The Breakfast Club Research Paper

Adolescence Development Stages In the movie The Breakfast Club you see all different types of kids going through adolescence. There are examples of the athlete, brain, basket case, princess, and criminal. All of these kids have different backgrounds on why they are the way they are. They are all teenagers, and they are all going through the same struggle of trying to find their identity. All this while trying to find their identity, deal with peer power, and manage stress and anger. Every child goes through the struggle of finding themselves. The Breakfast Club has so many examples of all kinds of high schoolers trying to find their identity. Right in the beginning of the movie, when they walk into Saturday school, the teacher told them that during their time there they had to write about paper about who
they think they are.
When that is the question that every teenager wants to figure out, yet they can’t. All of the kids in this movie are an example of identity versus role confusion, “the complexities of finding one’s own identity are the primary task of adolescence.” When Bender was making the principle mad because he kept talking back to him, and the teacher kept giving him more Saturday school, shows that he doesn’t value much in life because he claims he doesn’t mind spending every Saturday for months at school. This is an example of Role confusion. While these kids are going through the struggle of finding their identity, they are also pushing through peer pressure. The movie also shows many examples of peer pressure. Although the students in The Breakfast Club are not necessarily a part of the same clique, they would still prefer to spend time with their peers, and not with adults. You can tell that Claire, (the princess) wants respect from the other people in the room. So when Bender starts harassing her about her being a girl she gets offended and gets mad. As Andrew the athlete; stands up for her because he wants Bender to think he is big and tough. And
when Brian, (the geek) was talking to Bender about girls, he mumbles under his breath that he did stuff with Claire because he doesn’t want to get made fun of because he is a virgin. After a while of everybody starting to get to know each other, Bender encourages everybody to sneak out of the library to go to his locker. At this point everybody has been dealing with peer pressure for a while. They have to make the decision to staying in the classroom and staying out of trouble, or going to his locker and getting drugs. Once they got back to the library with the drugs some of the kids didn’t want to smoke, but eventually everybody smoked it. In everyday life kids go through so much peer pressure, “peers push an adolescent to use drugs, break the law, or do things their child would never do.” When all of the them were sitting on the floor in the library, they starting talking about what would happen at school on Monday. If they would be “friends” and say hi to each other in the hall or not. Brian was the one that was the most concerned about it because he had never had that many friends and he thinks they should. But Claire climes that she wouldn’t talk to him because of all of her friends. That hurt Brian a lot because teenagers in general look forward to communicating with their peers instead of their parents or adults. Yet everyone gets mad a Claire because they know that adolescence pick their friends, in Claire’s case she is choosing not to be friends with them after the fact. Finally, several characters in the movie show examples of how teenagers struggle with handling the stress they feel with anger. In the movie, when all of the kids are sitting around talking about why they are all in Saturday school Brian says that he tried to commit suicide. Adolescent teenagers go through a lot of stress and anger when it comes to school, sports, family, etc. Andrew is there because he beat up some other kid. The difference between Brian and Andrew are that Brian wanted to hurt himself and Andrew just wanted to hurt other people. Andrew has all the pressure from sports, and his dad being on him about it. As for Brian he has the same pressure but from school. Most teenagers have a lot of stress and not having their peers to talk to can cause even more. In the movie Bender is reckless and has a lot of anger. He yells at the teacher all the time, even his class mates. All the teachers and students know he does drugs. They knows he causes trouble. All of the recklessness, and breaking the law are because of the anger built up inside him. Bender even takes his anger out on Allison, who didn’t say a word for half of the movie. She has the stress of not having a family. Being a teenager without a parent or even friends is frustrating, and she deals with it by being introverted and only being with herself. In the end, after talking for hours, once they know they have each other, they realize that they are all different but are going through the same struggles of adolescence. Being an adolescent means trying to find your identity, while going through the struggles of high school. Whether you are currently going through adolescents or went through it 20 years ago each of us can identify some part of ourselves in the characters of this movie. This is why the movie has remained popular through the years. The Breakfast Club can help any and every teenager understand that what they are going through is completely normal. The clothing styles may have changed, the name of the clicks may have changed, but the teenage struggles remain the same.