The Pivot of My Adolescence
It was December 16. At 4 p.m., I was nobody and knew it. Half an hour later, I was
walking home from school, delighting in the slight sting of snowflakes melting on my
upturned face, knowing I had been swept up in a sea of change.
“About 200 students sat impatiently in the auditorium that last day of school
before the winter vacation. We were waiting for Mr. Garrod, the English teacher who
headed the school’s drama program, to announce the cast of West Side Story. I was
hoping for a small speaking part and was not surprised when Mr. Garrod failed to
read my name as a chorus member. However, as the list of remaining characters
grew short, I became despondent. Soon, only the leads remained. I knew an unknown
kid in grade 10 couldn’t possibly be asked to play Tony, the male lead. Leads
were almost always reserved for more experienced, grade-12 students.
“Then the thunderclap. ‘Tony,’ said Mr. Garrod, ‘will be played by Robert Brym.’
‘Who’s Robert Brym?’ whispered a girl seated two rows ahead of me. Her friend
merely shrugged in reply. If she had asked me that question, I might have responded
similarly. Like nearly all 15-year-olds, I was deeply involved in the process of figuring
out exactly who I was. I had little idea of what I was good at. I was insecure about my
social status. I wasn’t sure what I believed in. In short, I was a typical teenager. I had
only a vaguely defined sense of self.
“A sociologist once wrote that ‘the central growth process in adolescence is to
define the self through the clarification of experience and to establish self-esteem’
(Friedenberg, 1959: 190). From this point of view, playing Tony in West Side Story
turned out to be the first section of a bridge that led me from adolescence to adulthood.
Playing Tony raised my social status in the eyes of my classmates, made me
more self-confident, taught me I could be good at something, helped me to begin discovering
parts of myself I hadn’t known before, and showed me that I could act rather
than merely be acted upon. In short, it was through my involvement in the play (and,
subsequently, in many other plays throughout high school) that I began to develop a
clear sense of who I am.”
The crystallization of self-identity during adolescence is just one episode in a lifelong
process of socialization. To paint a picture of the whole socialization process, we must
first review the main theories of how one’s sense of self develops during early childhood.
We then discuss the operation and relative influence of society’s main socializing institutions,
or “agents of socialization”: families, schools, peer groups, and the mass media. In
these settings, we learn, among other things, how to control our impulses, think of ourselves
as members of different groups, value certain ideals, and perform various roles.
You will see that these institutions do not always work hand in hand to produce happy,
well-adjusted adults. They often give mixed messages. You will also see that although
recent developments give us more freedom to decide who we are, they can make socialization
more disorienting than ever. Finally, in the concluding section of this chapter, we
examine how decreasing supervision and guidance by adult family members, increasing
assumption of adult responsibilities by youth, and declining participation in extracurricular
activities are changing the nature of childhood and adolescence today. The main
theme of this chapter is that the development of one’s self-identity is often a difficult and
stressful process—and is becoming more so.
The contours of the self are formed during childhood. We therefore begin by discussing
the most important social-scientific theories of how the self originates in the first
years of life.
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