Negotiating Multiple Social Contexts: Part I

In Part One, I want to explore the "what is going on" of adolescent psychosocial development and what it means for adolescents to negotiate several different contexts. I will develop this idea in four articles that will explore in depth a significant reality that must be considered if we are to be successful reaching out to and working with this emerging generation. Adolescence is extending. This we know, but what does this mean for academics, business, and the church? In Part I we explore the adolescent self.

The Adolescent Self

The transition from childhood to adolescence brings about significant changes in physical development, cognitive advances, and social expectations. James Loder likens this transition to the disequilibrium accompanied at birth.[i] It’s common to hear from parents that they feel detached from their teen, and they don’t understand why this distance has occurred. These changes introduce challenges for the adolescent who is negotiating multiple relationships and increased differentiation of values in their many social contexts.[ii] We know that the adolescent self is constructed cognitively and socially. Cognitively, developmental advances affect the level of differentiation and integration that the developing adolescent brings to bear on their self-understanding. In regard to differentiation, emerging cognitive abilities allow the individual to create evaluations of the self that differ across various social contexts.[iii] As the adolescent matures, these evaluations enable them to pick up on the inconsistencies in their developing self-portrait. Harter argues that the emerging ability to differentiate supports “the creation of multiple selves in different relational contexts.”[iv] This is most commonly seen in an adolescent during their transition from junior high to high school when abstract thought really kicks in. I tell parents that now your adolescent can think about you thinking about them! This opens them up to new and exciting possibilities. When the new skills that come with abstract thought combine with the diversity of values that they encounter in their social contexts, it leads to appraisals of self that begin to differ across various social contexts.[v] As they continue to mature in high school, they begin to pick up on the inconsistencies of their developing self-portrait.

Definition of the Self

Before we move into the construction of the self throughout adolescence, I first want to define what I mean by the word self. According to Susan Harter, the psychosocial literature utilizes sixty-six different terms that reference the self or ego.[vi] For our psychosocial purposes in this article, self will refer to self-representations.[vii] These are attributes of the self that are consciously acknowledged by the developing adolescent. We might understand these attributes as how one describes oneself (e.g., “I’m a happy person.”). This perspective allows us to consider self-attributes that are evaluative. That is, how might the I-self, as evaluator, perceive the socially-constructed Me-self, as evaluated? The I-self equates to what many would understand as the core-self or identity and the Me-self equates to the socially-constructed abstractions that are evaluated by the I-self.

Construction of the Self through Adolescence

           As the child transitions into early adolescence (typically, junior high), the ability to form abstractions emerge. This newfound ability leads to some interesting developments. First, it leads to increasing differentiation of the I-self which causes the early adolescent to question just who is really at the wheel. Second, these developments enable a proliferation of Me-selves that vary with social context and are brought about by increasing social pressures and expectations. These may include a Me-self at home, with close friends, on the football team, in the lunchroom, or even at church. For the early adolescent, a critical developmental task is the construction of multiple Me-Selves that vary across different roles and relationships. A reality of this differentiation process is the realization by the adolescent that they are likely to be treated differently in different social contexts. This relational mindfulness leads to a greater self-awareness of how others view their I-self. This leads to a great deal of variability across the relational contexts of the adolescent’s self-portrait. So, an early adolescent worries about what others think of them (their I-self) in order to decide which perspectives to internalize as part of their core-self.

           What is so fascinating about the young adolescent is that they do not possess the ability to integrate the socially-constructed abstractions of their many Me-selves. Consequently, the young adolescent will engage in all-or-none thinking. From the perspective of the adult, their thinking appears very black and white, even contradictory. In reality their socially-constructed Me-selves are compartmentalized. Thus, they are only able to reflect on their Me-self attributes one at a time. While this results in contradictions, they aren’t able to pick up on the contradictions or experience the conflict one would expect.

           As the young adolescent transitions into midadolescence (typically, high school or later) additional cognitive abilities emerge that complicate the integration of the self-portrait. In early adolescence, the socially constructed Me-Selves were compartmentalized and the adolescent did not possess the ability to make comparisons between them. Midadolescents, however, acquire the ability to make comparisons between their multiple Me-selves. This ability is called “abstract mapping”[viii] The adolescent is now able to map constructs from one socially-constructed Me-self to another and compare and contrast different attributes, thus recognizing contradictions as they compare and contrast different Me-self attributes. These, in turn, lead to confusion about just who the I-self really is. The midadolescent might wonder why they are outgoing and rambunctious during English but quiet and reserved in band. How is it that they can be the dependable responsible type at home and then completely irresponsible around friends from the cheer team? While they now enjoy the means of comparing and contrasting the different Me-selves, they cannot yet pull these together (integrate) to resolve the contradictions.

