CONNECTICUT EDITOR OBSERVES A YOUTH CONFERENCE

Leadership training solves teenagers’ ‘Identity Crisis'

Sometimes teenagers appear to be like aliens from another planet, and I'm told that they have that same perception of adults. There's also a tendency among teachers, parents, middle-aged writers, and the rest of the “over-30” crowd to divide teenagers into good and bad groups. “Good” teenagers were gathered last week at a student leadership conference at Quinnipiac University. We know good teenagers by the way they live up to or exceed our hopes and expectations for them, and these 250 kids did that, hands down. After talking to several student leaders from Hamden High School and observing them in action, I headed for my car thinking about how well they demonstrated the concept of the “identity crisis.” The term has been muddied by post-modernism, which has fractured the whole idea of identity in society to the point where it is a virtually meaningless concept, but it originates with the psychological theory of Erik H. Erikson. He coined it just at the point in history when teenagers began to preoccupy everyone with their surly attitudes and rock and roll music. Erikson said adolescents must resolve a conflict between identity and role confusion. In other words, they must settle the difference between who they think they are and who everyone else thinks they are. When they don't have that settled, they have an identity crisis, according to Erikson. He was convinced that this is the most important inner conflict a person faces in his life. In a culture that dwells obsessively on youth, as ours does, the adolescent identity crisis has the potential for all sorts of mischief.

The description of the leadership training for the kids at last week's conference got me thinking about Erikson's theory. Here's how he put it in his 1950 book, “Childhood and Society”:

“The growing and developing youths, faced with this physiological revolution [puberty] within them, and with tangible adult tasks ahead of them, are now primarily concerned with what they appear to be in the eyes of others as compared with what they feel they are, and with the question of how to connect the roles and skills cultivated earlier with the occupational prototypes of the day. “To keep themselves together they temporarily overidentify, to the point of apparent complete loss of identity, with the heroes of cliques and crowds.”
Erikson goes on to say: “In order not to become cynically or apathetically lost, young people must somehow be able to convince themselves that those who succeed in their anticipated adult world thereby shoulder the obligation of being the best.”

By learning and practicing leadership skills, as the Hamden High School students did last week, adolescents acquire the ability and confidence to step forward at crucial moments to defend the moral or ethical code, or to provide direction when it is absent. This is not to say that kids who dye their hair pink, dress like vampires, or walk around with their pants pulled down in the prison-inmate fashion of gangsta hip-hop are doomed to face an unresolved identity crisis. But the student leaders I met last week demonstrated what it looks like when the identity crisis is resolved. They have settled the difference between what they appear to be to others compared with who they think they are. And that puts them ahead in the game of life.

Fred Musante
2 December 2004

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1345&dept_id=432726&newsid=13478437&PAG=461&rfi=9

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