People these days, especially teens, hold themselves to the standards society advertises. Everywhere you look, there are stereotypes and images of what a person should be, according to society. There are many cliques that offer these easy fit in standards, but school is not the only place that the pressure to fit in is affected. You can be uncovered through your efforts to blend in, thus causing you many problems as you try to make it through high school without a couple bruises.
This generation’s high school lifestyle incorporates a lot of different cliques and niches. With these cliques comes many labels. The words “jock,” “nerd,” or “prep” may come to mind. Everyone has the expectation that they will find somewhere that they will find somewhere to fit in high school. What happens to the ones that do not? They seem to be in a void category, as if they are not even there or forgotten. They receive the label of an outcast. Shane Koyczan observes the way one may be labeled through his own experiences: “We were expected to define ourselves at such an early age, and if we didn’t do it, others did it for us. Geek. Fatty... I was being told to accept the identity that others will give me,” (Koyczan). We are not in complete control of who we are perceived to be. Surrounding peers decide who they think you are based on your appearance or grades but forget to look at what lies on the inside. It is all a process of categorization where you must attempt to camouflage yourself or risk being excluded.
Pressures outside of school itself are also very apparent in adolescent’s lives. These other influences on their behavior can affect how well they fit in or how much effort they put in to doing so. It is not always easy for teens to balance e...
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... take a stand for their peers, they would feel more accepted. It is important that you stand up to a bully without becoming a bully yourself. The fear of being unaccepted by association seems to stop others from reaching out to their bully victims or “outcasts.” Common courtesy has been consistently repeated to our generation yet, no one wants to exhibit it if it puts their own reputation at risk.
The adolescent stage can be a questionable time in one’s life. You are stuck between adulthood and childhood and still expected to decide who you are somewhere along the way. The other factors in life can make this self discovery very difficult; you are surrounded by other peers that are also trying to camouflage themselves in high school so they can avoid being singled out. Adolescence is a mere struggle to fit in to the puzzle held together by society and it’s standards.
High school can be a place full of cliques and groups of friends but some people aren’t always in cliques. If there is a person who doesn’t always like the same things as other people they might not fit in with a group of people. In high school a person may become different and not find a group of friends that they fit in with. With no group of friends a person in high school may start to become an outcast. Laurie Halse Anderson, the author of Speak used Melinda to show that any high school student can become an outcast.
When life becomes overwhelming during adolescence, a child’s first response is to withdraw from the confinement of what is considered socially correct. Individuality then replaces the desire to meet social expectations, and thus the spiral into social non-conformity begins. During the course of Susanna’s high school career, she is different from the other kids. Susanna:
As preteens and teens push for increasing independence from their parents, they tend to turn to their peers for guidance, acceptance, and security. For those who are low in self-esteem and confidence, their safety lies in fitting in and having a place to belong. Most people find a group in which they connect with in a healthy way while others make their way in cliques that give them security but at the price of their own values and individuality. The movie Mean Girls portrays how high school female social cliques operate and the effect they can have on girls. I will argue how if one doesn’t have a strong sense of self-identity, the opinions of others will become their identity.
Conformity means a change in one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people. As a teenager, the pressure to conform to the societal “norm” plays a major role in shaping one’s character. Whether this means doing what social groups want or expect you to do or changing who you are to fit in. During class, we watched films such as Mean Girls, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and The Breakfast Club which demonstrate how the pressure to conform into society can change who you are. In the movies we have seen, conformity was most common during high school.
A large majority of teens want to fit in and feel like they belong, but how far are they willing to go to fit in? The more they want to fit in the more likely they will be easily influenced by suggestions from others. During my second week of eighth grade, I felt like I wasn’t fitting in and that everyone was silently judging me and criticizing me. Of course now that I think about I don’t think anyone really cared about me, but I was more self-conscious about myself then. One day during lunch my friends and I sat next to a couple of girls who were known as the “popular” girls and I thought that maybe I would fit in more if I was friends with them. I spent the rest of that lunch hour trying to build up the courage to talk to them and at last minute I told the friendliest looking girl, that I loved her shirt and I asked her what store she bought it from. She told me that it was from Free People; she then gushed about the store and told me how everything there was amazing. She suggested that I should check it out sometime so I did. I, of course couldn’t wait to shop there. I told myself that if I shopped at Free People, I could maybe fit in with her and even be a part of the popu...
Is adolescence really about fitting in or not standing out? Do you have any responsibility to those students who do not fit in? Do you hear that? Hush, and listen closely. Do you hear it now? The cries for help of the kids who don’t fit in with the crowd. The cries aren’t always loud. Sometimes they don’t make a sound. Stop and listen to them. Take responsibility for those kids and stand up for those kids who won’t stand up for themselves.
To begin with, when I was younger I would have considered myself an outsider because when I first started school, I didn’t have the characteristics to fit in and felt like I would not blend into the people I was surrounded by. Also, I have met many people who have presented experiences from their past when they had felt like they didn’t fit in because they couldn’t keep up the standards to be popular. In social media, there are many guidelines that people feel the need to meet in order to feel like you belong and some who don’t match up can feel like outsiders, and that happens to many. Furthermore, in today’s society people feel the need to be popular or to fit in, and if they can’t meet the expectations they are considered an outsider and that happens universally. Others may suggest that just because someone doesn’t fit in a group doesn’t mean they are considered an outsider, they are just someone who doesn’t meet certain expectations. However, many others would disagree and would label someone an outsider when they don’t fit in or don’t meet expectations of society because that makes them think they don’t
Adolescence is all about teenagers trying to fit in. Adolescent teens spend most of their time worrying about their appearance and how they act to try to fit in with others. Most of them on things that they, “like,” just to be accepted by others. Many teens, compare themselves to each other and they really shouldn’t do that. I know that most teenagers try to fit in with the group, but they should really just have fun and be themselves. Sometimes, teens will try to act as if they are apart of a higher social class than what their family is, when in reality, they are both in the same social structure. For example, in the documentary, (People Like Us), Tammy’s son, Matt, try’s to make himself look cooler at school so he can fit in and not be apart of his family’s social class. Kids should not do this. They should ju...
