Parents Can Play An Active Role In The Identity Formation Of Their Adolescent Children

Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 28 Aug 2008 - 4:00 PDT

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Mainstream belief regarding identity theory tends to portray adolescents as the sole agents involved in their identity development. However, a new article in the Journal of Research on Adolescence reveals that parents are concerned, involved, and reflective participants in their children's identity formation.

Elli Schachter, PhD, of Bar Ilan University and Jonathan Ventura of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studied parents, adolescents, and educators affiliated with the Orthodox Jewry in Israel. Researchers documented and described parents that invested a great amount of time and effort thinking about their children's identity, even fashioning their own lives with their children's future identities in mind.

The parents demonstrated the extent to which they saw themselves as active participants in their children's identity formation. They reflected on how best to form relationships with their children, what environments to choose for their children that would best serve some vision of what they hope their children will become, and how they hope their children will come to see themselves.

Such thinking and planning can be very complex, taking into account broad socio-cultural factors, personal psychological dynamics, and ethical concerns. However, parents did not act as mere socializing agents, blindly attempting to reproduce traditional values and roles within their children. Rather, they took a complex view, respecting their children's agency while also taking broader, social and cultural perspectives into account.

"Research on identity within the field of psychology should broaden its focus to include a wider unit of analysis than the solitary individual," the authors conclude. "Such a focus will empower parents and educators to take a more conscious, positive, and active though careful role in the identity formation of youth while previously such a role may have been understood and portrayed as 'out-of-bounds.'"

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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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This study is published in the September 2008 issue of the Journal of Research on Adolescence.

Elli P. Schachter is affiliated with Bar Ilan University.

Multidisciplinary and international in scope, the Journal of Research on Adolescence (JRA) significantly advances knowledge in the field of adolescent research. Employing a diverse array of methodologies, this compelling journal publishes original research and integrative reviews of the highest level of scholarship. Featured studies include both quantitative and qualitative methodologies applied to cognitive, physical, emotional, and social development and behavior. Articles pertinent to the variety of developmental patterns inherent throughout adolescence are featured, including cross-national and cross-cultural studies.

Source: Amy Molnar
Wiley-Blackwell