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Who Are You Supposed to Be Today? Teenagers and Identity

Around the time my kids solidly entered the middle school years, I started finding snippets of paper all over my house with various signatures on them. My daughters would try out different ways of writing their names with different handwriting, nicknames, versions of their own names, etc. It hit me that we were really in the age of the teenage identity crisis and I wasn’t at all sure I was ready for it–like I could stop it if I tried!

Over the years, I’ve witnessed various hair styles, handwriting, speech patterns (ugh!), styles of dressing, friends, activity choices and ideas about the future. I’m learning to roll with it, but it still catches me a little off guard when I see a new version or a new side of my evolving teens. I want to ask them straight out–”Who are you supposed to be today?”

My little girl who wanted to be an artist and a farmer forever has discovered politics and social justice and says she now wants to be a youth counselor or a chef–after going through some major trendy dressing styles and long, expensive hair dos, she’s now wearing comfortable clothes and a shorter pony tail and some days actually goes off to high school with a minimum amount of make-up.

My other little girl who used to want to own her own candy factory is now determined to be a research scientist. I see her hunched over her notebooks with her glasses on punching numbers into her expensive calculator with her electronic pencils and it’s hard to grasp she is the same girl who used to build extravagant villages in the backyard with blankets and lawn chairs.

Of course, I’m sure my own parents were a bit concerned when I went roaring through my own eighties adolescence with my big hair and Madonna bows and lace gloves with the fingers cut off! I remember very well trying to figure out who I was and who I ws going to be as a separate, independent person.

Who knows where things will lead them? Music tastes change, ideas about what life is all about, plans for the future–everything seems to change in this blender of identity transition that is the life of an American teenager. I’ve given up trying to stay on top of things, and now I know I’m just along for the ride really. Won’t it be interesting to see what identity they finally settle on?

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