The Impact of Changing Patterns of Family Living on Identity Formation in Late Adolescence

Abstract

SynopsisIn our society many adolescents are asking the questions ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where am I going?’. Thus we have learned, claims Erikson, ‘to ascribe a normative identity crisis to the age of adolescence and young adulthood’. This paper examines some of the difficulties contemporary adolescents are facing in the formation of identity in the light of changes within and without the nuclear family. Demographic and substantive data suggest that adolescents today are facing an identity crisis of a more diffuse nature than that envisaged by Erikson. As a consequence there is a need to challenge and redefine the tasks of autonomy from parents, fixed sex role and occupational identity, and internalised morality which developmental theorists have prescribed for this stage of the life cycle.