Adolescence and Identity
Life is a series of lessons and challenges which help us to grow. According to Erik Erickson, the better that people come through each crisis, the better they will tend to deal with what lies ahead. People experience the most lessons during their childhood when they are just learning of how the world operates. Children and young adults handle situations very differently because their thought processes are different depending on their experiences. Of course lessons can be revisited successfully when they reoccur as adults, if they are recognized as a problem. This essay is a good example of how two people raised in different environments felt like they became adults. I chose to use …show more content…
He looks for models by which to measure himself, and seeks happiness in trying to resemble them. Where he succeeds he achieves self-esteem...” (Erickson 1980.) As seen by the example above, the role models Michael and I have both affected us but in different ways. I chose to do the opposite of my parents because I saw the mistakes they made. Michael chose to follow the career path of his father because he saw it support the family. “The growing child must derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience is a successful variant in a group identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan.” (Erickson 1980.) It is shown that each child has their own perspective of reality and adulthood which comes about through positive and negative experiences in childhood and adolescence. Erickson’s theory is useful in that it reminds us to look back and wonder where a person’s actions and way of life derived from. It is important to remember that in order to fix any problems and make changes in adulthood. It is silly to think that we just woke up one day with anger problems or low self-esteem. Everything came from somewhere and finding the source makes it easier to