Biological influences combined with societal and social expectations contribute to how well people learn to adapt to their environments (2013). According to Erikson, there are eight stages of development. Within these states, there are different psychological, emotional and cognitive tasks. In order to adjust, individuals must learn to develop these tasks. During adolescence, Erikson states that each person needs to navigate through the development task of ‘‘Identity vs. Identity confusion ’’ (2013). He defined this task by stating that adolescent children must learn to develop a sense of self and establish independence. Prior to this stage of development, a person’s parents largely influence their identity. In this stage the adolescent children begin to explore and develop their identity outside of their parents’ influence (Hill, Bromell, Tyson, & Flint, 2007). Adolescents are generally more egocentric at this stage and have an increased sense of self-consciousness. They also have a strong desire to conform to peer influence and develop concerns regarding their appearance. They develop concern about their level of competence in relation to their peer group as well. As peer influence increases, during this stage, parental influence decreases (Ashford & LeCroy, 2013; Hill et. al, 2007). Conflict generally increases between parent and child at this stage of development (2007).
Adolescence is, for the most part, about fitting in. Most everybody wants friends and wants to feel like they are a part of a social group. Young childhoods are spent meeting new people and making friends that share your common interests. However, in the teenage years, it gets a lot more complicated. Some people will start to leave their old friends for newer, “cooler” ones, and start to wear new clothing to make themselves popular. Everyone wants to fit in, and some people will make more of an effort to do so than others. In middle school specifically, cliques and social groups start forming. This is the time when teens and pre-teens figure out who they are and start to fit in with their friends.
Adolescence refers to the transition period experienced by children that occur between childhood and adulthood (Shefer, 2011). Identity is first confronted in adolescence between the ages 12 – 19 years old, because of physical and hormonal changes in the body. It is also due to the introduction of formal operations in cognitive development and societal expectation that this contributes to an individual’s identity to be explored and established (McAdams, 2009). The forces within and outside (family, community) the individual that promote identity development usually create a sense of tension. The basic task is, in Erikson’s terms, “fidelity or truthfulness and consistency to one’s core self or faith in one’s ideology” (Fleming, 2004: 9), in a nutshell: "Who am I and where am I
In one journal entry I wrote, I brought to light that the popular group is something that every one of us, for some reason feels as though we need to be a part of. This is from my own experience and things I have observed throughout my four-year career in high school. I think it was perhaps worse in junior high, however. When you are in seventh and eighth grade you are not sure of who you are and are desperately searching around for something to belong to, to be a part of. Why is this, why are we a society that are most often drawn to the most popular, "cool" and "beautiful" that high school has to offer? Why is acceptance the most important thing to us, is belonging really as important as losing your own sense of self? Who you hang out with, who your closest friends are as an adolescent without a doubt help to shape who you are. And it's funny that you seem to end up being friends with the ones who are the same type of people as you. Same fashion sense, taste in music or cars and movies. When searching for an identity in high school, it is hard not to just attempt to pick up the one that seems the most socially acceptable. I know that my personal experiences include these conforming characteristics. Still as a freshman in college I am constantly looking at the fashion of my peers, wondering to myself "do they think I fit in"? This was especially true the first few weeks of college when I wasn't sure who my good friends were going to be; I made sure that I dressed as well as I could everyday, in all the new clothes I had bought specifically for college.
In today’s society, high schoolers are split up into wide varieties of cliques. In high school, people label you in some kind of group or clique. People are either considered a goth, jock, stoner, nerd, loner etc. The reason why people are labeled as those things is because of what their interests are, what they wear, what their personality is, and the people that they associate themselves with. People tend to migrate towards certain kinds of cliques because they like to do certain things. Consider this, the jocks will hang out with other jocks and play or practice the sport they play, the stoners will hang around other stoners and smoke as an interest, and the nerds will get together with other nerds to study and practice things. High school is filled with drama and arguments, but hanging out and doing
“Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.” – Eleanor Roosevelt. These are some very wise and empowering words, I must say. I believe many teenagers in today’s generation are most of the time wearing a mask. A mask that is made up of what the world wants them to be, a mask that they think may protect them from not allowing others in, a mask that was built from peer pressure, a mask that was formed from bullying. There’s always a story behind someone’s mask, as I call it. Most of the time teens nowadays are afraid to be themselves, to be individuals, due to the way they think people will perceive them. I do have to say though, that those that have ripped their masks away are the ones that have truly become individuals. Of course,
the drive to excel in school and be one who stands out of the crowd instead of fading into it did not approach until my last few years of my high school career. In my single digits and my pre-teen years I was lucky to not to have been submerged in pink as some girls are, and my favorite things were frogs and dirt. Pressures to “dress like a girl” and to live up to all that society’s vision saw for me was annoying and near-damaging. I am proudly a girl, and I am proudly everything else I am, so why should I have to try to be so? The fact that I dodged that bullet and maintained my individuality as best I could is one of my finer achievements. However I’ve seen all over that so many others are not allowed to be themselves because of these pressures. We are all children with so much to offer and so much individual spirit and talent, and then as we get older some of us are told we are abnormal or wrong for being who we are. In this we all lose. These dimmed spirits lose confidence, the critic misses out on the value of his victim, and society loses what may have been a strong unique perspective. You cannot be self-actualized without being