and won more games than we lost, I am proud to recollect), several of my teammates would engage in drinking alcohol during their free time. A couple of them would even smoke cigarettes. Again, I observed this behavior and internalized it, but did not model it. I never drank alcohol until I out of the house living in college and was 19 years old. The influence of my teammates behavior only reinforced my adolescent cosmology at the time, that it was cool and better to be…