           In my work with midadolescents, they liken this experience to wearing different masks. Like the situation I described above, they recognize that they wear different masks in one setting (system), with their peers at school, at home, and in other social settings. They can see contradictions in how they behave or believe in one setting versus another, but they are unable to integrate the various masks into one core-mask. This realization causes considerable confusion and stress. The midadolescent desperately tries to figure out who they are. The creation of multiple-selves, coupled now with the ability to pick up on the contradictions, naturally raises concerns for the adolescent. “Who am I, really?” This leads to frustration and a lack of self-coherence.

           For years the development of multiple-selves corresponded to the high school midadolescent psychosocial reality. It’s been understood that with late adolescence[ix] comes higher order abstractions that facilitate the ability to resolve these contradictions. In the past I understood that with the completion of high school the developing adolescent had successfully integrated their multiple Me-selves and had developed their core self. That is, they finally knew who they were. Recent research and experience suggest that midadolescence may be extending into the college-aged years, the implications of which are yet to be fully realized.

Shifts in Construction of Meaning

           Understanding what is going on with the adolescent self is important if we want to effectively make a difference in their lives. Equally important is a working knowledge of how adolescents construct meaning. As parents and concerned leaders in our churches and communities, we expect adolescents to be good citizens, get solid jobs, think critically, be trustworthy, and possess common sense. Robert Kegan, a developmental constructivist, argues that, although these may look like good expectations of how adolescents should behave, they are really expectations about how we want them to know and the way we expect them to make meaning of their experiences.[x] These expectations from adults are really about wanting the adolescent to subordinate their perspective (point-of-view) to another’s perspective, an ability Kegan says requires a higher order of consciousness. Adults unwittingly expect adolescents to function at a higher order of consciousness than they are actually capable.[xi]

The First Three Orders

           Kegan’s theory consists of five orders of consciousness that develop throughout the lifespan, although most adults, he says, never achieve orders four and five. For our purposes, I will only touch on the first three orders.[xii] The first order of consciousness is the least complex and is the one most commonly used by young children. Kegan suggests an age of two to six years. At this stage the child is stuck in the moment and the immediate, this makes their thinking illogical, their feelings impulsive, and their social-relating egocentric. The second order begins roughly around age six and lasts well into the adolescent years. During these years the child develops the ability to organize things, others, and their selves as possessors of properties. As a result, their thinking is concrete, their feelings are made up of time-enduring needs, and their social-relating enables them to grant to themselves and others a distinct point-of-view. The third order corresponds with the adolescent years and beyond. It is during these years that a person develops the ability to subordinate a concrete principle (what Kegan calls a “durable category”) to a superordinate principle (“cross-categorical knowing”). This ability makes their thinking abstract, their feelings a matter of inner realities, and their social-relating capable of loyalty to people and ideas larger than the self.

Guardians of the Galaxy

           An illustration will help explain the first three orders. Walt Disney Studios released a Marvel Comics superhero movie in 2014 called The Guardians of the Galaxy. This movie exceeded expectations as it had something for all ages. The movie appealed to a broad audience made up of people with various orders of consciousness. For young children constructing meaning in the first order, no sense of story or any logical connection between one part of the movie and another existed. Instead, a single character like Groot stands out to them with no indication of his importance to the plot. “Groot was funny; I liked the way he talked.” Those in second order can string the events of the movie together at the concrete level to create a narrative, but they cannot conceive of what the movie actually depicted. Only the third order knower can conceive that the movie portrayed a larger battle between good and evil or some such abstraction as the narrative of the story is subordinated to a larger field of consideration. This example can help us see that the social expectations adults presume of adolescents are not consistent with their abilities and it is likely that Kegan’s third order of consciousness is actually occurring later in the life course than originally theorized.

Conclusion

Part one has explored the adolescent reality of the developing self. Adolescence is extending. This we know. What we have considered here is the what of this cultural phenomenon? This fundamental reality impacts higher education, church ministries, and any field in which this emerging generation seeks work.

In part two, we will explore why this is happening.

[i] James Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1998), p. 206.   

[ii] I also acknowledge the physical effects of pubertal maturation, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to address.

[iii] Susan Harter, The Construction of the Self 2nd edition (New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2012), 10.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Susan Harter, The Construction of the Self p.10.

[vi] Ibid., 19.

[vii] It is necessary, first, to establish the psychosocial position. Later in the article we will explore the theological understanding of self that becomes foundational for the psychosocial self.

[viii] Susan Harter, The Construction of the Self p.97. This is called abstract mapping and is characterized by reasoning that depends on the situation. This is the origin of the oft-repeated expression, “It’s relative.”

[ix] In the academic literature, there is a great deal of confusion on the ages and stages of adolescence. In this article, I will use the traditional three-stage adolescent developmental schema here for convenience sake. However, the overarching reality of determining when adolescence ends and adulthood begins is highly debated. See my chapter, “Understanding the Changing Adolescent” in Adoptive Youth Ministry, edited by Chap Clark (Grand Rapids, MA: Baker Academic, 2016), pp. 22-38 for insights on this conversation.

[x] Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p.19.

[xi] Ibid., 29.

[xii] The distinctions of these three orders are all taken from Kegan’s own descriptions on page 29.