10.1 Who Am I?

Column 37 Who am I? Establishing an Identity

In western cultures, adolescence is a critical time for the development of people. It is during adolescence that we develop many of our morals, ethics and other social values. It is also the time that we develop our sense of self. My three-year old daughter loves to play dress up, the earliest attempts at establishing a sense of self. My son, who is eight, draws much of himself from me. His favorite foods, pastimes, and even colors come from me. As he grows older I expect that many of his favorite things (and therefore his sense of self) will change and no longer copy my favorite things. During adolescence, if he is like most other children, he will probably reject me, his father, as the major influence in his life and look towards his peers and other role models to establish his own sense of identity.

When I was a teenager in high school, I rejected my parents as my major source of identity. I looked to my peers in my attempt to establish “who am I”. I dressed like them, acted like them, and talked like them, much to my mother’s dismay. There was a lot of turmoil in my house during those years as I pushed the limits of the rules and explored new possibilities. Then, when I went to college, I found a new group of peers, much better role models. I began to value intelligence and tried to copy those people that were successful at the university. I think it worked, despite my earlier troubling explorations, I was able to answer the question “Who am I?” and become a successful adult.

In many “primitive” societies, there is no such thing as adolescence, children learn the skills required for adulthood, such as hunting or fishing, during their childhood and often, with some type of ceremony, proceed directly from childhood to adulthood. In fact, some developmental psychologists argue that adolescence is an artificial invention of modern society which only serves to delay maturity. In the past, throughout the world, a child’s fate was laid out very early, girls would become housewives while boys would probably follow closely in their father’s footsteps. However, here in America, and across most of the Western world as well, the length of adolescence has been increasing at an alarming rate. A new term has even been invented for people caught in increasingly delayed adolescence, twixters. Twixters are those people that have achieved physical maturity, perhaps they’ve even finished college, but haven’t yet achieved independence, financial or otherwise. Even Japan has a term for these individuals, “parasite singles”. I’ve met plenty of Korean kids that fall into this category as well. However, in an increasingly complex world where life spans have gotten much longer, perhaps we need more time to establish “who am I” than in the past when our future was chosen for us.

In Korea, adolescence seems to be a different thing than in America. During middle and high school, prime adolescent years, Korean children are kept so busy studying that they do not have any time to explore their identity. In modern Korea we find that Korean children have little time to define themselves until they go to college.

We can expect that Korean children in America, however, will proceed through adolescence in much the same fashion as American children. They will probably reject their parents as their primary role model at a fairly early age. As in all families, this rejection will inevitably lead to conflicts. For the Korean family living in America these conflicts might feel worse, however, since it might feel to the parents that the child is not only rejecting them, but also rejecting their heritage. A parent who was raised in Korea must expect that their teenage children growing up in America will NOT act like they themselves acted as teenagers. Not even close!

However, as I can attest, even when adolescents are rejecting their parents on the outside, on the inside they still listen to their advice, though not to their yelling. I have confidence that as long as I teach my children right from wrong now, while they are young, and make sure that their friends are not completely bad, then they will grow up to be responsible and good person.