Ethnicity and Adolescent Identity Conflicts

Abstract

All adolescents go through a process of identity development during which they change their images of themselves. They need to feel that they are not simply extensions of their parents, but that they are separate individuals. They experiment with various roles, try them on for fit, reject some components and accept others. They formulate their own points of view on a range of topics, such as dress, music, boy and girl friends, and begin to scrutinise given moral imperatives. Adolescents of Asian or Caribbean descent who identify primarily with their parents’ culture will behave differently from those who identify more with various indigenous groupings such as native white boys and girls at school, their teachers, or heroes from the predominantly white mass media. If they forge a conception of themselves which is neither approved by their parents, nor by their native white peers they may find that they have to withstand considerable psychological conflict.